My studio is in Aghincurk, rural Armagh in the area my grandmother was brought up by her aunts and uncle 100 years ago. My family don’t farm anymore so I am an outsider observing the agricultural landscape. My painting compositions often centre around practical structures such as fencing materials or electricity pylons with a backdrop of green fields, now automatically understood as nature. Humans are represented indirectly by the materials and constructs we utilise to shape the earth as the dominant species.

Future hopes have to expand on historical knowledge, I see painting as a metaphysical process, a window into the landscape’s journey from ancient forest and bog toward hyper production and industrial farming.

My preferred language is painting but I also like words, my recent exhibition, Sheughs & Ditches references a remnant of language still commonly used here. The old word pronounced Shuck is recorded in three different languages, with the English spelling sheugh, Scots spelling sheuch and Irish spelling seoch. It is a drainage trench dug along the lower edge of a field to gather excess water, leaving the ground dry enough to grow grass for livestock. The word ditch in Hiberno-English describes the raised bank running parallel to the trench.

There is also a phrase ‘across the sheugh,’ (the North Channel between Scotland and Ireland). Land and Sea borders are topical here since the UK left the EU but really all of Northern Ireland is a border buffering multiple states of mind, a liminal place which is neither here nor there and yet both here and there.

Locality is a key influence but my paintings like all art relate to wider environmental and psychological forces. As the dregs of division fizzle away here, connected thinking toward a balance between nature and human grows. I am an optimist.