Returning: Tides & Stones
Corner Gallery, Clifden Arts Festival, 17th – 27th September 2026.
My work often focuses on seemingly forgotten places within rural landscapes; overgrown and deserted buildings, abandoned fishing boats and other traces of lives once lived. I explore the relationship these have with the terrain they are weathered in, how they become embedded into a place; returning to and becoming part of it, bearing witness to sometimes forgotten vernacular ways of life and to the people who have left them behind. My work draws a narrative through these elements, weaving layers of meaning into each painting through the use of unusual surfaces—old Ordnance Survey maps and Admiralty charts, discarded railway tickets and diaries.
Finn O’Lochlainn Diaries
I was given a collection of diaries belonging to the musician Finn O’Lochlainn. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Finn travelled regularly from his home in Dublin to the Aran Islands. In vivid detail, the diaries record his voyages aboard the Naomh Éanna ferry and his arrival by currach on Inis Mór.
