ABOUT GARY
I’m an artist and film art director, based between Dublin and Achill Island.
I grew up on Achill and studied architecture at DIT in Dublin. For more than 25 years, I have worked in film and television, translating stories into physical spaces. That experience continues to inform my painting through composition, scale, materials and close attention to detail.
My ongoing series, Spoken State, brings these interests together. I draw and paint the words of historic speeches and declarations to form national flags. From a distance, the flag is familiar. Up close, its surface becomes a text to read, connecting a shared symbol with the particular words, hopes and conflicts behind it.
Spoken State, Artevolve, RDS Dublin, March 2026
The Work
Spoken State is an ongoing series of paintings exploring language, national identity and belonging. Each work brings a national flag together with words spoken at a moment of political change, resistance or collective hope.
The paintings are made by hand in acrylic on aluminium composite panels. Drawing and painting the lettering is a slow, deliberate process that gives each speech a physical presence.
Seen together, the works invite comparison across countries and histories. I’m interested in the distance between what these speeches promised and how we read them today: who is included in the idea of a nation, who speaks for it, and whose hopes remain unresolved.
Nine original panels are complete; fifteen are in studio production.
COLLECTING & EXHIBITIONS
Spoken State is an ongoing series of original paintings, with signed, numbered archival print editions also available.
For enquiries about original works, editions, exhibitions or opportunities to present the series, please contact me directly.