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Submerged

My Submerged series is a very personal collection of work.  Having worked as an artist for over 20 years through conceptual photography, performance, writing and video, I had an overwhelming urge to paint, I can only describe this urge as a physical need which could not be ignored. When my children were small with a desire to be with them everyday, I resigned from my lecturing position in IADT and set up an art school for children in the kitchen of our home in Wicklow Town.  Over a period of of years, this school grew and developed into a business, a business to which I could take my children everyday, initially as students and eventually as helpers!  The urge to paint myself grew through teaching children to paint.  I was so inspired by these little people and all their creative ideas and their instinctive creative intuition.  It was always my aim to nature this intuition in the children and try and keep their self-conscious selves at bay, I wanted them to paint how they wanted to paint and not let a teacher dictate to them otherwise.

The symbiotic relationship I had with my students inspired me to eventually start painting myself, and I don’t mean just occasionally painting a landscape, what I needed to do was drop everything and delve into the physical energy of painting, indulge the urge to paint big canvases and explore the process of intuition which I had inspired to me by the children I taught. The Submerged series is a direct result of this exploration process into which I threw myself.  I allowed this physical energy to paint, that had built up inside me, to explode and find itself on the canvas.  The process of exploring paint, materials and tools which were at this scale new to me was exhilarating, exhausting, sometimes despairing but mostly rewarding 

For me the series is an accumulation of this exploration process  Abstract painting is an amazing medium, I love the way people see what they see and everyone sees something different in a painting.  I believe an abstract painting should alway entice the viewer to be intrigued and see something different every time they look at it and through my layering process in the submerged series, I think (hope) I have captured this intrigue.