Video transcript
My name is Helen Lowe. I have a website called quinnnart.com, and on it is pictures and paintings of the ocean, and boats, and our connection with the ocean and the mainland.
And what I like about the ocean, what it means to me, is about our history, you know? Everything that we have here, everything that we learned here, we’ve got it through the ocean. So long ago, the scholars, say on Lough Derg and Inis Cealtra, they got all their information because people came up the Shannon, the Wild Atlantic Way. The people on Inis Mór, they got all their food and their subsistence by the ocean. So they had to travel by the boats, by these beautiful black boats called the hookers, across, and everything had to be brought back and forth through the ocean.
So the ocean to me means subsistence, history, existence, and what we’re going to do in the future, because without it, we’re going to lose so much unless we learn from what are benefits and how amazing the ocean actually is.
There’s so much of it—the ocean, I feel, is still unexplored. And yet, we have it in our DNA of the ocean and transport and of life, and that to me is what I’m trying to create in the waves, the Wild Atlantic Way.
Like, there’s three main elements within the picture: it’s the blues, the dark navies, the hallow blues, and the burnt umber, which is representing the seaweed.
It’s just that energy and force that you have of the waves that brings life, and that, for me, brings also education and knowledge. Throughout our life, we’ve had it, and in our current existence, we still have it, and I’m trying to create that within the paintings.
Helen Lowe
