30/05/2026
I’ve been thinking about these two paintings lately, there’re sisters, or brothers…definitely siblings, though raised separately! Yellow, gray, pink, blue and silver sit well together for me and they’re colours that come up again and again in my work.
I didn’t know they were siblings, I kind of discovered that fact by mistake, almost like an overheard conversation, like a snippet you hear when walking past friends sitting chatting on a park bench, or in the isle in the supermarket…just enough to know exactly what they were talking about, enough to make you smile to yourself…that’s how I found out.
They both came from the following passage I read during the research phase of this work..I’d forgotten it until I found out they were siblings.
- As more and more people were admitted to the workhouses, and as a result, with them came many contagious diseases.
“What was designed for good purposes becomes active evil and the relief is not relief but a delusion, fatal to the recipitians” The workhouses became huge hospitals and like the clergy and doctors in the outside world, those who ministered to the inmates soon contracted diseases and died.
The two main sickness were Typhus and “Relapsing fever” or as it is referred to by the Irish “An Fiabhrais Bui.”
To improve the conditions and stop the spread of diseases the architect to the Commissioners demanded that ventilation should be improved. Doors were to be pierced with circular holes cleanly formed, top and bottom. Ventilators were to be widely installed and panes of glass in windows were to be replaced by pierced zinc “which would occasion a circulation of air and give very little admission to driving rain.
Where zinc could not be conveniently procured the old tin cans of the poorhouses could be beaten flat and punched with holes one-tenth of an inch in diameter and ½ inch apart.
Clúdaigh an fiabhras buí an talamh / the yellow fever covered the ground
Oil paint and oil bar on Belgian linen
51.5 x 41 x 2 cm
2025
Báistí Since / Zinc Rain
Oil paint and oil bar on Belgian linen
51.5 x 41 x 2 cm
2025
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