James Earley’s stained-glass-inspired 2019 mural reimagined the dying Cúchulainn tied to the standing stone Clochafarmore. Its colours echo the Irish tricolour. Painted on Brady’s pub, the work was replaced in 2022 and is preserved here in photographs.
03 / THE SUBJECT · A DEEPER LOOK
The story.
James Earley identifies Oliver Sheppard’s 1914 sculpture The Death of Cúchulainn as the starting point for this 2019 work. The legendary hero, mortally wounded, binds himself upright to the stone Clochafarmore. Earley describes his palette as an echo of the Irish tricolour.
The artist records water-based acrylic and spray paint, at a scale of 10 by 8 metres, on the gable of Brady’s pub. His project page confirms that the pub and mural are now gone; EPSO’s earlier page dates the replacement to 2022. The surviving photographs make this founding-year contribution part of the collection again.
Painted for SEEK’s first year and replaced in 2022, this work survives in the festival’s photographic archive. The exact historical wall position has not been verified.
James Earley is an artist based in Dublin, Ireland. His distinctive style celebrates and pays homage to his family’s rich artistic past within Irish stained glass art.
Earley has been producing artworks in public spaces since 1997. He began painting letter-based graffiti and played an active role in the Irish graffiti movement. From 2010, he started to develop abstracted, figurative works with an aesthetic rooted in stained glass.
In 2014, James painted Blooms Hotel. The project took one year to complete, according to the festival’s artist biography.
He has travelled extensively with his art throughout Europe, the States, Asia and has worked on a variety of large scale projects with a mixture of arts-based organisations as well as multi-nationals that support the arts.
