Gesine Mahoney

Malerei / Zeichnungen / Mixed Media

Zeitz / Cornwall

My fascination with clouds stems from my early childhood. My parents have been keen walkers and ramblers and the look at the sky was always important before they took off. They knew a lot about the different types of clouds and the weather. It was important to wear the right clothes for our Sunday walks as we stayed out all day long.

When I was five years old I came over the green border with my father from the Soviet Zone to  the British Zone, to the free west, so we thought. In Magdeburg we had drawn the curtains and huddled around the radio to listen to the BBC. 

As it was always said that people who had died would go to heaven, I expected them up there in the sky giving us signs, waving to us or giving us warnings. It turned me into a dreamer with my head in the clouds.

As I found out much later, when I researched my family tree, my forefathers all seem to have known a lot about cloud formations and predicting the weather.

Among my ancestors from both sides my fathers as well as my mothers were shepherds, farmers and postilions. On my mothers side they were also millers for a few generations. They, as well as many other professions historically all had to know a great deal about the weather and about cloud formations.

As a child I was very short sighted and didn’t see the clouds very well, but my parents had a lot of art books with pictures of figures with dramatic skies and with these images I used my imagination to imagine things within the clouds. For example I loved Michelangelo’s images of clouds and skies, he and Rubens particularly sparked my imagination. As I took nearly everything literally, I thought these paintings were real images and were there to guide us, warn or amuse us. I only had to look at the sky carefully and I would see shapes and images but unlike my parents, who looked at the sky before we went out for our Sunday walk, they didn’t see figures or monsters like I did.

Later, when I was about seven, I got glasses and could actually really see the clouds and stars clearly and I enjoyed imagining and seeing things in the sky that other people could not.

Turner and Constable – think about anything that connects your work
Like my forefathers, Constable’s parents had been millers and had to understand the weather
Cloud watching or imagining of these forms is a form of escapism for me at a time of deep environmental and social divide and unrest. They are also a form of reference to the threat of darker times to come but also of hopeful optimism. 

Are these clouds referencing a political mood?