Article: Up and Coming: From Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains, Genieve Figgis Paints Dark Narratives of Previous Worlds
The paintings of Irish artist Genieve Figgis share a dark, strange allure with the landscape that surrounds her studio in County Wicklow, Ireland, a short drive from Dublin. Her work brings to my mind a poem by the great Irish writer Seamus Heaney—himself a long-term resident of the county—who in Exposure (1975) imagines himself as a 17th-century Irish soldier. Having “escaped from the massacre” of his forces by the English armies he now wanders through the woods, living wild. It is December in Wicklow, and amidst “the alders dripping,” he has left civilization behind and grown philosophical, “taking protective colouring/ from bole and bark, feeling/ every wind that blows.”