My print on the theme of Eros and Thanatos is entitled Petite Mort . The intimacy of lovemaking brings two bodies as close as physically possible. Driven by Eros, we attempt to reach across the gulf that separates two people. Yet, at the moment of greatest pleasure and intensity we are made aware of our essential individuality. To have or observe an orgasm is to experience a loosening of the mind's control of the body. A brief revelation of an interior and physical world where intellectual control is suspended. This 'little death' is a foretaste of the solitary experience and loss of conscious being in death.

There are cross currents of sexuality and death in my work. All art is a celebration of the life-force and an attempt to posit meaning. As a male artist my work is concerned with potency, love and faith. Faith is concerned with the human place in the natural and supernatural world. As an Irish artist, I've lived surrounded by the 'faith of my fathers', from the standing stones and tumuli of prehistory to contemporary expressions of Christian and alternative religions. Acknowledging the tragic nature of mortality and inevitable loss, love is concerned with art's potential to transcend and make beautiful the experience of living and understanding.

Prints are made as observation, thought and action in tabular mediated form. The making process is important for me. In relief printmaking, I'm interested in the formal limits imposed on the image by the medium. Physically, the piece is ordered by flat shapes overlaid on top or side by side on the page. This quality means that the viewer has to hew the image from the marks, restructuring and recreating ideas and thoughts from what is seen or imagined. The illusion, or presence, that the printed marks establish has the potential to transform the 'space' of the support creating, in eye and mind, dimensionality which disregards limits of measurement.