Thoroughbred’s Travels

Acrylic & collage on wood
50 cm x 40 cm

This is a fairly straightforward Gulliver’s Travels / Jonathan Swift take on the strangeness of a monumental shift in scale. I was captivated by the enormous but never-built ‘White Horse at Ebbsfleet’ proposed sculpture of a giant horse by Mark Wallinger. It was like a Ray Harryhausen stop-motion nightmare, and I could almost see it move like his Cyclops, or his dinosaurs.

It’s not a Connemara pony as people assume, because I live and work in the west of Ireland. I don’t directly use my surroundings in my work, I let my subconscious take the wheel for that.

So I placed it in the distance, looming over a strange red earth foreshore where a ceramic Chinese horseman navigates through undergrowth studded with insects and scrimshaw. Most of the plants are painted and have added details sourced from vintage Russian textiles and eerie Dutch still-life ephemera.

This is a painting and collage on wood panel and presented behind AR99 ArtGlass