Dwell 2021: Paintings

​The paintings began as attempts to reconstruct the places I remembered, particularly our family home at Glenburn in Tornaveen. I used old maps, floor plans, photographs and whatever fragments of memory I could summon up, filling in the considerable gaps with guesswork and invention. The buildings were often shown as cutaways, with walls removed and rooms exposed, allowing me to move around inside them and revisit events, people and feelings associated with each place. Of course, the more I painted, the less certain I became about what was real and what I had invented. Each painting seemed to create a new version of the memory, which was perhaps the point.