Project Description

Lat year in 2025 I embarked on a new portraiture project with residents of St Josephs Hospital, Ennis and users of Clarecastle Day Centre, Clarecastle.

With the help of the great team in St Josephs and Clare Castle I met and drew 18 patients in St Joseph’s and 12 in Clare Castle.

I  would visit the facility, meet my sitter, spend an hour with them drawing and talking, and then finish the portrait was home with the help of some photos taken during my visit. The portraits are in pencil with white chalk.

I am deeply grateful to the portrait subjects for allowing me to work with them and for their patience and bravery. It’s not easy to be scrutinised and examined for an hour. I heard lots of sorties and had great chats and this project would not have been possible without their generosity and willingness to be involved. This project has been  supported throughout by the Age Friendly Programme based at the Rural and Development Department, Clare County Council.

See portraits below. An exhibition of this work opens on 21st September in glór, Ennis.

The portraits below are of the people I drew in St Joseph’s Hospital, Ennis.

 

And the ones below are of the people I met with in Clarecastle Day Centre, Clarecastle.

I wrote about the experience of visiting the two centres and meeting and drawing the people who kindly sat for me. More writings to follow.

 

Cé Mise Show, glór, Ennis: 21st September to 7th October 2026

The show was installed and opened on 21st September and was officially launched on 29th- with representatives from Clare Co Co Age Friendly Team and Ennis Mayor Joe Killeen and the team from Clare castle Day Centre, and the team from St Josephs Hospital and some of the portrait subjects and their families and friends in attendance. It was a great opening and thanks to glór for organising and providing refreshments. I had to give a speech which thankfully went ok and I managed to remember everyone to thank more or less. I was proud of the work.

Moving on now and having had some time to reflect on the process- I want to look for further spaces to show the work, and I wasn’t to write about the process of getting to this point. This work could be called figurative portraiture, it could be called socially engaged process based work, it could be called drawing. It’s a lot of things. It was also crucially self conceived, initiated, self organised, executed and navigated and negotiated (funding, venues) by me. I want to write about the challenges of doing it all yourself and the advantages and responsibilities of being in control of the whole process. After I finish my tax return…