Stamp-Cells by Seán L O'Neill

'Urban Jungle (Ice-Ice Baby)' (detail) mixed media on promotional literature on wood {full image below}

The Birth of the Stamp-Cell

I began making Stamp-cells in 2007, when I temporarily occupied an abandoned squat in Wicklow. There had been some very creative people there and they left behind murals and sample tins of household emulsion. I began painting interior scenes of the house which was old and very quirky, and not having a lot of spare money I decided to use supermarket catalogues instead of buying blank paper. This had the interesting effect of bits of garbled marketing-jive appearing in parts of the paintings. There was an empty mushroom punnet lying on the floor and I noticed the pattern on it and tried out a few experiments on plain coloured paper. The Stamp-Cell technique I eventually employed between 2008 and 2012 is a mixture of these two discoveries. I no longer make Stamp-Cells, I made enough that I just get around to mounting more of them on wood whenever I can and put finishing touches to some of them. Never say never of course. The Guitar for the Musical Youth Foundation, which sold, was a departure, done in 2015.

'Rare Ole Time'
mixed media on magazine cover on wood

This was painted on a Time Magazine cover- there was something about tuna fish being over-fished on the front page, so I used a plastic corner guard to make a pattern that looks like nets.
The mixed up traffic light colours are there to show the lack of understanding of the danger signs of over-consumption, and the conflicting danger of people losing their livelihoods.

'Artistic Comforts'
mixed media on paper on wood

I discovered one day that when I pulled the pages of lidl catalogues apart, the titles at the tops of the pages would become jumbled up, often with interesting results.

'Fitter Shapeshifters'
mixed media on promotional literature on wood

There's absolutely none of the fitness catalogue that this was done on left. It's got lots of layers, from emulsion to gloss to spraypaint, and finally some fluorescent (neon) and phosphorescent (glow in the dark) layers.

'Jane deVille and Kamali'
mixed media on magazine pages on wood
This one I did on an exotic magazine from the 1980's. It was interesting deciding how much to cover up and how much to leave. It's to do with censorship, this one, and how hiding something sometimes makes it more tantalising. Stained varnish, neon red and yellow spraypaint and white gloss were used in the final layers here.

'Urban Jungle (Ice-Ice Baby)'
mixed media on promotional literature on wood

The ice-cube tray impressions I used here look a lot
like sky-scrapers along an Australian river to me.
The abandoned bungalow I was using as a studio
had a forest of nettles at the end of the garden,
and beyond that a stream, and beyond that
the M50. The whole area is turning into another
high-rise satellite town but at least they preserved
Carrickmines castle beside (and partly underneath)
the motorway. The scrapey lines were done with a car aerial, the kind with a springy bit.

'Christmas Wishes- Now Available in four themed Packs'

Above is 'Christmas Wishes..' It was shown for the first time in Goma, Waterford in Autumn 2016, alongside 'Things Behind the Sun'. It's done on the pages of the Christmas brochure of a four-letter supermarket. It's 2 metres wide.

'Roll On Optipus'

This one here, 'Roll On Optipus' is double the size of most of my stamp-Cells, as it's done on a fold out catalogue for a toy Megastore in Carrickmines.
It's a stylised depiction of the feeling of rolling down a grassy hill.

'Centerfold'

Detail of 'Centerfold'

Here we have 'Centerfold', which was in Gallery X's exhibition of erotic collage, 'Sticky', in early 2016. It's done on the pages of a 1980's porno mag which is pasted onto two bread trays (that they deliver bread to shops on). It measures h134cm (incl. chain) x w82cm. Its a heavy one this (7 kilos) as there's panels attached to the back to prevent warping.

'Everything but the Kaleidoscope'

This 'un is now hanging in the attic pool-room of a mate who gave me a lift when I was moving out of the cottage in Carrickmines, a move that was on the cards anyway, but was eventually hastened by the fact that some entrepreneurial types came along and carefully removed the aluminium window frames in the kitchen I used as a studio, without breaking the glass! They left the glass behind. But that's another story, for another blog entry.

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