My involvement with printmaking started forty years ago with a summer course in lithography in Urbino, and has over the years deepened and broadened to the extent, that it is now probably true to say, that my involvement with printmaking is essential in defining not only what I hope to achieve as an artist but how I define myself as a person.
My work often engages with the intaglio technique of drypoint or monoprinting. Both these techniques contain the ‘remove’ and ‘process’ which form an essential ingredient of printmaking while offering huge scope for graphic or painterly means of expression.
These drawings are drawn in small pocket-sized hardback sketchbooks. Their pages recount, among other subjects, visits to concerts and plays, boat trips, keeping company with friends (and animals) as well as journeys made through urban, mountain and coastal environments. Making them is a way of connecting with the event; a way of constructing and preserving memory..
The series of landscapes shown here are part of an occasional on-going series.
Each print is ‘constructed’ in the studio, informed by sketchbook drawings, memories and other material and information collected on visits to the ‘landscape’ in question. ‘For the Record’ and ‘One of the Milestones of Earth’s Residence’ are about Aillihies in West Cork. The other landscapes are in Co.Kerry.
For the last twenty years I have been exploring the concept of ‘Mapping’. 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’.
“..Ultimately it is about identity; who we are, where we are, not a formal matter”
David Hockney
“You can gain visions of yourself in all sorts of ways – in a mirror, in photos, or movies, on tape, through the description of others, by getting psychoanalysed and so on, but you cannot quite break out of your skin and be outside of yourself. (modern occult movements, pop psychology fads etc. not withstanding)”
Douglas R. Hofstadter
