Sometimes I wonder if I’m an outsider artist. And whether even asking this question is evidence to the contrary? How does one define what an outsider artist is anyway? I’m not a grizzled illiterate hermit carving strange totems out of swamp oak in a rotting shack deep in the uncharted woods; nor am I a wild-haired mumbling crone in an insanely cluttered apartment compulsively drawing endless horror-vacui tangles on sheets of pound-shop greaseproof paper (although this is not an unlikely final station for my life’s train journey); but I feel more akin to those troubled souls than to the proper artists I see in galleries and study in books. Or a modern-day equivalent of the medieval stonemasons who amused themselves, and irritated the likes of St Bernard of Clairvaux, by placing grotesque leering creatures in the corners of stately soaring Gothic cathedrals, that anarchic Middle-Age spirit that gave us Bosch and his hybrid monstrosities, Brueghel and his armies of slaughtering skeletons, and Arcimboldo turning the Holy Roman Emperor in an assemblage of vegetables and flowers, ripe in the moment but decaying into flyblown mush by summer’s end… 

I was cycling home from work one night down Esmonde Street when I saw a skip outside a closed office, and, as is my wont, stopped to examine the contents to see if they were worth photographing. I remember it being very cold and the street was deserted. I was already in the process of moving out of Gorey forever and so each evening was part of a countdown to the final one… What first caught my eye was the grey metal object in the centre - a definite face - but as I looked the textures and colours around it I found them very beautiful. So I brought back my proper camera the following morning and took a few shots of it, out of which I constructed the image above from the photograph below. My initial impression was of a drunken robot who’s passed out in a rubbish dump, so I gave it the title ‘a momentary cessation of unhappiness’ (taken from Bertrand Russell) as it seemed to fit rather nicely.  This image has a special place in my heart as it’s the last industrial image I made before I permanently moved to Limerick.