Dutch-born artist Anita Groener, whose show Heartlands is currently running at the Galway Arts Centre, moved to Ireland from the Netherlands in 1982. As so often happens, she originally came here for just one year, with no intention of staying longer. At the end of that time, she thought she'd give it another year. Only eventually, she says, did she realise she was staying. "I know that emigration is central to the Irish experience, but it's relatively unusual for the Dutch to emigrate," she points out.

Now she doesn't "really feel Dutch any more", as she puts it. But nor is she Irish.

Instead she finds herself in that odd no-man's-land inhabited by people who choose to live in a country in which they were not born and brought up. "For an artist, it's particularly acute because, you know, I'll never be an Irish artist, I'm never considered in those terms. But of course I'm not a Dutch artist either, because I'm not there. So that can be difficult. You can get a bit lost somewhere in between."

Her painting has always hinged on modes of self-exploration and latterly her experience of displacement, particularly with respect to her relationship with her mother and the rest of her family, has come to the fore. This means that the work is as much about time as place.

"When you see your family once a year or so, time accelerates. Life is a series of rites of passage, and you are different as you go through each one. I don't mean to dramatise it, but the realisation that I will probably die here is fairly significant. It puts things into perspective."

Much of Heartlands is in a sense text-based. "I started to Tipp-Ex out texts in a book," she says. "The title struck me because it was called Abroad in Ireland, which seemed to relate to my experience. But actually, it was a book written entirely from a British imperialist perspective and quite insulting to the Irish throughout. So I began to TippEx what I didn't like. Then it seemed that what was left made sense to me."

She was wary about allowing words into the space of her paintings, but felt she had to. She reread the letters her mother sent her regularly and began to use them. "It was a way of meditating on the meaning of what was said," she explains. That is, implicit in the apparently casual messages, there is a sense of life being lived, of feelings being communicated. Groener's approach, in painting out lines of text, may seem paradoxical. Why thwart the communication?

"I don't feel that I am getting rid of the text in the sense of nullifying it, obliterating its meaning," she says. "By erasing words, I feel, I am obliterating something, but it is the past. It's like undertaking a journey. I've been there, it's gone, we are done with that stage, and that one, and so on . . .

"The meaning that remains is more poetic than literal, more about the time and the nature of the experience than about the specific details, which are really incidental."

Repeated textual motifs, she also feels, become visual through repetition, symbolising the repetitive nature of life. "There is such a cyclical quality to life, but also a series of irreversible events. When I had a daughter myself, I felt that strongly. A child changes your awareness of yourself, of time, of place and of responsibility. In a sense, life is a series of goodbyes. You are constantly leaving stages of experience," she says. Her texturally rich paintings are almost devoid of colour, built up in layer upon layer of tonal pigment, of minimally inflected greys with occasional residues of colour and silver. They have distinctly "slow" surfaces that demand to be read like texts rather than absorbed at a glance.

Despite their subdued atmosphere, she doesn't see them as being unduly sad or elegiac. "More to do with silence and meditation," she suggests. "I think that's why the colour has disappeared to such an extent. Painting has to be quiet for me. Though, admittedly, there is that element of saying goodbye to a past in them."

She has never thought of the work as being particularly Irish or Dutch, and when "Brian Maguire looked at the work and said it was very Dutch, I honestly couldn't see that".

"But he meant, if you look at the strong horizontal emphasis, the sense of regular pattern that is the Dutch landscape and something of the Dutch sensibility, with its innate sense of order, which runs through all aspects and layers of society. And he's right. It's like if you ever fly to Holland and look down, what you see is Mondrian, his sense of order and compositional regularity."