Blighters is a mirror world version of Vincent Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters (1885), a depiction of a peasant family eating a meal of potatoes. Mooney has suggested that van Gogh’s Potato Eaters ‘should be an Irish painting’; he describes seeing it for the first time while an art student and being struck by a moment of false recognition, as if this canvas was a missing link in Irish visual culture. 

The work was exhibited as part of Revenants, a solo exhibition of paintings by Cork-based artist Kevin Mooney in IMMA in 2022. Informed by Mooney’s engagement with Irish mythology, history and cultural migration, Revenants was an exercise in speculative art history which imagines the ‘lost’ art of an Irish diaspora.