MY STORY
My name is Deirdre Burton. I was born and raised on the Bog Road in County Limerick, surrounded by fields, hedgerows, wildflowers and wet ground. Nearly all my happiest childhood memories are outside.
Summers seemed endless. I walked down the bog with my mother, grandmother and grand-aunt, the three women I thought of as my mothers, to collect a beart of sticks for the fire. I went there with my granddad too, to check on Sangko, his donkey. My friends and I picked blackberries and plums, ran across dykes and lay among the wildflowers, looking up at the sky, talking and laughing.
I remember playing hurling behind the house with my dad and going for cycles together. My father told my sisters and I stories about Llewellyn and his dog and stories about giants. They filled the landscape around me with imagination and wonder. That sense of something almost mythical remains with me when I stand beneath a vast sky, look across open land or find myself surrounded by the sea.
Home carried many small, joyful rituals. I made queen cakes with my mother and bread with my grandmother. I played Snakes and Ladders, Ludo and other board games with my grandparents. My mother brought great joy to our summer holiday by the sea and made Christmas feel magical. These memories of family, colour, anticipation and celebration remain deeply connected to my sense of home.
I dug clay from holes in the fields with my fingers and carried it home in my hands to make little objects. Being close to the bog, touching the earth and watching life grow from it gave me the same feeling of belonging I found with my family. The land felt steady and familiar. It carried warmth, memory and a sense of home.
The joyful colours of flowers also carry memories of my family. Their pinks, purples, yellows and greens remind me of warmth, laughter and the happiness that existed alongside the more difficult parts of life. I am equally drawn to the way sunlight transforms the landscape. The sky becomes more intensely blue, fields turn yellow and the sun casts a golden hue across everything it touches.
Life at home could also hold chaos and turmoil. Like many families, ours included people carrying pain of their own, which could spill into the lives of those around them. Love, joy and warmth existed alongside fear, hurt and uncertainty.
I think this is why I am so deeply drawn to the sea. It feels like a metaphor for my life. I love it completely. I know it is where I belong and, in many ways, it feels like home. The people I love are also my home.
The sea brings me joy, freedom and healing, but it can also be chaotic, unpredictable and dangerous. I enter it knowing that. I respect its power and accept it for everything it is, while continuing to love it deeply.
I do not think I would be brave enough to walk into a cold, rough Atlantic sea if I had not already lived through difficult things. Those experiences taught me that I can feel fear and still move forward. The first cold can feel almost unbearable. It takes my breath away and shocks my entire body. If I remain in the water, breathe and move with it, the cold begins to change. Warmth returns from within. What first felt impossible becomes freeing, exhilarating and healing.
Life can feel the same. Pain passed on by people carrying pain of their own does not have to remain inside us forever. We can move through it, understand it and find warmth within ourselves again. The experience may shape us, but it does not have to hold us under.
I now live in Williamstown, County Galway, surrounded by bogland once again. There is something meaningful in having travelled from one bog to another, with the Atlantic becoming the place between them where I found another part of myself.
The changing sky outside my bedroom window brings enormous joy to my soul. In the evenings, I walk through the bog with my beloved family. I watch the bog cotton moving in the air, purple flowers emerging through the land and curious cows watching me from the fields.
These are the moments when I feel most human. Bills, routines and expectations begin to fall away. There is nothing to achieve and no role to perform. I can simply be alive on this earth.
My paintings come from these experiences of Ireland’s sea and land. They are about how it feels to stand among grasses and wildflowers, to feel clay between my fingers, to enter cold Atlantic water, to move with the waves and to lay in the warmth of the sun afterwards.
I work primarily in acrylic, and occasionally in oil, building layers of colour with brushes and palette knives to create texture, movement and feeling across the surface of each painting. I work intuitively, following the painting rather than beginning with a fixed outcome.
Sometimes the work feels quiet and grounding. Sometimes it carries freedom, energy and joy. At other times, it reflects the uncertainty and power of the sea.
I believe colour does you good. There is something soulful about living with it.
Through my paintings, I want to offer a moment of colour, freedom and connection. A reminder to stop, to look and to feel the world around us.
Sometimes it is enough simply to be here.
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JOURNAL
ARTIST STATEMENT
I paint from a connection to the landscape that began in childhood.
I grew up in County Limerick, where my happiest memories are of being outside. Summers were spent in fields and hedgerows, picking blackberries and plums, running across dykes and sitting under bridges. Before the farmers cut the grass, my friends and I would lie among the wildflowers, looking up at the sky, talking and laughing. There was a freedom in those days that has never left me.
About eighteen years ago, I moved to Galway and found myself close to the sea again. During a difficult period in my life, wild swimming brought me back to myself. The cold water, the movement and the feeling of being completely surrounded by nature gave me a sense of freedom and confidence that I had lost. Soon afterwards, I began painting at night in a spare room, allowing something that had been quiet within me for many years to come forward again.
My paintings are shaped by the land and sea of the west of Ireland, but they are also shaped by memory and feeling. The Atlantic, changing skies, wildflowers and untamed edges of the landscape continually draw me back. I am interested in the way nature can make us feel both very small and completely held.
I work mainly in acrylic on canvas, building colour, movement and texture instinctively. I rarely begin with a fixed plan. There is often a point during the painting when thought falls away and the work begins to lead me. At times it feels as though something has taken over and is coming through me. I follow that feeling, allowing the painting to become what it needs to be rather than trying to control it.
My seascapes, wildflower paintings and abstract works all come from this same place. Through layers of colour, palette-knife marks and dotting, I try to hold onto the sensations that are difficult to put into words: the energy of the Atlantic, the softness of a field on a summer day, the joy of being caught in the waves, or the quiet relief of feeling at home in yourself.
Painting has become a way of returning to that instinctive and unguarded part of me. Each work carries something of the journey from the fields of my childhood to the Galway coast and back to the landscape again.