Forecasters 2026 — Diane Magee

Forecasters is Diane’s third solo show of paintings, and continuing the artist’s exploration of imaginary, almost hallucinatory, animals and their relationships with their surroundings, their environment, and the climate. Forecasters is the continuation of a semi-accidental series, looking at how these creatures – or any of us – can process, and maybe grieve, how much (or little) balance and control we can have over our own immediate lives. A series of ten new, richly-layered paintings, the theme of Forecasters is inspired by the weather lore of the flying and furry barometers that have been our cues for changes in weather for much longer than they haven’t. For millennia, barking foxes or soaring swallows foreshadowed fine weather. A braying donkey heralded the rain. Huddled sheep, or seagulls heading inland, meant trouble. Cormorants gathering sticks were an augur of a long winter.

In 2023, Diane’s show Winterage was hyper-focused on the Burren and its ancient seasonal movement of cattle, based on the artist’s time working there. In 2025’s show Blaze, all real physical references were dropped, and the work shifted to the artist’s imagination, and to an uncomfortable, instinctively animal reaction to climate change.Now in Forecasters the international cast from the previous shows is gone. This new troupe imagined by Diane certainly still seems almost supernatural, but this time they are definitely local, with some of them looking like they’ve jumped off old Irish coins. Like the bounding hound in Sun Setter, and the fox barking warning in Warble, these are signs to be read, and ancient signs at that. Billy Jacks, the nickname for cormorants in the artist’s seaside hometown of Youghal, features seabirds that might be from centuries-old shadow puppets, or even older cave paintings. The huddled sheep from Woodland could be carved from agate, or cut directly from the layered landscape they are set in.

In Forecasters the animal subjects are no longer guided by human husbandry, but shaped by and responsive to human destruction. In this show, animals are the guides, the ones with the knowledge and insight, the ones who can still read the signs.