Just Three Words is a body of work comprising 40 oil paintings on Irish-woven linen. Begun in 2021 with Arts Council support and completed in 2025, it approaches the island of Ireland not as a political territory but as a living form; something to be experienced rather than defined.
The title refers only to itself; a literal phrase that gestures at the limits of language. It echoes the work’s broader concern with how we perceive place, and how words often fall short in capturing landscape, experience, and memory.
Using a conceptual grid, I divided the island into 40 segments. At each point where these divisions met the coast, with one exception, chosen for personal reasons; I travelled to the site, entered the sea, and photographed the land from the water. These acts became quiet rituals, inhabiting a threshold between land and sea.
From these moments I made watercolour sketches, later developed into paintings in Donegal, Iceland, and Dublin. Each work varies in its degree of abstraction; some hold traces of place, others dissolve into gesture, reflecting both the tone of each site and my experience of it.
The linen is woven in Ireland using flax grown in Europe from traditional Irish seed, creating a material continuity with the land.
While maps and mapping underpin the work; as tools of power, history, and distortion, the focus is perceptual. The project resists borders and fixed meaning, instead offering a kind of anti-map: a portrait of Ireland from the outside in, shaped by immersion, movement, and time. Ultimately, Just Three Words is about looking; at land, sea, and our entanglement with the world that holds us.
