Artist, “Repression, Resurgence, Reemergence”
In your artist’s statement you mention that you went “to Donegal to retrieve something that was lost. Perhaps it was a pride that had been crushed by poverty and starvation”. What role has your art played in retrieving this “something”?
I found a rich artistic and oral history that was never shared with me since my grandparents schooling ended in the third grade while they were struggling to survive. I found prehistoric ruins in that were on the same meridian with Morocco, and ancient castles from Medieval times, and manuscripts from the golden age of Irish history. These ties to an ancient past gave me a greater sense of inter-connectivity given my teenage interest in art of the middle east, particularly Samaria and Egypt. Islamic art has its roots in Celtic art, a fact that i had intuited during that trip.
I think that each of my paintings are a type of archaeological dig into the ancient past, a collective unconscious where all of humanity comes together.
Since I lived in Egypt for six years and also traveled to Spain recently, finding that interconnected-ness of common histories, centered in southern Spain in the ninth century has helped validate my intuition in a search for more ancient and international identity.
How and to what extent does your dual nationality influence your artistic process?
I just received my Irish passport so as of yet the dual nationality is more of a cultural experience. However, I begin each painting with decisions that derive from a kind of passion and emotionalism inherited from my maternal Irish grandparents. The geometric structures that develop are often based on a narrative of living in cities in the US. They play between the lyrical, and the organic and the architectonic.
