Carry

This image has been on my mind for some time, several years in fact. The sloping ground is based on one of the family farm fields, the ‘High Field’. The Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down is the underlying idea. Here, I’m nearing the top of the ‘high field’ and the rope that I’m pulling my father up the slope with is about to snap. The coffin will slide back down to the bottom of the field, and the whole pulling exercise will begin again. It’s about living with long term bereavement from suicide. Forever grateful to my late mother for taking two photographs of my father lying in the funeral home.

Butterflies and Starlight

This painting is part of a group exhibition in Fota House in June 2026. The Mór Artists collective was founded in 2023 to help rural artists living in East Cork / West Waterford to connect better and get more opportunities for exhibiting and selling work. We were invited to submit work based on a theme of boxes and under the title ‘within / without’. This image combines 3 boxes. An old churning container for butter. A box with an inner blue lining that had mysterious white stains on the upper side. And a glass box displaying various butterfly species. So I put them together and came up with this surreal piece.

Sunset Over Ardnahinch at Garryvoe Beach

I’ve been wanting to paint this sunset for a long time, the original reference photo was taken in January 2013. I painted it in my homemade oil paints. There’s nothing like a sunset at winter when the tide is going out and the sky is reflected in the wet sand. Twice the magic!

Fetal Rock

The highlighted parts of a rock I saw last December reminded me of a fetus. This led me thinking about the Kerry baby and Ann Lovett cases in the Eighties and how, up until recently in Irish society, the absolute worst thing for a young woman in Ireland to do was to get pregnant outside of marriage.

Bedroom at Dawn

Times of the year when daylight gets rapidly longer or shorter (late March and April, October) tend to bring out vivid dreams or nightmares for me. I wake at dawn. I’m exploring that in-between moment when the dream is still fresh and you’re not sure where you are. The wood of suicides from Dante’s Inferno features in the middle in the door area and various personal memories surround it. Limited palette of ultramarine blue, raw umber and bluish silver. I painted it in casein and it gives a unique look.

Claire Making Flower Bunches

In spring and early summer, I give a hand in my sister’s flower field. Planting seed trays and pots and weeding, it can be a busy time. This painting depicts Claire in the farm shed doing flower bunches. It’s late September and near the end of the flower season. I thought the composition would be interesting, surrounded by flowers fanning out and going sideways and down rather than the usual upright direction. I’ve not done a formal painting of her before.