‘A Prospect of Limerick’, drypoint, watercolour, chine collé, 195 x 605 cms, 1998
For the last twenty years I have been exploring the concept of ‘Mapping’. Around that time I moved back to live in Limerick city and began to draw and make prints of my environment. Prompted by my new surroundings, I started to include in the work, not only topographic information but also personal experiences, observations and memories (I was born and grew up in Limerick), references to historical events (I studied history including the late C17 period when the action in Limerick was for a short time centre stage in Europe), records of temporal activity - routes travelled e.g. and so on; in other words the work became less ‘landscape’ and more ‘map’.
‘These are rich drawings, full of excitement and surprises, produced by someone who is engrossed in his subject-matter and who explores it with a visual passion and wit. He offers you his maps, not to find your way by, but to get thoroughly and enjoyably lost in.’
Jim Savage, ‘A prospect of the artist’, The Usurpers Habit: Drypoints by David Lilburn’, catalogue, published by Galway Arts centre, 1998