Artist Statement
My traditions in painting and sculpture derive from drawing, it’s texture and the form it makes possible are primary. From the caves of Lascaux to Picasso, Paul Klee, and onwards, line has produced a powerful visual resonant mind-scape in our odyssey through cultural expression in time.
In sculpture one has mass and line and colour in a three dimensional field, unlike painting, which operates in two dimensions or in the illusion of another dimension. It has been suggested that today there is no dominant stylistic direction, movement or group consensus. The fragmentation in current art, the glut of images taken straight from advertising media, television, film and “High Art” are direct reflections of contemporary experience.
It is in the juggling of these elements that a work is created.
Over time one accumulates a personal visual vocabulary to articulate ones experience of the world within and without. The armature I have chosen is both, expressionistic and figurative. The narrative is the myth that clothes these creatures. My sources are eclectic but in the main I am rooted in an Irish identity and in particular early pre-Christian sources.
For me, the essence of the artists odyssey is both the medium and the message it conveys, like Munch’s silent scream of almost unbearable emotion or the Swiss artist Giacometti’s works which inhabit spaces of silent intensity.
The tension of what should be there but isn’t, that which musicians here call the ‘quare note’ are articulated in the sinuous sensual lines of a Schiele drawing. I would like to think that my work over time develops in style and strength, like the river ‘Anna Livia’ in Finnegan’s Wake ( James Joyce ), we return to source constantly;
“ Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve to shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
In my sculpture the figure predominates whether human or animal while in my painting and printmaking, landscape becomes the stage and backdrop for the human conundrum.