Instagram Pick of the Week | Niamh McKenna

We love Instagram! Why? Because it gives you access to tonnes of visual art at your finger tips! Follow @thisheadstuff to stay up to date with our finds on our favourite app!

Every week HeadStuff’s Visual Arts Editor will feature posts from their favourite artists on Instagram. So add the hashtag #thisheadstuff to be featured!

Up this week is Niamh McKenna aka @whatiscreamedcorn, a recent graduate of an MA in Film & Visual Studies in Queen’s University Belfast. Her feed is a delightful mix of artful photography and her own lovably creepy drawings which she describes as “Stanley Donwood meets Keith Haring meets Barbara Kruger.” She loves Iceland, the Soviet Union, charity shops and dogs.

For me, Instagram is a really great way of keeping a visual diary. It gives me a place to document my sketches and videos, like a little personal portfolio, and when your art is all in the one place you can see your own development and growth which is a wonderful thing. I love Instagram because it encourages me to think visually and keep doing more and more drawings when I find out people actually like them and don’t just think they’re really sad and weird.

I’ve had Instagram for over a year and have posted drawings sporadically throughout that period. Although it can be nerve-wracking, there’s also something very therapeutic about sharing your work with people. I often have so many ideas trapped in my head which can be entirely overwhelming, but releasing them to the world creates an active creative space and really helps you to think with more clarity.

It’s vital to create work with a feminist narrative when the art world is still so male dominated and unequal. Something like 90% of the collections in the Hugh Lane and the National Gallery is male work – it’s absolutely crazy. Though in saying that, some of the most powerful art emerges from protest and counterculture. Art gives us a really amazing medium to open up a dialogue that forces people to confront these issues head on.

I’m now no longer a student so at the moment I’m experiencing the beginning of what I’m sure will be a very prolonged existential crisis from being thrust into the world of adulthood. Realistically I will probably move back to Dublin at some point if I get a job and continue to be a poor suffering artist on the side, though my ultimate dream is to win the lotto and move to NYC to be a rich, but likely still suffering artist.

A lot of my work is inspired by modern comic artists and illustrators like Daniel Clowes, David Hughes, Joan Cornella, as well as underground comix artists like Aline Kominsky, Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. The Comix movement of the 60s and 70s was groundbreaking and opened up a space for comics to depict content that was forbidden by mainstream publications – like politics, social issues, sex, and drugs. I got into these sort of comics a couple of years ago and they’ve been a huge influence on my artwork.

Sometimes I just get certain words into my head and I feel the need to illustrate them. Then other times, it’s the opposite way around. In a purely aesthetic sense I love how words and illustration look alongside eachother – when you get it right it’s the most beautiful thing.

I’m not sure if I’d say that I intend the creepiness, but it certainly has always been a fundamental element to most of my work as both an artist and filmmaker. I’ve always been drawn to weird things and most things I create tend to freak people out a bit, which I secretly really enjoy. I think it’s important to feel weirded-out and uncomfortable every now and again.

I once failed a Christmas science test but the teacher passed me because I did a really good snowman drawing beside my work.