Grateful to OCAP

Some invitations arrive as dates in a calendar. Others arrive like a hand on the shoulder.

When Oughterard Courthouse Arts Programme committee invited me to take part in this year’s summer arts programme, I felt both honoured and steadied. An exhibition always asks something of an artist. It asks for work, of course, but also for trust. Trust that the private language of making can stand in a public room. Trust that paint, memory, colour, and silence can meet people where they are.

This invitation means even more because the opening date falls on the second anniversary of my sister Caroline’s falling asleep

So this exhibition is not only a collection of paintings. It is a way of saying thank you.

OCAP’s invitation gave the work a place to breathe

I am deeply grateful to OCAP for inviting me into the Summer Arts Programme. That gratitude is not formal or polite. It is personal.

Paintings gather slowly.

OCAP’s invitation gave this body of work a place to stand. It offered a frame, a deadline, and a public setting. More than that, it offered recognition at a moment when the paintings were already carrying more emotional weight than I had expected.

I gathered paintings that were born from research into the bible concerning Gardens of pleasure, of delight and of joy, of the world living outside the 'garden', paradise, future and personal childhood dialogues with the landscape

The invitation from OCAP helped me recognize that these works were ready to leave the private space of making and enter a shared on a wider scale

The opening date falls on Caroline’s second anniversary, and I have carried that knowledge with me through every stage of preparation but in a much deeper place I carried the invisible meaning of life

Anniversaries have their own weather.

When I first realized the exhibition would open on that date, I felt a catch in my chest. Part of me wondered whether it would be too much. Could I stand beside the paintings and speak about beginnings on a day so marked by an ending?

The more I sat with it, the more the date began to feel like a form of grace.

This year's work with last year's response to world drowning prevention . holding a mosiac

Genesis and the whole of God's word became a way to think about life many years ago

My paintings for this exhibition are inspired by my research into Genesis.

The opening lines of Genesis are full of visual power.

Light and dark become contrast.

Water becomes movement.

Earth becomes pigment.

Breath becomes rhythm.

Naming becomes composition, the act of saying, “This belongs here. This shape needs space. This mark must remain visible.”

That idea stayed with me. So many things in life begin hidden.

A painting begins hidden beneath uncertainty. A new season begins hidden under the old one. Grief changes, not because it disappears, but because something living grows around it.

I have come to think of painting as a way of waiting with what is not yet visible.

In this body of work, I wanted the paintings to feel as if they were emerging. Not finished too neatly. Not sealed off. I wanted them to carry the tension between chaos and order, wound and growth, loss and life.

Some canvases began with washes that looked almost like floodwater. Others began with rough, earthy grounds. I scraped back layers. I let accidents stay. I turned canvases around when they felt too settled. I looked for that moment when a painting seems to breathe by itself.

That is the moment I trust most.

Making work without a proper studio has shaped the paintings

I do not have a proper studio, and that fact has shaped the work in ways I can now see clearly.

At first, I saw this as a limitation. It can be frustrating to work without the right conditions. Large canvases are awkward. Wet paintings need somewhere safe to dry. Materials have to be packed away and taken out again. There is no clean division between art and life.

Then I began to wonder whether that lack of separation was part of the work.

These paintings are about life, and life rarely gives us ideal conditions. We create in the middle of interruption. We grieve while making dinner. We remember someone while sweeping the floor. We think about the beginning of the world while washing brushes in a small sink.

That closeness has entered the paintings.

Because I did not have a dedicated studio, I lived beside the work. I passed the canvases in the morning before I was ready to speak. I saw them at night when the room was quiet. I noticed what was too loud, what was false, what needed to be softened. I learned from the paintings in fragments.

Since Caroline’s passing, I have become more aware of silence. Not empty silence, but the kind that gathers around memory.

After loss, ordinary memories become luminous. They are not grand scenes. They are fragments, but they hold weight.

That is how I began to think about the smaller marks in the paintings. A thin line. A scraped edge. A patch of colour half hidden under another. These details may not dominate the canvas, but they carry the painting’s emotional life. The same is true of memory.

The exhibition is about beginnings after endings

I am grateful to OCAP for making space for this work in the summer arts programme. I am grateful for the chance to share paintings that have been made in the thick of real life, with all its limits and interruptions. I am grateful that Caroline’s anniversary will not pass in silence, but in the presence of colour, form, memory, and people gathered together.

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