DON'T call it a 'comeback', he's been here for years: although artist Farhad O'Neill is currently staging his first Belfast exhibition for almost two decades at Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, his work will already be a familiar sight to many people in the west of the city.
Hailing from Unionville in Ontario, Canada, the largely self-taught sculptor and painter lived and worked here in Belfast from 1993 until 2004, when he returned to Canada to look after his parents while they battled cancer.
O'Neill helped found the Space gallery at the Conway Mill in the mid-1990s, where he also had a studio space and served as 'artist in residence': the bronze statue of Cú Chulainn at the Mill is his creation, while his large-scale copper sculpture Freedom Restrained is prominently displayed at the Falls Women's Centre.
His other public works around Belfast include the Herald of Jericho mixed metal sculpture which hangs in the Upper Springfield Development Trust building, the basalt Carriage Failte sculpture with bronze bas relief inset which stands at the top of the Monagh Road and the Carriage Mairghead basalt sculpture with steel and bronze insets which is situated at the entrance to the Aitnamona estate on the Monagh Bypass.
Every visitor to the Cultúrlann will also pass beneath his impressive mild steel illuminated screen sculpture The Birth of Kells, which hangs in the lobby of the Falls Road arts and cultural hub.
According to O'Neill, it's good to be back in Belfast and indeed back at Cultúrlann with his first exhibition in the city for 18 years, a 16-piece collection of paintings titled Loquens per Velamen – 'Speaking Through the Veil'.
"It's great," he enthuses.
"The scene here in Belfast is just much more home for me. I'm a community-based artist and the community in the arts sector is so much stronger here than it is in Toronto."
That said, O'Neill has certainly left his artistic mark on Ontario's capital city: one of his many commissions during his time in Canada included being selected by the Archdiocese of Toronto to create bronze-gilded double Marian Doors incorporating the entirety of the Rosary in sculptural bas-relief for the newly refurbished St Michael's Cathedral Basilica.
This impressive project took almost six years to complete and involved O'Neill becoming the Cathedral's artist-in-residence for a time, working from a studio located in its belltower.
Announcing his return to Belfast, the works in Loquens per Velamen feature two distinct sets of baroque, detail-packed illustrations inspired by "medieval narratives and natural philosophy", themes which tie-in with his work on the aforementioned Marian Doors: the Rosary itself dates back to St Dominic in the 11th Century.
"There are eight coloured illustrations which are oil pastel and ink on paper," explains ONeill of the most immediately eye-catching pieces in the current exhibition.
"Those are sort of surrealist mystical abstract illustrations dealing with alchemy and natural philosophy. I made those when I was also carving the Marian Doors for St Michael's, which were very heavy and very medieval.
"So I'd work on these illustrations as a way to relax while also applying myself to the compositional tools artists would have used in the middle ages – things like alchemy and the occult, etcetera.
"The other seven pieces are gold and black ink on paper are different: they refer to specific medieval narratives such as the quest for the Holy Grail, The Song of Roland, Saladin, The Travels of John Mandeville and the legend of King Arthur."
These heroic myths and the blurred lines between nature, spirituality and science which charactarised medieval thinking have long been a source of fascination for O'Neill, as he explains.
"It's an intensely creative period," he tells me.
"These people are very open-minded and connected with nature. They were sort of like the early Greeks – they would consider anything, even stuff we would consider daft. It was also incredibly spiritual and this sort of spirituality was not divorced from everyday life: it's god, it's sex, it's violence, it's warfare, it's loving – everything was wrapped together.
"And it was also quite tolerant too: from the fifth to the ninth century the amount of ecclesiastical and artistic cooperation that took place between Ireland, south-west England and Wales was tremendous. And, moving into the Middle Ages there were tremendous levels of cooperation between Christians, Muslims and Jews – especially academics.
"Unfortunately, the Viking, Norman and English invasions ruined the former, and the Crusades ended the latter."
O'Neill's late mother was originally from Ligoniel: he has inherited her love of music and the Irish language, in which he is well on his way to becoming fully fluent. He first visited Belfast in 1991, the year of his graduation, before moving to live here in 1993.
"Belfast was a very different place back then," O'Neill recalls.
"It was much more 'rubble on the ground'. The Divis Flats were still up, and they were a nightmare for people. The town was fully locked down where you'd be the only one walking around the city centre if you were out at night. It wasn't particularly safe and there was an awful lot of harassment.
"But at the same time, there was a tremendous community feeling and a tremendous vitality to the arts scene within the communities in west, east and north Belfast. Those were good times with good friends – and also, tension is something that produces good art."
Indeed, it seems that the artist missed the community-minded Belfast art scene during his time in Toronto.
"In Toronto, everything was happening and nothing was happening – it's a huge city and very multicultural but I didn't find it particularly interesting, aside from the music scene which was great," says O'Neill, who studied music at Toronto's York University and is an accomplished pianist.
"My career there was self-driven: I would curate my own shows, if there wasn't a collective I would form one, if there wasn't a gallery I would set one up and all of my major commissions there I sort of dug out the ground myself."
However, now he's back in Belfast for the long-haul, with enough recently created art for "three or four solo exhibitions" currently in storage.
"I'm home for good now," he tells me.
"If I get a juicy contract in Canada or wherever I can still go, but I think Belfast will be my home for the rest of my life."
:: Farhad O'Neill's Speaking Through the Veil runs at Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich until August 14, visit culturlann.ie for more information. Visit Farhad online at farhadsculpture.com
