Mending Fences

This series of prints is titled Mending Fences; the collection draws on my experience of living and working in a rural community during the pandemic. The work was conceived through a collection of found objects, drawings and photographs gathered while hill walking in my native north Louth. The Mending Fences series explores line and shape and experiments with scale and perspective. While the earlier works in the series veer towards representational, later works become more abstract in nature and attempt to challenge the viewer’s notion of landscape. This working from representational to abstract is how I work in the studio, I take the objects and images collected on an experimental journey using a variety of printing processes. The title Mending fences not only refers to the seasonal chores of hill farmers in the area, it also refers to the renewed connections I made with neighbours on the mountain during the pandemic. Traces of these rekindled friendships and heart-warming conversations are present in each of the works.

In May ‘22 I exhibited this series of prints outdoors, I hung twenty-three works on sheep wire fencing along a well-known path on Anaverna Mountain in my native North Louth. For one-day only local sheep farmers and neighbours where invited to gather around the work, the familiar location and subject matter fostered lots of story telling and a real sense of community and belonging.