U2's latest tour, which kicks off in California next weekend, should be as visually strong as ever. Deirdre Mulrooney meets artist Catherine Owens, who creates dramatic backdrops for their shows.
'I'm here, in the depths of the countryside, and I'm able to check my e-mail," says Catherine Owens. "Paradise!" After almost 20 years in the US, the Dublin-born artist now has a studio in the Blackwater Valley, in Waterford. There is a distinct contrast between the parts of Owens's transatlantic life: country and city, traditional and modern.
She is here painting abstract watercolours for U2's Vertigo tour, which begins in San Diego on Easter Monday. Outside the south-facing windows of the light, airy room, a bevy of whooper swans is taking flight from a boggy field.
Next week she will be in her other home, dwarfed by the skyscrapers of New York, working out dissolves for the paintings - "coming off a Rothko vibe" - as they are animated into a video to accompany U2's performance of Yahweh, a song from their latest album.
The A4 watercolours spread out on her table will dwarf U2 when they end up on the huge screens the band uses.
This is Owens's fourth U2 collaboration - she has been curating the screens since the visual assault of the Zoo TV tour, in 1992 - and she is acutely aware of what is required to keep the audience focused. "The attention span is about a minute if the band is not on stage," she says. "You've got to be conscious that you're in a room with 30,000 people."
Having listened to Yahweh quite a few times - "not to interpret it but to pick up on the emotional high and low of the journey of the song" - today Owens is looking through books, making sketches and doing the paintings for the animated segments, "which will be on a loop, like a series of paragraphs". She makes three or four versions, she says: "a full piece, an abstract version and a shorter version".
Owens's relationship with U2 goes back almost 30 years, since her brief stint playing bass in The Boy Scoutz, a punk band managed by Steve Averill, who went on to design U2's album covers. "Let's not go there!" she cringes, burying her face in her hands.
Owens hung up her bass guitar when she set off for art college in Belfast, but music remained central to both her solo and collaborative work, finding its ultimate expression in her visuals-meet-music U2 odyssey.
"This time around, I'm not trying to cover every base and find content for every track," she says. "I am far more involved with where the band is coming from, musically and emotionally. The journey between all of us is so long. It's like watching your friends grow. By now it's an intuitive collaboration."
Owens was with the band in France last summer, evolving ideas for the limited-edition Vertigo CD book while they were in their final two weeks of recording.
"We talked about making those pages very personal and having the band create the artwork themselves. I extracted the essences and got the concept, about the journey from fear to faith. I do the same for the tour: extract some essence of everybody's thoughts, take it to another level and give it a U2 feel."
As well as curating the screen imagery for the Popmart and Elevation tours, and collaborating on Zoo TV (it was Owens who customised those eccentric Trabants), her signature contribution has been political video content.
"The band and I share a subversive tendency towards political truth," she says. "It came out in a meeting that we all believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of the most important pieces of literature in the world. It's a text that has to be reignited in the minds of who and where we are right now, because we are paying such little regard to the concept."
So the full text went into the Vertigo book. Inspired by Tony Oursler's video-art piece The Influence Machine, which Owens saw in London in 2000, she is making the human-rights declaration a "three-dimensional image projected onto fog".
For Elevation, Owens created a scroll of names of people who died in the US on September 11th, 2001. It was played at the Super Bowl, as were video segments about Charlton Heston's gun philosophy.
For Zoo TV she had an animated George Bush Sr singing along to Queen's We Will Rock You. For the Vertigo tour, her nine and a half minute video inspired by the 1948 declaration, is scheduled for the encore break. Last week she put the finishing touches to its audio.
But as Owens's swirling watercolours attest, "as a woman, one of the things I bring is some feminine perspective. As Willie [ Williams, the show director] says, I am constantly reminding everybody that there needs to be some arcs and circles".
After testing the fog machine, in Vancouver, and seeing the San Diego show, Owens will be back at her Blackwater Valley drawing board in April, working on a solo show for the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, in Cork. "I go straight into working on a sculpture piece that is based on all this technology, developing LED sculptures. The absolute can-do approach [ of U2] has given me a confidence I can take back into the art world."
The Kronos Quartet, with whom she also works, will be playing in Cork in May, as part of the Cork 2005 programme. For their 30th anniversary tour, in 2003, Owens provided a visual response to the avant-garde quartet's "playing" of Harry Bertoia's Sonambient sculptures - "beautiful welded rods that have different heights and sounds".
Owens's solo shows have included Balls, at Project Arts Centre in Dublin, Self-Address, at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork, and In, at the Hugh Lane. Music spills over from her U2 work into her solo work - as when Brian Kennedy's a cappella voice was piped into an empty room as part of the four-room journey that was In.
Her new studio, designed by architect Felim Dunne, is the dream of a lifetime. "The only thing I've really ever cared about since the day I left college is having a workspace."
What does the future hold for Owens? "To come back and work here, but do a lot of the concept and research in New York. I'm so totally thrilled with where I am at this moment," she says, gazing out across the Blackwater Valley. "I couldn't be more lucky."