I am delighted to be exhibiting a solo presentation of etchings and collage pieces at the Dower House Gallery, Emo Court, Co. Laois until November 18th. thin places of escape and return is a body of work created between late 2021 and 2023. It features colour etchings, monoprint and collage works based on ideas of escape, reverie and our search for retreat; drawing inspiration from iconic dwellings and structures in folklore and fairytale, the landscape and the structures within them.
I am interested in these tales and how the houses in them can shape our thoughts, our dreams and our memories. I am interested in the mountains, the pathways, the dark lakes, the clustering shelters, the groupings of islands, the fading horizons, faraway fields, and the clouds that hover above us. I am interested in the meaning we assign to all of these things. The houses that feature in my landscapes act as a representation of safety or security against the elements outside. But our notions of safety are temporary, and our time is fleeting. These structures might not hold, as storms and changes approach. Islands are a source I return to often in my work – looking at an island is like looking at another world; and there is something about this distance that allows space for dreaming and distillation of thought. I often refer to stories, poetry and prose when I am making work – the works of Alistair Mc Leod and Brian Friel, writing about identity, memory and belonging held particular resonance for me while working on this series. I use colour to add to this sense of a narrative, and to reinforce the emotional complexity of these personal landscapes of memory.
Irish and European texts provided an inspiration for many of the works in the exhibition, as did many of the great artists who have engaged with the subject matter before me – from Harry Clarke to Paula Rego, from David Hockney to Shaun Tan. These stories are dark and deep. They are the stories we are told when we are tucked up safe in our beds; but they tell us about danger and evil, many of these structures are traps or prisons, things are not always as they seem. My prints depict dark and fractal towers, glassy sharp mountains, and towering beanstalks, all familiar, and yet strange. We have returned to the world of our childhood, but something is different in this desolate oneiric universe. Something has changed. But maybe it is we who have changed in returning, like Oisín on his ill-fated trip from Tír na nÓg.
In recent years I have been making collage-etchings alongside my etching process. I create one-off original pieces using this technique: combining elements of monoprint with collage, using off-cuts of elements from my etchings and juxtaposing them with one another to create new narratives and compositions. These works explore further how stories can change and evolve through different interpretations and translations, through different times and eras. The etchings in these unique pieces become a printed universe – a sort of vernacular or visual language of my own, changing and evolving with each iteration of the narrative, with each re-telling of the tale. These repeated motifs can be seen as a metaphor for the telling and the re-telling, the construction and the re-construction of narratives, re-imagining these imagined worlds once more. The resulting work creates something of a dream-like universe, in which elements from a print can appear and re-appear in different settings, creating new meaning and contexts through these works.
