Diarmuid Delargy (b.1958)

Down on Dunseverick Strand (1981)

Diarmuid Delargy is an Irish artist working in painting, printmaking and sculpture and lives in Sligo with his family. He studied at the Slade School of Art, London. In 1999 he was elected to Aosdána and to the Royal Society of Painter/Printmakers, Bankside, London in 2005.

Delargy has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. He has received multiple awards for his work including the Gold Medal at the European Large Format Print Exhibition, Dublin in 1991. He completed a suite of 24 prints based on a text by Samuel Beckett in 1996, which exhibited in MOMA, San Francisco, Las Vegas and New York. Delargy also collaborated with the poet Paul Muldoon in the limited-edition publication ‘Hard Drive’ in the US.

During the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Delargy did not intentionally make ‘political art’, however, as the artist explains “it would be fair to say that my work did reflect many of the concerns of the time, albeit refracted through the prism of art history.”

This piece, entitled Down on Dunseverick Strand depicts a shoreline scene with pig carcasses lying near a stately looking gatepost. A group can be seen on a shoreline with black flags flapping in the wind near a tumultuous sea. Delargy’s use of black flags is a reference to the Hunger Strikes campaign of 1981, in which supporting protesters carried black flags to mourn the dead in prison.