an exhibition of new artwork by

Michael Flaherty

Dingle & Paris 2008

There is a unique quality to the landscape where Michael Flaherty grew up and still lives. A visitor might think I refer simply to the special appeal of the Dingle Peninsula, but the whole peninsula is too large when observed up close, from a local perspective; we need a more intimate space as our own, and within its relatively small expanse, the Dingle peninsula boasts many quite different environments. Most parts of the peninsula share the characteristic of having land that lies between the mountains and the sea, but no other area possesses the unique character of the area below Mount Brandon to its east, where the relationship between mountain and sea is at its most intense.

Mount Brandon stands at what was for many centuries the outer edge of the known world. Formed two hundred million years ago, it is one hundred and seventy million years older than the Himalayas. The millennia of erosion have given its western slopes a gently rounded shape, made softer by the covering of blanket bog; but on the northern side steep cliffs present a high, craggy rampart to the sea, and the eastern face of the mountain falls abruptly to large corries.

The summit, – at a height of 3127 feet (953 metres) – offers on a clear day views as far as the Aran Islands to the north, Dursey Head to the south; and in between, to the east, the cliffs of County Clare, the Shannon estuary, the plains of north Kerry, the mountain ranges (prominent amongst them Carrauntuohill), Dingle Bay and the Iveragh Peninsula. To the west lies the vast expanse of the Atlantic, seeming to bear as a burden the ever-changing weather, its waters betraying advancing storms.

No artist engages with the landscape’s mutability quite as Michael Flaherty does, and it seems to me that he draws many senses into play from the landscape, and evokes many emotions, including a sense of human mutability. For here the light changes frequently and radically. Few if any places are as dark and threatening as the eastern side ofMount Brandon when thunder clouds advance in a deep dark wall above the darker rock wall of themountain itself. Yet nowhere bursts into sunlit splendour like the montbretia-laden ditches below fuchsia hedges beside the generous sweeps of strands such as Fermoyle. The landscape here possesses a variety of intensities – of form, colour, mood, light – and to these characteristics of the natural, physical world, the artist brings his own forms of intensity – not so much a representation or a description as a parallel visual language.

Steve MacDonagh, Brandon Books - Mount Eagle Publishing, Dingle, Co. Kerry
www.brandonbooks.com

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