Diane Magee Art

FOREWARD Winterage is a gorgeous word. A solid but fairy-tale word that is warm and cold at the same time. Practised by Burren farmers for thousands of years, it’s the seasonal movement of livestock to the Burren uplands in late October, left to graze over rocky pastures for the winter months. Counterintuitively, despite the tough climate and no shelter, the limestone winter pastures retain heat, removing the need to bring cattle indoors. Winterage is an ancient farming practice and annual celebration being celebrated again in this show.

This Winterage isn’t reality but the artist’s own multiverse, darker than her previous work, at times trippy and more of a dreamscape – like residual images we sometimes carry into real life in the spilt second of waking. In Hiemal the animal might be vibrating through from another world. The sepia action shot of Apricity could be an early moving picture with the feel of a Lascaux cave painting. In Mizzle both farmers and boulders are similar shapes, all made from the same stuff. Throughout the work you might wonder, are these the colours and shapes that the cattle see? Some of the cast of cattle and characters make the final cut, others are worked back in the paint, with a few stubborn ghosts that won’t leave, like the phantasm of one farmer watching another pass him by in Herdsman.

Winterage is an obsession with the Burren that has come full circle – a circle first painted in watercolours with collage, then oils and acrylics, but ultimately bringing Diane back to the landscapes where she started.