Mags Duffy: The Faraway Nearby

I grew up in an estate on the banks of a river that flows through the town. This waterway and its hinterland have been a constant in my life where the landscapes of land and water blur and where places along its course tell a story.

 

I have always been drawn to myth, folklore, and storytelling. The river, itself, became a portal into my imagination; realms of monsters, ghosts, dangers, treasure, and magic all lived out in the endless flow of water.

 

Pollagh na gCapaill is a place; a sinkhole near the edge of this river. Legend has it that it is bottomless, and that people and animals have disappeared into it. A water horse or Púca is said to emerge from this marshy pool to graze. This creature then vanishes beneath the water if any human tries to approach it. It was also told that at the end of time a flood will emerge from its depths to engulf the whole town.

 

The Faraway Nearby is a collection of the remembered geographies and stories of my

childhood. The title comes from Rebecca Solnit's book of the same name, in which she writes about how a distorted memory or place can become something else entirely in the retelling, not less true, just differently true. This uncertainty of what is real and what is imagined is what I explore in these paintings along with the way time, past, present, and future, can blend together to tell an entirely unique narrative.

 

Each painting holds a fragment of a story, threaded together by the river as it flows

through the town towards the sea. This is a world where gold sparkled in the riverbed, where monkeys lived on Bamboo Island, and where the Red Bridge arched away to other lands. It was also a world of rats and bats and escaped lions glimpsed at the edges, of homemade rafts racing toward the waterfall; a place with no fences to shrink the imagination.

 

I have used the slow process of painting as a method of enquiry, building up layers of

paint and wax, then excavating earlier histories through scratching, scraping, and sanding. By working on several paintings at the same time, I can allow narratives and emotions to move between them.

 

Making this work has allowed me to return to the physical places where my heart and

mind were first opened to the possibility of creativity and understanding. These watery landscapes, like Pollagh na gCapaill, are repositories of a history as well as a snapshot of the present and a glimpse of the future all held in the same moment, the way the sinkhole will hold everything that disappears into it until the day it finally returns through the telling of its stories.