I’m not the most sentimental of people. My mother was famously unsentimental and would happily throw out anything that couldn’t prove itself to be of some practical use. I’m not quite as ruthless but the fact that I’ve moved dozens of times over the years means I’m fairly light on personal effects. A while ago my friend John sent me a photograph of us, we could be five years old in it, possibly six, out the back of his childhood house. I’ve known him since I was born, our mothers wheeled us round in prams together, I formed my first band with him, he moved away to work, so did I, we kept in touch but sporadically. We both moved back eventually. When I was waiting for surgery and not allowed to drive he took me shopping. Just before my surgery was due he had a heart attack and died in a shopping centre. A passing nurse with the presence of mind to shout for a defibrillator got him back. We’re probably closer than ever. Treasure your friends, the thread of life is tenuous.

I don’t particularly think of myself as a surrealist. When there are odd juxtapositions in my work they are normally planned and programmatic. Purposeful. This work though has its origins in accident. I broke a favourite cup a few years ago, trying to do six things at once as usual and the coffee stained the floor of the space I was using as a studio in those times. For some reason I was moved to trace around the outline of the stain and of a fragment of the broken cup. I stashed the drawing and it has moved countries with me twice. At some point I drew a brutish face beneath the ‘hat’ and, seeing a shambolic, shameful hooded figure I added two walking sticks to prop it up. I stashed it again and in the empty warehouse of my brain that shambolic figure became death. Sluggish and inept, unable to get about without help from its thuggish supporter it seemed obvious as this year ground on that I would locate this hideous pair in Gaza against a backdrop of shattered building and buried children. Death the occupation, his manservant the western capitalist powers which fund and arm it. I’d normally shy away from spelling these things out but nothing about this is normal, is it? In the first iteration Death was dressed in grey but I made a second pass, putting death in imperial purple. Empire is death.

When my mother died I inherited a couple of boxes of family photos. The bulk of them date to before I was born and some originally came to her from my uncle on his death. My uncle arrived home to Newry when I was a child and to my young eyes he was an exotic figure. He and a friend had run away to join the merchant marine in their youth and he came back via a long, untalked-of stretch of time in London where he plied the family trade of plastering and, apparently, drank anything he ever earned. He was a sharp dresser though, with a Sinatra-like sparkle and a ready wit. He is the source of the photo I transcribed for this work, some unrecorded, unknown friend or lover, whether from London or his prior travels I have no idea but a testament to the vivid colour of a life that faded to gray once he returned home.

Over the last couple of years I’ve made a preponderance of three dimensional work but a recent change of circumstance has forced me to re-think my practice. I’ve always had an interest in historic practices and the seemingly alchemical ways in which previous generations of artists used materials in inventive ways. One of the processes I’m particularly interested in is silverpoint. Before graphite lead pencils were in common use artists used a silver pointed stylus to make a mark. If you look at any old master drawings there’s a high degree of probability that the delicately traced marks they made were put on a prepared papaer surface with a silverpoint. The silver leaves no visible mark on bare paper but if you coat the paper with casein gesso it leaves a fine grey line. Once the mark is made it can’t be erased the way a pencil line can so it’s a very unforgiving technique but ineffably beautiful. I’m normally in favour of diving straight in but on this occasion I’ve decided I had better refresh my drawing abilities fo I’ll end up succumbing to frustration so what you’re seeing below are pencil drawings.

This piece is on show as part of the Artists At Work 2 exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery until February 12th 2023. I had originally intended to show one of the works from the Three Views of A Border exhibition but I couldn’t get the dates to work. Three Views was still touring in Ireland when the work had to be delivered so I wavered, vacillated, huffed and puffed and decided to show this, which is the most complex of a series of related pieces that pull together memory fragments of the 1970s in a playful way.

It has a number of familiar elements. The lead and bitumen are there, as are George and Pat and the rusty drawing pins but there are ideas there that are still emerging and which I’ll develop in future. The gallery gets quite a high number of family visitors and the lower panel is hung at a child’s eye level which I really like, hopefully the magpie nature of the collage will be appealing to young visitors. That’s an approach I want to develop in future. In keeping with a lot of recent work the title ‘The Cold Hard Facts Of Life’ comes from a countrypolitan song, Porter Wagoner’s finest moment in this case, although the phrase ‘Pressure Cookers! Pressure Cookers!’ appears in typescript on the upper panel and I was almost swayed to use that as a title. One visitor has already likened the piece to ‘an explosion in a junk shop’. If that isn’t a title waiting for a piece I don’t know what is.

A lot of us carry our guilt around. It weighs us down. Almost everyone has done at least one thing in our lives which we’re deeply ashamed of and which we have an unhealthy habit of letting define us. The Sin Eater is a piece which aims to empower the viewer, or the actor because you interact with this work far more than you view it, to absolves themselves of that burden. First shown as part of Three Views of A Border in An Tain in Dundalk, The Sin Eater then travelled to the Cityside Arts Festival in Belfast and a second iteration is currently part of the Iontas incarnation of Three Views of A Border.

When an exhibition ends I unseal the ballot box and burn the ballots before encasing them in wax to produce a permanent record of those absolved sins.

I would love this to have a life independent, or semi-autonomous at least, of me. You don’t really need the ballot box, any box which can be sealed will do. If you contact me I’ll send you an instructions poster, and if you send back the ballots in a sealed envelope I will burn them and transform them into the outworking of the installation as you can see with The Sins Of Dundalk below.

Myself and my friend and fellow artist Anna Marie Savage have talked for a number of years about the possibility of exhibiting bodies of work together as we both grew up along the border and both have frequently made work in response to the experiences and memories of how life was and is there. We approached the Tain Arts Centre in Dundalk and they suggested we add Ciaran Dunbar to the mix. The resultant exhibition brought together three very different views of life in proximity to the border. Anna’s work is extremely painterly. Her sensuous use of paint and ink is a very effective counterpoint to the harsh, often angular intrusions into the landscape that serve as her visual starting point; Ciaran’s work as a documentary photographer interrogates life along the border in a detached fashion while my work examines how landscape and memory are codependent in our own experience of an ambivalent past. I’ve gathered together the body of work I made for the exhibition in the ‘It Only Hurts If You Look At It’ page of this site.

The exhibition was warmly received and a second venue came on board with the exhibition moving to the Iontas Theatre and Arts Centre in Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan in August. The modern space of Iontas gives the exhibition a radically different context from the exhibition space of the Tain Arts Centre which was originally a set of cells under Dundalk Court House. The exhibition continues there until October 25th 2022.