Noel Sheridan: Noel Sheridan, who died in Perth, Western Australia, on July 12th, was for many years a versatile and charismatic presence in Irish and Australian cultural life, in several capacities: as a painter, as a conceptual and performance artist, and as an educator and administrator.
His appearances on The View on RTÉ television over the last few years also confirmed him as a perceptive and witty cultural critic and commentator. Not for nothing did the artist Brian O'Doherty once describe him as "a one-man committee". He was also a brilliant conversationalist. One of his favourite pursuits as director of the National College of Art and Design was to settle into prolonged, intense and usually hilarious discussions with students about art, life and the meaning of everything.
He was born in Dublin in 1936, one of three children of Cecil and Ann (nee Doyle) Sheridan. Cecil, a descendant of Aubrey Brinsley Sheridan, was well known as an actor and variety entertainer. Like his father, Sheridan attended the Christian Brothers School in Synge Street. He showed ability in both the visual and performing arts, and for a number of years it was not clear which direction he would take.
Being Sheridan, he kept a foot in both camps for as long as possible. On leaving school, he worked in the accounts department of the Irish Independent while studying for a commerce degree at TCD in the evenings. He became involved with the Players' Theatre, and at the same time he was painting. Leo Smith of the Dawson Gallery invited him to exhibit his moody, lyrical, abstracted landscapes there in 1958 and became his dealer. He married Liz Murphy and, funded by a Macauley scholarship from the Arts Council, went to London in 1962.
With John Molloy he went to the United States to perform a revue based on the visit of John F Kennedy to Ireland. Their timing was bad: JFK was assassinated. But Sheridan loved what he saw of New York, and was quickly back there, with Liz. He painted and worked as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, which provided him with a kind of crash course, as he later put it, in modern art history. Although he continued to paint for as long as he was based in New York, until about 1970, he was absorbing a great deal of the avant garde ideas around him, which eventually led him to make a leap into conceptual art.
After a brief spell in Wicklow, which produced an outstanding participatory artwork, Everybody Should Get Stones, a quixotic quest to make a film in New Ireland, close to New Guinea, led him to Australia, where he and his family remained for the next eight years.
Besides making a number of ambitious, conceptually oriented artworks (some reprised for his 2001 retrospective in Dublin) he became involved in third-level education, lecturing in Sydney's School of Architecture and the National Art School where, as Dorothy Walker pointed out, for a time he was the only professor of conceptual art in the world. In 1975 Goff Whitlam's Labour government backed the establishment of an Experimental Arts Foundation in Adelaide and Sheridan was appointed as its head, a role he fulfilled with great gusto for four years.
There was some surprise when, after his stint with an avowedly anti-institutional institution, he took on the position of director of Dublin's National College of Art and Design. When he arrived in 1979, the college had come through turbulent times and was beginning anew.
Sheridan oversaw and championed the move to its current home, the erstwhile Powers Distillery in Thomas Street. He was an exceptionally popular director, liked by students and teaching staff. NCAD registrar Ken Langan, who worked with him for many years, described him as "a born communicator who was wonderful with people".
Less predictably, he was also up to the administrative side of his job, which was demanding as the college went through a period of unprecedented expansion and development.
In 1989 he rocked the boat in applying for, and getting, a career break, the first head of a third-level college to do so. The reason was to return to Australia for a five-year stint as head of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was a less rewarding experience than Adelaide had been, partly because the artistic climate was less amenable to the kind of openness and experimentation that Sheridan relished.
On his return to NCAD, he set about establishing a media department (now headed by Kevin Atherton) and, apart from his other responsibilities, started to make time for a re-engagement with his own creative work. In 1998 he restaged a piece he had originally performed in 1976 in the Project Art Centre's temporary space at The Mint Theatre off Moore Street.
But he also addressed himself to painting again, producing a significant body of new work for his 2001 retrospective at the RHA Gallagher Gallery, which coincided with the publication of Noel Sheridan: On Reflection (Four Courts Press). He retired as director of the NCAD in 2003.
His instincts as a performer were flawless and his timing was superb. His friend Donald Brook recalled his departure from Perth in 1994. When friends and well-wishers assembled for his parting speech, expecting ritualised acknowledgments and regrets, the curtains parted and they got Noel, in costume, miming to Ray Charles's Hit the Road Jack , complete with backing singers (including his daughter, Japonica).
One of his father's key tips on stagecraft, he recalled in a piece about him, was: "End high." He is survived by his sister Ann, his wife Liz and his children Anne, Mark, Lutie, Japonica and Adelaide.
Noel Sheridan: born December 12th, 1936; died July 12th, 2006