Entering the chapel at Mount Stuart, I am wrapped in an immensity of white marble. Abruptly, a shock of green enters my field of vision. Planted in front of the altar, a single word, CRIOCH. “End, Border, Finished,” Byrne explains, “like at the end of a play, but in French it’s ‘finis’ which is quite elegant. In Gaelic it’s much more….” he pauses and with a wry smile slices his hand across his throat in a mock-decapitation, “Final.” Here, the painting’s placement is a tongue-in-cheek confrontation, a border made manifest, and a reference to the quashing of the Gaelic language by the English.
Just upstairs in the red-swathed bedroom of Lady Bute, Molly’s cry, “Yes Yes” –cited from Ulysses–hangs above the bed. It’s the type of witty wordplay, linguistic orchestration woven into Byrne’s work.