Fire Horse Glass

Emerald Dunne: Artist statement

 My background is in stained glass and I run my own business, Fire Horse Glass. While living in Japan I began to explore painting and held three exhibitions of my work. Like many western visitors I had expected to encounter a blend of the traditional and the innovative. I was keen to capture the colours that I saw there: the bright blue of a metallic mobile phone, the red and gold of a kimono.

The work that I started in Japan depicts circles, the default shape of the universe. Electrons revolve around neutrons as stars spin around star systems. Life could also be described as circular; we often come back to the same points time and time again, hopefully with more knowledge and experience. I find Buddhist belief in reincarnation an interesting idea and one which I found particularly inspiring when visiting Koyasan, a major centre of Buddhist practice and belief near Osaka in Japan. 

My more recent work focuses on artificial lights and how they represent the presence of human beings. When I was a child I lived in Scotland in North Berwick, a small seaside town some twenty-five miles from Edinburgh. It was a dormitory town but also a popular holiday spot because of its interesting beaches and nearby rock islands. One of them, the Bass Rock, was manned island and each night I would sit and wait for the lamp to come on. I was always aware that the lamp out at sea meant another human being was there. And this was same feeling I had whenever I gazed across the sea to Fife on the opposite coast, seeing the yellow and orange lights that obscured homes, streets and cars. I found it very comforting to know that other lives were going on across the water, even if I knew nothing about the people living them.