Friday 13th June 2025
Location: An Chead Tine Art Gallery, Mezzanine Flooe, Dunnes Stores
📍 An Chéad Tíne Art Gallery
Curated by Mary Doyle Burke
Opening speech by Laurence O Toole,
⏰ opens 7pm Friday 30th May, all invited, runs until June 25th.

Artist Statement:
In January 2024, I moved into a small cottage in the hills — a quiet, tree-ringed place where the sky feels vast and near, and birdsong fills the air. It was the first time in a long time that I found myself truly alone. And for someone who has always felt alone, the reality of solitude was something altogether different. It wasn’t empty — it was full of old ghosts, demons, and unwelcome memories that had waited patiently for stillness. Walking the land with my dog, thoughts I had long buried began to surface. What followed was a kind of emotional purging — of bile, grief, tears, of things I had hidden from. It’s a process still unfolding. But with each walk, I began to sense the scale of the world around me and how small I am in it.

This realisation was strangely comforting, and it freed me from the pressure to make a perfect sense of things. As I near a landmark birthday, I’m more aware than ever that I’m possibly more than halfway through my life. The idea of spending the time I have left making art fills me with fear, terror, and joy in equal measure.

Music has always moved me deeply, especially songs that soar and crash and pull at the heart. I’ve long envied how effortlessly music captures emotion. One song, Duet for Ghosts, by Ed Harcourt, stayed with me — not just for its sound, but its title. I never felt I was duetting with my ghosts, though, for most of my life, it’s felt more like a series of duels.

There’s a stream I pass every day on my walks. I often stop to perch on a rock in the water and just sit. Up here, on that rock, I’ve slowed down. I’ve begun to accept that I’m not the centre of the universe — just another part of it. That understanding, in its way, has been liberating. Life is precious. We are all lucky to be here, even with our wounds, even in our uncertainty. These paintings come from that year — from that stream, that cottage, that reckoning…
Organisers Website

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