Meet Anna Moloney: Visual Artist & Creative Therapy Teacher

We had the good fortune of connecting with Anna Moloney and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Anna, where are your from? We’d love to hear about how your background has played a role in who you are today?
I am from County Meath in Ireland, which is a 1 hour drive North West of Dublin. I grew up in the countryside but I have been living in Dublin for the last couple of years. I love being outside in nature and I crave the stillness of the countryside whenever I am in the city. I visit my Mam in Meath often and we explore the surrounding countryside together. Like many others, the Covid-19 pandemic provided me with the opportunity to reconnect with where I grew up. Isolation from others brought me closer to nature and to my immediate natural landscape, the local bog-land. I have become fascinated by its transformative nature, and with the history and secrets that it holds. I find a lot of inspiration for my art here.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I love to draw, I always have done. In college, I studied Ceramic Design and then Digital Animation Production, but drawing is something I knew I would always inevitably come back to. My current art practice is a combination of drawings and digital collage. I combine elements of the natural and the supernatural, the surreal and the real. I work from a broad range of influences, including internet culture, mythology, classical art and the natural landscape. My practice utilises visual story-telling to discuss social issues. I use well known motifs from mythological and folkloric stories to illustrate my views. For the past 4 years I have been teaching creative therapy pottery classes in nursing homes. When it was no longer possible to continue the classes due to pandemic restrictions, I set up a shop to sell prints of my work. Since then, I have been enjoying spending time creating new work and I am excited to see where it goes.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I spend my time between Dublin and Meath. These two counties are right beside each other so I would probably bring my friend to both. County Meath is a very magical and mystical place, so if I had a friend staying there would be lots for to do! It has many places of historical and spiritual significance and is home to the very impressive neolithic monuments of Newgrange, Nowth and Dowth in the Boyne Valley and Loughcrew near Oldcastle. Throughout the year there are various different Celtic festivals to partake in, one of which is Sámhain, the Celtic festival of fire. This is celebrated on the Hill of Ward on October 31st, and is where Halloween originates from. We could go to Dublin and explore it’s beautiful coast, go for a swim and drink some lovely pints! There are lots of great swimming spots along the coast of Dublin, but of course, it depends on whether or not we’re feeling brave enough for the cold!!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Where do I begin? I’m very grateful to have such a supportive group of family and friends. My parents and my brother have encouraged me to follow my love of art since day 1, and I definitely feel very lucky for this. Advice, discussion and help from friends is paramount to my art-making. Every like, comment, share and DM on social media is massively appreciated and it is really nice to know that people care about the art that I create. My business mentor Tara Predergast has been really helpful. Tara runs a business mentoring group called The Biscuit Factory. This is a community of creative entrepreneurs, where everyone involved helps each other with any business related queries. It’s a great community to be a part of! Tara was a lecturer of mine in the Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship post-grad I did in Trinity College Dublin last year. I have to give credit to all the lecturers and tutors that I’ve had in various college courses throughout the years. They have all thought me valuable skills, and I am finding recently, that even if I didn’t see some of the skills as relevant at the time, they seem to becoming relevant to my practice now which is very cool! A book that I can also give credit to is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I couldn’t recommend this book enough. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a 12 week long workbook to help you to reconnect with your creativity. You read and complete 1 chapter per week. However, I tend to dip in and out of it as I am a painfully slow reader, and this way seems to work just fine for me! I went through quite a long period of “artist’s block” that lasted over a year, and I feel like this book really helped me to get past this and to relax into my art-making.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annymolo/

Image Credits
Kyle Cheldon Barnett