Blackwater
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Solo Exhibition: Blackwater
Blackwater: Myths, Memory, and the Passage of Time
Blackwater is an inquiry into the intersection of myth, memory, and place, re-examining personal narratives formed in childhood through the lens of adult reflection. The series seeks to excavate early perceptions—long submerged within the sedimented layers of memory—and to reanimate the formative myths that continue to shape identity. Each painting operates as a mnemonic device, tethered to a distinct time, belief system, or emotional terrain. Central to this exploration is the River Blackwater, both as a literal landmark of my early life and as a symbolic conduit for memory’s dual tendencies toward permanence and transformation.
The work foregrounds the material and metaphorical properties of the riverbed—its murk, sediment, and unseen currents—as a means of investigating water’s capacity to hold and transmit memory and emotion. Figures of the girl, the woman, the land, and the past are interwoven through experimental techniques that emulate the river’s fluidity and unpredictability. By relinquishing control over the flow of pigment, allowing watercolour to pool, merge, and granulate organically, the paintings echo the mutable dynamics of recollection and the elusive nature of temporal experience.
The exhibition engages with broader themes of impermanence, tranquility, and ecological interconnectedness, drawing aesthetic and philosophical inspiration from the dark, tannin-rich waters of the River Blackwater. Through stratified granulation, organic pigment movement, and translucent layering, Blackwater offers a contemplative space wherein visitors are invited to encounter both the natural world and their interior landscapes.
The integration of a short film further extends the sensory dimensions of the exhibition, fostering an embodied, multisensory mode of engagement. The project resonates with the principles of wabi-sabi—the appreciation of transience and imperfection—and shodō, the meditative practice of Japanese calligraphy, reinforcing its commitment to mindfulness, presence, and the quiet, transformative power of memory.
Sketchbooks: Art Notes and Fragments of Flow
Riverwalk constitutes an ongoing series of sketchbooks documenting direct, embodied encounters with the River Blackwater and its surrounding landscapes. These sketchbooks function as fieldwork: sites of observation, reflection, and improvisation, capturing the river’s shifting moods and material realities in situ.
Through loose studies, fragmentary drawings, and written notations, Riverwalk explores the immediacy of place and the artist’s evolving relationship to it over time. The project foregrounds walking as both a physical journey and a method of attunement—slowing down, witnessing, and becoming porous to the environment.
In dialogue with the Blackwater paintings, Riverwalk provides an intimate, processional counterpoint: a lived archive of textures, atmospheres, and fleeting impressions that informs and enriches the larger body of work. Together, the two series articulate a meditation on impermanence, memory, and the river’s ceaseless conversation with the land.
"Planting the flow" Medium: Watercolour on Paper Dimensions :380x260mm “To learn one thing, you must let go of another. The river does not cling to its source.” — John O’Donohue £450.00
"Unbridled Current" Medium: Watercolour on Paper Dimensions :380x260mm “There is no end to the wind, no end to the sea.” — Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
"Forgotten Journey" Medium: Watercolour on Paper Dimensions :380x260mm “The past beats inside me like a second heart.” — John Banville
"The Watched Water" Medium: Watercolour on Paper Dimensions:380x260mm “In the shadows of the Blackwater River”
“ In the shadow of the BlackWater River” Medium: Watercolour on Paper. Dimensions:180x125mm “The shadows of our ancestors lean over us, whispering through reeds.” — From Boglands by Seamus Heaney
” Stillness is the Rivers Edge” >Medium: Watercolour on Paper. Dimensions:380x260mm “There is a silence beneath all things that speaks.” — John Moriarty
" The River's Wrath" Medium: Watercolour on Paper Dimensions :380x260mm “All nature is at war, and the rage of the river is an old fury.” — Medbh McGuckian
"Rooted Remains" Medium: Watercolour on Paper Dimensions: 340x740mm “We carry the bones of the past in the roots of our lives.” — Anne Enright
"Silent Sentinels" Medium: Watercolour on Paper Dimensions: 340x740mm “The trees, still as stone, remember what we forget.” — Doireann Ní Ghríofa
" Obsidian Shoreline" Medium: Watercolour on Paper Dimensions: 340x740mm “Darkness was a mirror, and the river the edge of knowing.” — Eavan Boland
"Waiting Spring" Medium: Watercolour on Paper Dimensions:380x260mm “Even in the winter of the soul, something prepares to bloom.” — Paula Meehan
"Riverbone" Dimensions 120x170mm “The land remembers what the body forgets.” — Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
“Byre in stillness” >Medium: Watercolour on Paper. Dimensions:180x125mm “Stillness is where the spirit dwells.” — John O’Donohue
"Midnight Current" Dimensions 180x125mm “The river at night tells the truth we hide in daylight.” — Inspired by Patrick Kavanagh
"The River's strange whisper" Dimensions:380x260mm “All rivers carry stories — some we understand, others whisper through the dark.” — Original, inspired by Irish oral tradition
"Shifting Light" Dimensions 380x260mm “The light changes, and with it, what we see becomes what we feel.” — Michael Longley
"The Boat" Dimensions 380x260mm “I was a voice. I was a vessel. I was a boat adrift on the poem.” — Eavan Boland, “Anna Liffey”
"The unseen beneath the trees" Dimensions:380x260mm “I can hear the grass growing.” — My great-grand Auntie Mary
"Interrupted silence" Dimensions: 380x260mm “Listen for the corncrakes building nests in the long grass by the river’s edge.” — My mother