Landscape Bantry 1997

For me the art of landscape is about our symbolic relationship to nature, it is about the meaning and our feelings towards the soil of our beginning. Perhaps when Melaine Klein talks about an infant's enormous wish to explore, to get to know the mother's body, what she calls the epistemophilic instinct, perhaps it is that which underlies the emotional impact of landscape and our complex relationship to mother nature. The scenic and the picturesque might then function as aesthetic equivalents of that inner sense of creaturely existence.

These works are an exploration of the idea of land as the maternal body, the land as flesh. This land can also be seen as a womb, as life at its most absolute: protective, raw and sublime. Our adult relationship to the land might echo that umbilical relationship to the mother body and recall a sense of intimacy that was lost.