Description of the work
Title: Tectonic
Size: 130cm h x 120cm w
Medium: mixed media including peat, hessian, acrylic paint on board.
This piece is dedicated to all women who took part in war especially on the island of Ireland. Often women would risk their lives by delivering messages in many different ways to combatants during War of Independence, sometime cycling to meet rebels working in the bogs, carrying messages hidden in the spouts of billycans or their garments.
Materials in this painting are suggestive of sacks used for gathering turf in the bogs with motifs relating to the topography and random road layouts around townlands used as alternative routes to deliver the messages.
The material is deliberately manipulated and a joined seam on the left of the composition evokes the clandestine underground activity and segregation within periods of war. Peat and bullets inserted under the border along with red paint are burned onto the surface of the painting to conjure the peril associated with such undertakings. The sacking is incidentally stamped with the number ‘1795’, by chance coinciding with the run-up to the United Irishmen rising and the foundation of the Orange Order. Ultimately, however, the work represents a more personal tribute to the strength and courage of the artist’s grandmother and other Irish women who rose to the challenge of extraordinary times during wars.