"I moved to Australia about twelve years ago. To say that my life has gone through a bit of sea-change since then is an understatement. Here I was, a pale Cork boy thrown into a land of wondrous, savage beauty- a land with a complex history and identity, a million miles away from the comforting familiarity of home.

For the first few years, inevitably my heart and mind was tethered to what I had left behind, and my wife and I would travel back frequently to satiate the home sickness. Of course it’s impossible to sustain living in two worlds and the rhythms and sounds of this new country became a soundtrack I eventually learned to dance to, while my birthplace echoed distantly in the background. I don’t know if it’s the country itself or the experiences I’ve had while living here, or both, but I’ve often felt like I’m wandering through a fantastically blurred version of reality. Maybe it’s my age and these experiences happen to most people wherever they are- births, deaths, loss, incredible beauty, violent ugliness, pain, elation etc. But coupled with those things have been a sensory overload of new sights, sounds and smells, as well as people’s stories and their funny quirks.

The strange thing is I feel a bit of a ‘man without a country’. I lost a lot of who I was when I came here, but I found so much too. Perhaps that’s what these paintings are about; the life we inhabit in this strange world is so much more than simply where we’re from. It’s also where we’ve been, what we’ve seen and done, where we’re going and who is there with us through it all."