The problem with writing about Carmen Casey is knowing where to begin. Take her name. The Caseys were poor immigrants who left Ballymahon around 1810 to settle in Argentina where Carmen was born, where she returns every year, and where her surname is pronounced Kassee. Then there are her many talents. As a classical guitarist, she has given concerts in Buenos Aires, London and Dublin. She is fluent in three languages and at ease in another two. Her courgette muffins are heavenly, she has the walk of a queen and she has just overseen the interior redecoration of the Strasbourg residence of Ireland's Ambassador to the Council of Europe - to whom she happens to be married.
In 1986, she toyed with the idea of giving up her music to devote herself to her painting. This she finally did in 1990, a decision which coincided with the arrival of her first daughter. Her latest exhibition, States of Mind, is running at the American College for a week, until Sunday. First shown in Vienna last year, the show consists of a series of female heads, all of them wearing hats that could be described as surreal - although the artist takes issue with the term used in this context: "The male surrealists painted woman as the complement to man, the inspiring muse, something to be seen. My faces are inward looking, lost in thought. It doesn't matter whether anyone is looking at them or not. They exist regardless of the viewer." Her interest in hats stemmed from research into medieval paintings in which people were always defined by the costumes and hats they wore: the judge, the soldier, the bishop each had his own which placed him firmly in his social class.
The idea for States of Mind came to her while watching her two daughters - Beibhinn (10) and Lucia (7) feeding pigeons in St Mark's Square in Venice, one New Year's Eve: "The pigeons were greedy and they perched right on the children's woolly hats. I started to think about the minds of people and how what they wore on their heads and on their faces could be expressions of their innermost thoughts - the opposite of the medieval paintings, in fact, where the faces always remained blank since what people thought was not important. At that time, only God's thoughts mattered."
Her pale-faced women - bare shouldered, bare-breasted - wear fish, snails, birds, butterflies and shells on their heads. One woman, her mouth as determined as her eyes, wears an explosion of fiery coral on her head. Entitled Down- trodden 1, the note explains that corals cannot be trodden on. In another - Nesting - a woman is depicted looking with fixed eyes at some distant and perhaps unattainable horizon, four white birds poised on her head. The note tells us that some birds can and do nest in places that other animals find impossible to reach. Vanity 1 shows a small-mouthed, sad-eyed woman, her head proudly ringed by the feathers of the crowned crane whose display, found in both male and female, serve no obvious purpose.
She is an avid reader of any scientific journal she can get her hands on and refers constantly to the world we live in: "Did you know," she asks, "that thousands of humming birds are taken from their habitat every year so that their feathers can be made into hats?" Not surprisingly, humming birds figure in States of Mind. Everything goes into the paintings, she says: "We all have an inner life. It's going on, all the time." She is particularly exercised by the music of the universe: "Some scientific writing is absolutely incredible. Not one leaf is exactly like another and yet everything, unique as it is, is an echo of something else. Pulsating stars are like a reverberating bell. And ovaries," she says, developing her theme, "when they stop functioning, it's like the death of a star."
Motherhood crops up all the time. One painting shows a giant clam fixed tightly to the head of a woman whose face is turned away from us: "Clams lie quietly at the bottom of the sea and begin to grow so big they can no longer move. Motherhood can be a bit like that: you have to stay put for a couple of years."
She draws in pencil. Then, before working in pastels, she prepares her background by applying layer after layer - 15, sometimes - of gesso, a method much favoured in the Middle Ages. "If I don't do that, the pastel cracks. This way, I can make the faces smooth, smooth. Built up like a mask." Her models are Uccello, Piero della Francesca and the Quattrocento. "I also like Rubens," she says, "because of the way he portrays the quality of the skin."
She says she will never be well-known because of her nomadic lifestyle, which means she can never have a regular gallery or a faithful following. She has a droll take on the vicissitudes of diplomatic life: the regulation dinner parties, the receptions, the formal smile: "People may get the impression I'm a diplomat's wife who paints but I'm not. I'm a painter, married to a diplomat."
States of Mind is at the American College, 2 Merrion Square, until Sunday May 21st. 10 a.m.- 5 p.m.
