Ionad Cultúrtha, Baile Mhúirne
This exhibition dwells within the landscapes once known to those who departed West Cork in the late eighteenth century. Among them were my grandfather and two of his brothers who, as blacksmiths, were in demand for the laying of the railways spreading across the plains of America. They were carried within that quiet tide of emigration that reshaped so many Irish lives.
These paintings return to the terrain they left behind — to its shifting light, softened horizons, and enduring presence — and consider what it means to leave, and what it means to remain. The works follow the imagined path from Baile Mhúirne to the harbour at Cobh, County Cork, a journey marked as much by emotional gravity as by distance.
My heightened sense of colour and light finds expression through paint applied in an impasto style. It seems to echo the layered sediment of memory and time. Here, the built environment and the rural landscape become repositories of absence and endurance, where history lingers quietly within the present.