Déjà vu in Paris

MONICA BOYLE

Déjà vu in Paris

By Lynda Cookson

As the ferry slipped into the harbour on Eigg Island in the Hebrides where Monica Boyle was working at the time, she mused on the feeling of knowing the intimacies of the islanders’ lives as well as knowing the ways of mainland folk. She felt like both an insider and an outsider and yet neither one, in a limbo between the two - and so, in the late ‘80s her fascination and love affair with islands began. In her own words: ‘I have never been able to understand or escape my growing infatuation with 'the islands'. It has compelled me for decades to fall through layers of relationship from distant admirer, acquaintance and finally lover to a whole archipelago. Like most obsessions, it has become narrower in its focus, mainly the islands around West Cork and Heir in particular. The first time I went to Paris, the hamlet of houses on the west coast of Heir island, it all seemed very familiar to me, I had a sense of déjà vu and felt as if I had been there before. Sole possession or an understanding of the relationship is not a necessity for me. It is my 'encounter' with the offshore islands and my subsequent response to it in paint that is important to me. Water, land and sky merge and separate into abstracted forms as I wipe paint on and scrape it off again. I dip my finger in vibrant vermillion and make an emphatic smear, which is then enveloped in a haze as I smudge grey-blues around their edge. Indian red and sultry ochre trickle along dark shorefronts to lift the temperature further in these cold western seas. Finally, I scratch the surface to stitch and consolidate the whole. The painted surface is the only vestigial record of the experience.’