Lights of the city shrouded by mists of winter

Patricia Burns’ paintings of her daily route home evoke the cold, gloomy beauty of Cork’s suburban sprawl,says Tina O’Sullivan

THE Glen in Cork is a stark contrast to the Dublin suburb that Patricia Burns grew up in. But it is on her daily route to work and is the subject of her exhibition Hinterland: The Glen Paintings, on show in Triskel Christchurch.

Burns graduated in painting from Dublin Institute of Technology in 1986 but didn’t work as an artist for ten years. A move to Cork saw Burns join the Backwater Studios before undertaking a H Dip in the Crawford College of Art and Design.

“I have family connections in Cork,” says Burns, “I bought my grand-aunt’s house in Blackpool, which is how I ended up living in Cork, forced out of Dublin by the price of property. My mother and father are both from Cork; we used to come down here all the time when we were kids. I’m from a very ordinary suburb in Dublin, so it seemed magical to us, all the hills.”

The Glen Paintings are a continuation of the interests Burns had explored for a few years. “I had an exhibition in the RHA’s Ashford Gallery in 2007,” she says. “It was called Redemption Road and it was based on the north side of Cork city. I followed that up with a show in the Vanguard, which was called North Side and again was focusing on different parts of the city. Through making that work, I had made some images of the Glen and decided I wanted to make a series of paintings concentrating solely on that area.”

There are 12 paintings in the exhibition, sharing a glistening palette of greys, which draw on the mists of the city. The figurative works depict homes in the Glen caught at dusk, their windows like subdued beacons of light. Overlaid paintings and drawings harmonise on the large canvases.

“The work’s origins are memory,” says Burns. “Reinforced by photographs, line drawings, a lot of walking, a lot of physical moving back and forth. Pulling up in the car, making small line drawings of the houses. There’s the idea of home, to see the outside of somebody else’s home. To be looking at home is kind of mysterious — other people’s homes.

“The houses would be lit up when you’d be coming home in the evening time. Fires being lit and kids coming home from school. All that is very intriguing to me.”

The sparse lines in the structural drawings lend a ghostly feel, evoking architectural drawings. These are painted out and reintroduced, the selection leaving untold layers of housing hidden in the depths of the painting.

Trees are the other objects in the work — they pierce the fogs, their bare winter branches holding out against the elements.

“The paintings start with one idea, and then what happens is I build them up and I often remove things. Sometimes I remove things and they’re still visible and sometimes they’re not. There are different ideas working under the surface. Maybe there’s more buildings, more structures, and then I take them out, always stepping back and making them more beautiful. Always trying to have some kind of restraint in them,” she says.

While the work is heavy in its depiction of wintry evenings, there is a scaled-back element of bright colour that appears sporadically in the paintings. “The little flashes,” says Burns. “That’s usually where you get to a stage where you think, ‘I have to do something very radical here’.”

Burns teaches and has a studio in east Cork, and her daily pilgrimage from Blackpool turned into research for the development of these paintings. “This work is two years in the making. The paintings were started in a residency in Ballinglen. I had done about two months of research and then I had the six large canvases delivered up to north Mayo, where I was working. They were begun up there and then brought back down to east Cork. There is two years from start to finish in the work. I go through the Glen every day, so when I was running out of material all I had to do was go back that way and if I had run out of energy it came back,” Burns says.

The light is an overwhelming feature in these paintings, the glare of twilight fogs rolling in haze over little patches of electric warmth in the buildings. Triskel Christchurch is an apt exhibition space for them, as the daily route of the sun transforms its interior as the day slips away. Burns encourages the viewer to catch her work in the morning light.

* Hinterland: The Glen Paintings runs at Triskel Christchurch until January 23.