About

Greag Mac a’ tSaoir (pronounced GREG mak-a-TEER)

I grew up in a small Northern Irish town in the 1970s. It was a violent, repressive environment and music and art were the means of lifting yourself out of that environment, of preserving some semblance of sanity, of dignity. One of the threads of my work still addresses those dark times and as a whole the underlying themes in my work are restoring loss and affording dignity to those it has been taken from. Between 2016 and 2023 I lived and worked in Kippen in the Scottish central belt but I moved back to South Armagh in 2023 where I have now carved out a small working space and am returning to making installation based works and paintings.

I make work that deals, for the most part with memory and loss, mostly at the borderline where personal meets political. Like a border drawn on the map, things aren’t always where they should be or even where you think they are. Although most of my work tells a story of some kind, these aren’t stories with a normal narrative arc. They may not entirely make sense to you, in fact they may not entirely make sense to me either, which is fine because they aren’t ‘my’ stories and what the viewer brings to them completes them.

In addition to paint, works are often made with a combination of reclaimed domestic material – floorboards and lead flashing feature in many works – and found objects – toys or stickers – that hint at stories that artist and viewer can tell together. Occasionally the narratives border on the explicit, with direct quotes from stories retold by survivors of the violence of the last half century, but those works are made with enough breathing space for the other references and elements they contain to exert a balancing influence.

If you have any questions about my work or if you are interested in buying a piece, please feel free to get in touch by emailing me at folkslinger1963@gmail.com. Studio visits are also possible with some notice.