On your website, Bryan Wizemann describes your pieces as “haunted by a strong memory of youth, the culturally specific fantasies that one always carries as an immigrant to a new land.” Is this effect an inspiration for your pieces, or an involuntary result?
As an artist I do not paint in response to emigrating from Ireland to America at the age of eighteen. I do not paint in response to my love of the landscape I grew up with. I do not paint directly to this or any one aspect of my life experience. I do however paint as a consequence of my experiences. With the belief that we do not choose the memories we carry with us, rather our memories are a collective of the meaningful events that transpired. The memories that “haunt” my work are in fact the memories that continue to survive. The collective of unresolved events that occurred amount to the moment in the studio when I put paint to the linen.
In order to lose myself in the work I come equipped with a skill set and a passionate response to the life I live at the time I live in and try to make sense of it all. Sometimes I wish to be free of the troubling events that caused me to leave Ireland. There was not one reason but a curiosity for a life beyond the land I lived in. I left because I needed to know more. I stay gone because I have attached myself to a new way of living but I leave behind a land and people that I love.
The Irish writers abroad (ie WB Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh), have written about the conflicting emotions of an emigrant. I do not want to abandon the great land that gave me life but in leaving it there is a feeling of guilt and of quitting. These nagging emotions interfere with my growth as an individual and in turn continue to show up and influence my paintings. It is a complex life. I am only Irish in America and in Ireland I am a Yank, I am a misplaced entity. Seeking my own identity and finding a fulcrum wherein I can find a balance of who I am between the two lands that I call home will always “haunt” the work I make.
