'The Turning'

Powerfully situated in remote landscapes, ancient stone monuments have an intensity and grandeur appropriate to the many magical meanings attributed to them. Long-standing and covered in moss and lichen, the court cairn at Rathlacken in North Mayo is the inspiration behind the work of this exhibition. The site is part of a landscape of tombs preserved beneath the bog.

These beautiful, weather-worn witnesses to passing millennia were moved into position by Ireland's first farmers over 5,000 years ago. This incredible manoeuvring happened at a time when the dynamic between people and the natural world changed irrevocably. In creating these structures, the first farmers mark their moment of mastery over the natural world. The purpose of these monuments, it has been suggested, was to commemorate this shift.   Arguably, it has culminated in today's crises of climate and the unseemly race for the earth's scarce resources.

As we approach the end of the era of exploiting the home planet, these monuments remind me that it was once possible to live in harmony with and walk lightly on the earth.

The Turning opens on Sunday, October 16th from 3pm to 5pm and runs until November 16th.

 Artist’s Statement

How a pain in the neck gave me back what I had learned and lost

 

“I used to paint from the outside in. Now I paint from the inside out. I have become more engaged with the process of painting . . . Art, like life,  is all about change and learning to adapt and roll with the brushes . . . I thought I had this figured this out.  I learned I hadn’t when I couldn’t lift my head or look sideways for almost 18 months.   What I realise now is that that pain in my neck gave me back what I had learned and lost. . .  Gazing. I used to know how to really look. To absorb. To engage with an 'empty' mind.

When I began to paint again,  it was in a radically different way . . . Using cold wax added to oil paint I use ash or sand, applied in thick layers (or thin). This surface may be scraped, scored,  scratch or gouged.   As a result, deep fissures appear and are retained or transformed by a wash of solvent.

Each skim creates a new layer that can always be re-worked. This process of veiling and unveiling means that the engagement with the image never ends.

Through this process I have become a painter . . . and the kind of painter I was never born to be.”

 Mary Duffy, September 2022