About me

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be? Charles Bukowski

​

​

I was always fascinated by materials and objects, their shape, form, identity.

School was not for me, the Ireland of the 1970s was very rigid and conservative, the teachers made me anxious and afraid. Art for my leaving certificate was mainly about Titian and the bronze doors of the Vatican by Bernini, but did little to address the creative potential the students had within themselves. The old Nun would say „Now children, today we will draw and paint butterflies” - I was eighteen.

The situation in the local Technical school was the same, the classes were concerned solely with engineering, and nothing regarding the creative arts. I had lost interest in school at an early age anyway, believing firmly that education was about conformity, about the system, and had little to do with me. At seventeen, I somehow discovered the writings of William Blake, his exuberance and brilliant insights into the wonderful world in which we live was a revelation, an escape. His unorthodox views regarding life, perception, and the soul, was to bring me pleasure, understanding, and peace of mind.

​'If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.'

Having trained as a technician I worked in electrical rooms around the world for many years. Rooms concealed from public view, often underground, in big cities, and in the remote deserts of Saudi Arabia. I began to appreciate the beauty order and form of the various objects and components that surrounded me, in this hidden world. 

Later as an Artist I wanted to work with these same objects, and their perceived identity - changing, reinventing, manipulation, endeavouring to create something new, aesthetic, and pleasing to the eye. In the same way as a painter works with canvas brushes and tubes of paint.

Spending many years in Leipzig and Berlin, in the former East Germany, I collected a lot of material from abandoned factories, and the industrial wasteland there, but my electrical experience and interest in industry does not define or limit me as a creative person. I delight in working with all kinds of materials, a collaborate between Artist and object, bringing something new, something different, into existence.

John Power.