Artist’s talk: Thursday 3 December 2015, 1pm. All welcome. No booking required.

Taylor Galleries is delighted to present Thin Places, Pat Harris’ eleventh solo exhibition with the gallery.

“The early Celts believed in ‘thin places’ – geographical locations scattered throughout Ireland where a person experiences only a very thin divide between past, present, and future times, places where a person is somehow able, possibly only for a moment, to encounter a more ancient reality within present time or places where only in a glance we are somehow transported into the future.”

– Edward Sellner, ‘Wisdom of the Celtic Saints’

In this new body of work Pat Harris has concerned himself with the landscape of North Mayo and more particularly with the area around Stonefield, Carrowteige and Kilgalligan in the parish of Kilcommon, Erris where he and his partner, fellow artist Linda Ruttelynck, recently built a new artist’s dwelling. It is the landscape that Robert Lloyd Praeger described in 1937 as the loneliest place in Ireland but went on to say: “I confess I find such a place not lonely or depressing but inspiriting. You are thrown at the same time back upon yourself and forward against the mystery and majesty of nature and you may feel dimly something of your own littleness and your own greatness.”

These paintings of Sruwaddacon Bay, sea stacks and the Stags of Broadhaven are quiet, meditative paintings. They are paintings more about the space that these majestic rocks and islands inhabit than they are of the rocks and islands themselves, but it is by rendering their space that Harris has mysteriously asserted their presence.

They are about time: past, present and future. The rocks and islands come and go, shimmering in a mysterious light as ghosts of the past or maybe glimpses of the future. But these paintings are also about mark making, about paint on a surface. It is as if Harris has taken space, time and a certain stillness and encapsulated them in seductive paint.

Pat Harris was born in Dublin in 1953 and studied at the National College of Art & Design from 1973 to 1978 and at the National Higher Institute of Fine Art Antwerp, graduating in 1981. In 2008 he was awarded a PhD in Fine Art by the University of Antwerp. He has exhibited widely in Europe with numerous solo shows at Taylor Galleries, Dublin; De Zwarte Panter, Antwerp and Gallery S65 Aalst, Belgium; as well as Purdy Hicks, London. He is a member of Aosdána and was recently elected Associate Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (ARHA). Harris’ work is represented in numerous private and public collections including The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, IMMA, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, UCD, St. Patrick’s Hospital, Language Centre of Ireland, AIB, AXA and the University of Antwerp.