A 3000+ square foot immersive mural installation made in collaboration with the Canada-Ireland Foundation for their ephemeral street art exhibition “Miotas” (Myth) in Toronto, July 2021.

It is a tale of loss and enduring love, centred around the four children of an ancient king and their step-mother, Aoife (EE-fa), who, in a fit of desperation and jealousy, transformed the four children into swans.

In revisiting The Children of Lir for this installation, I was struck by a detail left out of my own family’s version. Immediately following the children’s transformation, Aoife is overwhelmed with panic and regret. She is unable to completely reverse the curse, but in an act of small mercy, returns the children’s beautiful voices and limits their previously eternal sentence to nine-hundred years.

The complexity of emotion expressed in her wavering of pure villainy feels expressly human. It peels away some of the archetypal gloss we often take for granted in fairy tales. Aoife, to me, becomes the most relatable character in a story padded with supernatural kings, birds and bells: an individual in grief after years of neglect.

The dichotomy of good and evil falters at this one moment, which is the kind of intricacy I seek out and appreciate most in myths and legends; a bridge to our own imperfect lives and dilemmas.