These paintings relate to much more specific events in Northern Ireland's recent history. Like a lot of people I had been appalled by the events of that summer which had seen the murder of the Quinn brothers in the run up to the Drumcree dispute and the Omagh bombing. I worked from images that had appeared in the local press and in particular those images that had been reproduced as stills from a home video taken the day of the bombing. I was interested in working against the ephemeral nature of the media imagery and was trying to put something down in paint to provide another way of remembering. The last painting in the series was based on a photograph of Donna Keyes who suffered horrific facial injuries in the blast. |
