Fionnbharr Ó Súilleabháin
Ireland (citizenship)
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Making in Practice
(2026)
author(s): Fionnbharr Ó Súilleabháin
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
BA Fine Arts
This paper is my submission for the Graduate Research Paper, a requirement as part of the Bachelor in Fine Arts at the KABK. The paper examines the idea that an art practice based on making is an alchemical practice. I explore how, in the heyday of alchemy, artisans working away in workshops to produce artefacts through a bodily engagement with materials, were seen as alchemists. I describe more modern theories of making, taken from the Humanities, to show that they are really describing a continuation of this same way of working – the search for what Pamela Smith has termed an artisanal epistemology. I examine how alchemy might be incorporated into an art practice. It is evident there are two principal ways in which artists engage with alchemy, and I classify artists as being either Borrower, Adept or a hybrid of the two approaches. Finally, I present 3 bodies of work in which I have engaged with alchemy in my own practice.
