Irish Heritage Collection

This body of work, entitled Somewhere Between Two Extremes, is part of an ongoing reflection on memory and movement - on what it means to leave and to return. It draws on the wider story of 20th century migration from Irish rural cottages and fields into towns, cities and often, far beyond. Using old photographs, fragments of text, and layered natural imagery, I explore how people carried their sense of home and identity into unfamiliar places, and how the landscapes they left behind still hold traces of their absence.

My own story sits within that wider journey. I left Fermanagh in the 1980s, moving to London in search of work and a better quality of life. It was a time of change and discovery - exciting, challenging, and sometimes lonely. London opened my eyes to new ways of seeing and living, but it also deepened my connection to the quiet fields and rhythms I had grown up with. In 1997, I came home to Fermanagh to raise my daughter, bringing with me all the layers of that experience - the mix of belonging and displacement, and of being shaped by two very different worlds.

One inspiration for the series was my relationship with my grandfather Harry, who was a blacksmith. The many hours I spent watching him work left a deep impression on me. His forge was a source of comfort and security for my young self, as well as being a place of magical transformation, where both matter and imagination were shaped. Several of the paintings in this series draw directly from Harry’s world: the forge, his tools, and his craft - which, as a teenage apprentice, he had to leave the family farm to learn. Before I left Ireland for London my grandfather had retired and, by the time I returned, he had passed away, and the forge was gone.

The past and present, the physical and the emotional, the abstract and the real, balance somewhere between two extremes. It is in that space that my work lies, in that in-between place where life really happens; where stories, like mine and my grandfather’s, continue to unfold.