All Through the Dark Times

Water soluble graphite, watercolour and liquid metal paint on gessoed board (2022) 

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17.5 x 12 cm

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£110

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"Memories of growing up during the most turbulent years of the ‘Troubles’ are intrinsic in my work. My landscapes attempt to process the scars of these painful histories alongside the wider historical narrative of loss and trauma in the Irish experience. Growing up on a

housing estate, the works reimagine the view from my childhood bedroom window which overlooked a wooded area untouched by development. These unpopulated spaces are filled with a melancholic sense of loss and absence, while recurring motifs of boundaries

and perimeters suggest an undercurrent of threat and physiological darkness which pervaded my formative years. Drawing on my relocation to England in 1992, the works also deal with feelings of difference and dislocation and attempt to reconcile ideas of

place and home, in terms of longing and belonging. The landscapes navigate my own personal memories, but also question how we collectively remember and commemorate

the past."

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Heather McAteer

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