Strange Beasts - Lavit Gallery - Cork - 2020

Horse and Rider III - Kilkenny Limestone - 40 x 39 x 22 cm

My first encounter with ‘Horse’ was when I was very young and when visiting the RDS Summer Horse Show. I had wandered off around the stables where I came across a startled and very excited tanned monstrosity which clopped about with abandon. I wasn’t any taller, it seemed at the time, than its knee. Whom I was with, or had I a hand to hold, isn’t part of the memory just pure awe at its size, power and beauty.  

That was the start of my infection. That immensity and intensity I experienced was something, since then, I haven’t encountered.

What has evolved in the years since then has been manifested through exploring meaning, through connectedness to and isolation from, through a take by the rubber bandits and having a ‘horse outside’ as distinct from a Subaru or a Honda Civic and what that means, through a historical interest in how human civilisation evolved to the modern era over an interwoven existence spanning 6 millennia with Horse and what that has meant and why it happened at all; what is it, about humankind, that directed it so and not least that I got taller and with it a changing viewpoint that allowed more imported empathy and connectedness to a wider world and to self.   Horse was there as a subject and as a prop. It allowed me also to work with the figure where the horse below could disrupt the gravity for the figure above, balance etc.