DAS FERNWEH - Untitled No 31 Painting

Oil paint on birch ply panel If you don't mind, I'd like to give you a little background to the original thoughts behind this series. Fernweh is a German word that I have been fascinated with for a long time. A German friend always tells me that this is too hard to translate. A quick search online and you find it’s basically the exact opposite of “homesickness”. It refers to a feeling of desperately wanting to be away from where you are. Away-sickness? Wanderlust? This is what my dictionary suggests but feels too weak for this feeling- it’s more than that; it’s kind of a desperate, painful desire to travel far away. I was very aware of this word and the thoughts that it evoked during the first lockdown in Ireland in March 2020. Like everyone else in the country, we were housebound, within our 2km radius, me, my partner, who was 7 months pregnant with our daughter, our 4-year-old and my partner's father. We just happened to be in lockdown under the flight path of Dublin Airport. As we sat on the couch, wondering if I would be allowed in for the birth of our daughter, there was a constant glimpse of an airplane in the sky overhead, through our living room window. They never stopped, the numbers dwindled, but they never stopped. You couldn't help but think who was on them? Where were they coming from? Maybe it was much needed PPE gear? Maybe it was people on holidays? Were people still going on holidays? Why weren't we going on holidays? These were a few of the questions that I asked myself every time I saw a plane overhead. It was then that I started taking photographs of planes in the sky, with our 4-year-old from the window and then from the garden outside the studio. The making of this work was also how I experienced my own version of fernweh, my own escape from the real world, into the world of imagination and a free mind. I hope you enjoy the work and, please, contact me here, should you have any queries, Warm regards to you and your family, Al