La Bealtaine – My favorite time of year since childhood. A time of promise, brimming with possibility, the light is returning and bring new luck with it. Our days are lengthening and stretching to those long evenings where we can make the most of things. The fields and hedgerows are wakening up from their quiet winter slumber and life is blossoming.
Bealtaine is my time to thrive. My hands feel the cool pull of the soil as I get busy planting. My senses are reawakened. I hear the call of the buzzard, the return of the cuckoo, the honeybee in search of their first dandelion, the lambs on the hills. My eyes trace the colours evolving as the Blaeberry blossoms, the Blackthorn erupts veiling the lonans in bridal white blossom. The whins are ablaze in a golden crown.
So Bealtaine for me seemed the most natural time to launch my new collection of wool paintings. Made over a year of uncertaintity, of stops and starts, during the worry and hesitance that ensued amid a global pandemic; it was creativity and an acute gratitude of belonging to this place and these people that nurtured me through. They are all centred around Slieve Gullion and her foothills where poets tred and still do. They are all inspired by that special feeling that we are a place apart…
