Attempts To Stop Death

My work has always been primarily concerned with memory and loss and underpinning that there must be some element of clinging on to something which cannot be held on to. Clutching at straws, cursing the incoming tide. Attempting to stop death. The two material which are most frequently found in my work, lead and wax, are both inherently associated with funereal practices, both used to hold back the putrefaction and decay of the grave. Lead used to line the coffins of those who cannot be immediately buried, wax used to replace the bodily fluids which make life possible but then turn on the body in death.

In Gaza, under the genocidal zionist regime which ravages it, there is more death than we can ever hope to process, bodies, or parts of bodies, lying in what used to be streets. Bodies buried, not in graves but under thousands of tonnes of rubble. The laughter of children silences, the childlike innocence of play replaced by a desperate search for food and shelter. I want to stop the death but that isn’t within my gift. We live in a system where the will of the majority of people who want to see an end to the killing is ignored by the machines of states in whose vested interests the genocide rolls relentlessly forward.

Powerless as I am alone I maintain a hope that mass action can yet turn the juggernaut around.

In the meantime I keep making work and much of it is shot through with a common thread. Attempts to stop death.

In March 2024 I had open heart surgery to replace a defective aortic valve. This is one of the main reasons behind my inactivity during the preceding year. With my diagnosis came a period of significant personal upheaval including my relocation back to South Armagh from Scotland. I had neither the wherewithal nor the motivation to make work of any significance. Although my condition was advanced and serious I didn’t dwell particularly on my own mortality. The practicalities of everyday living occupied the bulk of my energy. It was only in the convalescent period post-surgery that I had the time to come to terms with what could, if it had been undiagnosed for another couple of years, have been the end of me.

In 2022 I exhibited The Sin Eater as part of ArtsFeast at the Citywest Shopping Centre in Belfast. I was living in Scotland at the time and someone very kindly collected the work at the end of the show’s run and stored it for me. It took a while to make its way back to me and by the time it did I was getting ready to move back to South Armagh so into the back of the van it went again. I knew the sins were bundled up inside the ballot box but I didn’t have time to burn them properly and it was only when I was burning the wishes from the Raunachtswuensche piece that they came into my mind again. I was a little shocked by the sheer quantity of responses. Grace and Amy who run ArtsFest had said it was popular but there were more than 200 responses and in the end it took three tins to contain them all.

Father’s milk is a foundational work for me. When I was a child I used to be taken to work by my father. He was a school caretaked and had a workspace where he repaired things. One day, interrupted in the middle of making a cup of tea, he put an open milk bottle on the window board. When he retired nearly two decades later the milk bottle was still there. It’s many changes traacked a path for child to adult for me, from middle age to retirement for my father. Sill there, still milk, in some altered way but far removed from its wholesome nourishing beginnings.

This is an open edition and I’m happy to make a version for anyone who can supply a glass pint bottle and commit to give it a secure undisturbed spot in which to age.

The Attempts To Stop Death core works, like life itself, are almost unbearably fragile. I’m not sure how I might be able to show these although I would dearly love to.

Samhradh, Samhradh is the opening line of the traditional Irish song Thugmar an Samhradh Linn (We’ll Bring the Summer With Us). Summer usually brings a lot of flies round here, this year not so much.