In 1996 I visited Mexico for the first time. Having been born and grown up in Ireland, Mexico was an amazingly exotic and alien place, totally different to Ireland, and the art, culture, landscape and people were to have a huge impact on my work. After the initial shock to the system of being immersed in a foreign culture I began to see parallels in Mexican art and culture to Irish Celtic culture; the mixture of Catholicism and pagan indigenous cultures, the sense of a society coming to terms with it’s unique character and history after centuries of colonial and religious domination and particularly the enduring strength of folk art and literary mythology.
Having visited Frida Khalo’s house in Mexico City, I was struck as much by her collection of folk art as her own work. There were hundreds of Retablos (postcard-sized paintings portraying miracles and saintly interventions in everyday life) on the walls. These tiny, narrative paintings, painted in a direct, unselfconscious style, struck a powerful chord in me in terms of their use of religious and mythological imagery. The images were painted in a manner which suggested they were revealed to the artist in a flash and fixed on the surface directly. This is what I have tried to do in my own work; to convey a sense of immediacy of revelation but in a manner which is more reflective.
My work for the last couple of years has been concerned with a loss of religious faith. Having left Ireland, a country stepped in religious tradition, mythology and superstition (often all at the same time!) I have, since moving to the US, become interested in the enduring power of religious belief and how art through the centuries has facilitated and reinforced belief. In my paintings I try to explore ideas of dogma, superstition and fundamentalism in religion and politics using images from the past juxtaposed with contemporary settings. For me they represent the constant intrusion of the past into our lives.