Welcome to my blog! My name is Morgan Madison-Daly, and I am the creative behind cliabhán studio. Art has been a central part of my life since I can remember, so it was no surprise when I decided to pursue it for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees. I especially love drawing. This motivated me to establish this studio, with the aim of illustrating and designing artworks and homewares that can enhance a person’s everyday life. Each month or so, I will post a new blog post here, where you can find musings and reflections from my studio.
It seems fitting as my introductory post to pay homage to the location that inspires much of my work and the influence it has on my practice as an artist, illustrator, and designer. Nature is among one of my favourite subjects, and I have long had an affinity for flowers, some of my favourites being mountain avens, meadowsweet, and germander speedwell.
I live on a farm in rural North Clare, situated in the Burren. The varying silver hues of limestone rock offer a striking juxtaposition to the rolling green fields and lush hedgerows. Among my favourite aspects of this landscape are the wildflowers that grow in abundance each spring and summer and it’s something that I have found myself daydreaming about as the winter blues set in. From February onwards, the roadsides, rock crevices, and forests’ floors offer up a constantly evolving organic display and the foliage and flowers perfume the air with a dazzling freshness that makes you feel like you’ve been transported to paradise. Each walk offers a new find as the seasons progress. With tomorrow, St. Brigid’s Day or Imbolc, ringing in what culturally is deemed spring in Ireland, I can’t help but feel excited.
The seaside also features prominently where I live, enhancing the mountains’ grandeur with swaths of turquoise, blue, and grey. The sweeping nature of this landscape captures your eye and entices the senses. It is this storybook setting that I draw my inspiration from, be it the birds and wildlife, the native flowers, or the kaleidoscopic colour palette. But there is something else, less obvious, but equally important, that encourages my creativity in this place.
Time.
The more you walk, the more of it you encounter. Remnants of fossils in rock faces, ancient and new man-made formations, and buds looking toward tomorrow make it feels as though this landscape is doing its utmost to hold past, present, and future all at once. The tangle of so many threads of time quietly revealing themselves through space hints at the multitude of stories contained throughout it, and strumming each string sounds a new song. For an artist like myself, these narratives are exciting to encounter and seek out, and shape experiences that feed and fuel both paint and pen.
