Helen’s Bay greets me with softness every time. As Translink’s Artist in Residence, I’ve stepped off many trains, but few platforms feel like this. Nature thrives. Robins hop between gorse bushes & starlings braid themselves into murmuration.

I set up at the platform first, capturing the early sun as it turned the rails a silky blue. Swimmers passed me - the same hardy group I met weeks later in Derry~Londonderry. “Eight degrees that morning,” one laughed when she recognised me again. “We’re mad, but happy.” As a former cold water sea swimmer, I could relate totally to their happiness! 

Down by the tide, the light shifted constantly - pearl, silver, sudden gold. A cormorant dried its wings on a rock. A family said they had used the Journey Planner for “a quiet adventure they’d mapped out on the Journey Planner the night before.” Even the seaweed felt artistic - dark calligraphy against stone. 

Another woman told me she stops here each morning before taking the train into Belfast - “to find a bit of myself before the day begins.”  

A Translink employee came down to chat with me on the platform also. I ask him to stand still for just a couple of minutes and add him into the painting. It gives the composition an immediate sense of intimacy and scale.  

He was delighted. I loved hearing his stories about a lifetime of working on the railway. 

And later, on other journeys - on Ulsterbus, on the Goldliner, on the Enterprise to Dublin - people told me they’d seen my painting from this day. That tiny coastal station followed me like a warm memory.