14.12.2022 — 15.1.2023

The exhibition will consist of a new series of paintings and installation.

The title is an excerpt from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2006), it continues “these fragments mattered to me, I believed in them”. Didion describes about how as a child she thought a lot about meaningless, she describes finding meaning in geology; “the constant changing of the earth; the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away”.

I find her words deeply profound, and they give form to the sentiment in the new series of works. The paintings take on a semi-abstract nature, influenced partly by time spent in the West of Ireland, by the imprint of island life in the Atlantic, the vastness of the sea, the pure night darkness, the cracks of the limestone slabs, the sensations of the cliff edges, the glistening gooey elements of seaweed, and various creatures fastened to the rocks, the feeling of the cosmos. I am experimenting with different organic matter and materials in the painting process to create textures and tactility such as seaweed pulp.