A death

About a year ago, driving home, I saw the car in front of me clip something. There was a lay-by I could pull into so I stopped and walked back along the roadside, cars careering past. It didn’t take long to find the hare, thrown into the ditch by the car that had spun it from the road. It was still alive, its chest pumping, its eyes flared. I thought I might be able to save it but as I lifted it I saw that one of its back legs was pointing in the wrong direction and there was blood leaking everywhere. By the time I got it to the car it was dead. I put it in the boot and brought it home, thinking that I might paint it, to tell its story and make its place in the world something tangible.

An entombment

As I painted it I started to dwell on how serene it looked for all that it was broken and bloodied. I built a cairn of sorts over it on an old garden slab down the side of the shed so that the rats wouldn’t carry away its bones and as the days past I found my self thinking about it and I knew that as the flesh fell away the broken bones would fall away and it would tell a much clearer story of its grim end.

A resurrection

Exactly a year after I built the tomb around it I uncovered it again. Some of the bones had fallen in unexpected ways and some had moved far farther than I would have thought possible but it was the bones of its pelvis and back legs that spoke most clearly of the violence of its demise. I painted the hare a second time.

With that second painting complete I set about itemising the bone fragments, 535 pieces, some no bigger than specks of dust. I may have missed some in what remained of the rotted down carcass but what remained I decided to try and coax one final act of transcendence from by making bone black pigment. I’ll tell you about that another day. For now contemplate the hare’s tale.

Una-Minh Kavanagh, an Irish journalist and Irish language educator, recently caught up with me to ask a few questions about the direction my work has taken since I arrived in Scotland. She asked some very perceptive questions and I think the interview gives you a flavour of what I’m like as a person. You can read it at https://weareirish.ie/culture/greag-art-painting-visual-ireland/

I realise my name can seem a bit of a challenge for anyone who doesn’t have a smattering of Irish but names are important to the Irish. Our language was taken from us over centuries, place names as well as personal names lost any attachment to their original meaning. In English my name is McAteer, but it can also be brought into English as McTeer, McTear, McIntyre, McIntire, all approximations of the original phrase mac an tsaoir, son of the free man. The Irish for free is saor but in this context it is a very specific form of freedom. In mediaeval Ireland with it’s complex systems of chiefs and minor kings the ordinary man in the field paid certain taxes, or owed specific obligations, to any leader further up the chain. Makers though, people who worked wood or stone, were free from these obligation and formed a class outside the conventional structure. As close as my father’s generation my family were quarry men, still working stone. So for me the name Mac a’ tSaoir still has a resonance and a sense of purpose that McAteer has failed to bring into English with it.