My Father's Work Shed

Book excerpt: This is a collection of poems and paintings written and painted over the course of the past eleven years. The book deals with loss, and the poems and paintings contribute a diffuse sense of the memories, places, and nostalgias that accompany it. The connection to Ireland and my childhood there is heightened by geographic distance and the recent passing of my parents. Though the subject matter is deeply personal, I engage with contemporary art practice. I am concerned with aspects of language and the visual; how they can coexist yet never fully resolve. The paintings explore the legacy of modernist abstraction as much as they deal with personal content. Though I begin with childhood memories I develop a concurrent relationship with light, perception, material, and color; the ever -shifting background of Irish skies informing my complex relationship with twenty-first-century America.