Land-shape Dreaming (fine art print)

I became so attached to this painting that I later used Land-shape Dreaming as the title of a solo exhibition in Derry~Londonderry. The words below were written around that exhibition. The coves in the painting are places I explored as a child on the Isle of Doagh, sometimes up and running with the sun at five in the morning.

'We are all connected to the land. Growing up between the Inishowen Peninsula, Co. Donegal, and around the border of Derry has had a huge impact on who I am as a person, as an artist, and on how I live.'

Donegal artist Sinéad Smyth created Land-shape Dreaming as a homage to the landscape that formed her.

'I spent many years away from Donegal, calling other places home.

I know what it is to try to build a life for your family in a country where you do not speak the language.

One January morning, waiting for a tram from Heidelberg to Mannheim, a memory of Inishowen arrived with such force that I could almost feel the coast again.

I was standing beside a busy tramline in the middle of a German city, but in my mind I could see Malin Head.

I could almost smell the Atlantic and hear waves hitting the rocks. I knew then that I needed to go home.'

What does it mean to remember land through shape, colour and form? A landscape can stay alive in memory and become part of the way we understand ourselves.

There are places around this peninsula I return to again and again, sometimes at particular times of year. They are not famous places: a bend in a stream, a space under certain trees, coves reached only when the tide is right, grassy cliff faces I climbed with bare hands. I gathered ivy there, built huts and dams, cried, laughed, and spent long stretches alone. My connection to them is deeply personal.

People speak about owning land, but I often think the truer relationship is the other way round: we belong to it.

The ground is indifferent to ownership. It simply endures.

Some places create an immediate sense of recognition, even when you have never been there before. Perhaps that is why so many creative people describe Inishowen as a kind of soul home and keep returning to it.

There are places where I can feel several versions of myself at once - child, adult, artist, daughter - all standing on the same ground. Time seems to fold in on itself there. That feeling of being held by a place, rather than possessing it, sits at the heart of this work.

Land-shape Dreaming came from trying to paint that connection. I wrote the following poem for the exhibition. I do not call myself a poet, but the words belong beside the paintings.

Remembering the ground that raised me

Feeling damp grass beneath bare feet

and the smell of the earth

by that riverbank.

Fishing for trout

in those shaded brown waters

and cooking on driftwood fires.

Crouched beneath the fairy thorn,

In moonlit fields behind that house.

Scouring sandy and pebbled shores,

along the Swilly and Foyle

where wind sweeps across my face,

salt air reminds me of life and living,

carrying loved ones in memory.

Devouring potatoes boiled in sea water,

all salt crystals and dripping butter.

Swimming at the Isle, rain pelting your skin

and laughing with storm clouds.

Land-shape Dreaming grew from remembered experiences between the Inishowen landscape and myself as a child, revisited later through painting.

The works come from a life spent paying attention to the land - not only how it looks, but how it is felt and remembered.

Mark-making became a way of moving between memory and the physical act of painting.