Drawing

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…

The Cold Hard Facts Of Life

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…

The Sin Eater

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…

Three Views Of A Border

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…

The Fourteen Stations

The area from William Street through Rossville Street and Glenfada Park to Abbey Park in Derry, where 14 people were shot dead on Bloody Sunday, 30th January 1972, has been extensively redeveloped – a common issue with ‘sites of memory’ in Northern Ireland – but as close as I could manage it, these fourteen images document the places where the fourteen dead of Bloody…

Fourteen Silenced Bells For Derry

I was an eight year old child when the British Army’s Parachute regiment shot 26 Derry civil rights protestors on 30th January 1972. Thirteen died where they lay, one lingered for almost five months before dying on 16th June. Even as an eight year old I can remember the stunned silence in which we watched the grainy black and white news reports. The gunshots…

It Only Hurts If You Look At It

Sometimes examining our own pasts can be the most difficult thing we do. If we’re to do it honestly we have to give equal weight to the things that make us different and to the things that make us the same. Familiy, social circumstances, history unfolding around us all forge an identity but it isn’t always clear if 2 + 2 + 2 totals…

Innocence + Loss

Many cultures have death rituals which involve an attempt at preservation and memorialisation. The ancient Egyptians are the culture we associate most with this, with their mummies and pyramids. We think the ancient people who lived before history in Ireland may have disinterred bones of people who had a particular meaning from them and that they carried these bones with them. We have grave…

Silenced Bell

A bell is meant to speak. Or call. It has a tongue, a voice. In mediaeval Ireland bells were invested with significant symbolic power. They were associated with saints and some of these early bells were guarded, hidden and passed down intact to modern times. This bell is based on the form of those early mediaeval Irish bells but rendered in lead rather than…

Hare Bone Black

Alchemy Nowadays a painter can get virtually any colour imaginable straight from a tube. It’s easy but there’s little by way of mystery involved. It wasn’t always like that though – the tube is less than two centuries old – and for centuries painters, or their apprentices, made their own paint. There’s something alchemical about transforming some everyday substance into a tool for creative…