Plovarius, 1994, acrylic (?) on canvasboard, 20.32 x 24.6 cm., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

This work belongs to a series of paintings which I did in my room in Ballsbridge, Dublin, as a student of aesthetics in the philosophy department at Trinity College in the late ‘nineties. The title Pluvarius is a made-up word intended to evoke the condition of raining, based on a vulgar Latin word for rain. Without intending to represent anything, I painted the work by memory, vividly recalling a chilly Dublin rain, but a rain specifically experienced in the vicinity of the bust of the Irish revolutionary Countess Markievicz, in the middle of St Stephen’s Green. I did not think of the vertical non-objective form as an observing self (not to mention the plinth of the bust?); but even simply remembering this painting always puts me in mind of its provocations.