Paintings : Other Themes

Among other themes that have provided subject matter for Carmel's work is the subject of birds. Described by Cyril Barrett S.J. as 'the undying love' of Carmel's work, this subject has featured in at least three phases of her career. Barrett traces this fascination back to her childhood in the Irish countryside, where Carmel and her brother would nurse wounded birds. This theory is rendered literally in the 1985 painting 'The Wounded Bird', a copy of which hangs in the offices of The Samaritans, providing inspiration to visitors there.

The mythical significance of birds has also featured in her treatment of this subject, and in Barrett's 'second phase' she used the ethereal quality of birds in flight, in motion, as the basis for her own move towards abstraction in her painting.

The symbolic significance of birds returns in her volcanic series, again quite literally in works such as Phoenix (2000) and her 'Fantasy Birds' (1997), in which they are used to symbolise the struggle with life in the shadow of the volcano. The Fantasy Birds work was used as the basis for the Firebird installation that was realised by the Berengo Glass Masters in collaboration with the artist in 2000.

In the 1980s Carmel produced a series of paintings that used clowns as their principal subject matter. This theme has again been traced by Cyril Barrett to her childhood; he reports that as a young girl she would frequent the local visiting circus and was so enraptured by it that she would play truant from school to spend time with the circus people. She chose as a subject to paint the white clown, an unfunny and unloved character, a victim just like the wounded birds.