Splitting Borders, creative, collaborative story telling.

Have you ever asked yourself the question; what makes an artist an artist? We have, we’ve thought about it, read books about it and had many late night discussions about it. And what we keep coming back to again and again is that what makes an artist is the making of art, purposefully and regularly.

We are artists, but when we stop practising our craft a removal occurs and we are artists in name only, removed from meaning and conviction. The only remedy is to re-engage with the work, shakily, sometimes reluctantly and with as much courage as we can muster.

Gareth is the main illustrator of these pages and he had been enduring a lengthy and distant removal from his pen and his paper and, harder still, from his passion for the art work. We devised Splitting Borders to gently, lovingly and a little bit pushily entice him back to his love affair with visual art. Sadhbh is the editor and now with the new Melancholic Wife stories is the main writer. We had been considering projects we could collaborate on for some time and the venture has, thankfully, fit naturally into our lives.

We made our first escapade into printing our work for the Dublin Zine Fair in 2013 with Splitting Borders Volumes One and Two and since then we have produced The Splitting Borders Alphabet Book, Curated Lines, The Professor and the Octopus and The melancholic Wife and her Perpetrating Husband.

We commit to extending our creative selves. We try not to place any narrative or pictorial limitations on ourselves.