Hazel Greene didn’t expect Shinrone to be the place where everything would come together, but it’s impossible to separate her story from it.

Her roots were always here. Her father was born in Shinrone, as was his father before him, farming land just outside the village. Hazel herself was born in London, and she came back as a teenager. She went to school locally and then left again in search of work, first to Belfast and then Dublin. Years passed, and Shinrone became somewhere she had come from, rather than somewhere she ever imagined returning to.

“I disappeared for twenty years,” she says.

She came back not out of necessity, but into a life that slowly took shape around her.

Her path into art began with something simple as she couldn’t afford Christmas presents after buying her first house, so she made them instead. It all started with hand-painted silk scarves. It was practical, quick, and, as she puts it, “painting is just far too slow a business.” However, what began as a practical solution gradually turned into an actual business.

By the time she returned to Shinrone, drawn back by both family and the man she would later marry, she had already started her successful textile business.

After returning to Shinrone, she opened The Bramber Studio. The place where she would be able to teach art.

A small ad in the local paper brought forty-eight people to her first classes. No big campaign, no build-up, just immediate interest. “If I could get started, that’d be great,” she had thought. Instead, it took off straight away and week after week the people just kept coming and she had four to five classes per week.

“It was mostly local people… amazing local support.”

That support became the backbone of everything. For twenty years, Hazel made a living through art in Shinrone, something she hadn’t believed would be possible in a village of its size. “I wouldn’t have thought we would have been able to pull that off,” she admits. But they did: a business, a home, and a family, all built side by side.

If one line captures her story, it’s “We built a house, built a community, built a family, and could live through the business.”

Her work is grounded in the place itself. The landscapes around Shinrone like open fields, long views, the Slieve Bloom Mountains in the distance, keep returning in her paintings and textiles. More than anything, it’s the atmosphere of the place that shapes her work.

“Light is everything,” she says. For Hazel a good day in Shinrone is simple: sunlight across the fields, space to see, and time to work. While she often paints in her studio, she’s drawn to painting outdoors, capturing something immediate in the changing light. Trees, sky, and the shifting tones of the land are constant subjects returning in her work.

Her textiles and paintings are closely linked. What begins as a painting can become part of a larger design- layered, combined, and transformed into fabric pieces. It’s a process that allows her to move between forms without losing the original idea.

Now, her life is shifting again. The studio has been sold, and the classes have stopped. However, instead of slowing down, she’s returning to something more personal she is painting for herself, working on pieces that take time, experimenting in ways she couldn’t before.

“Now I want to create the pieces I didn’t have time to create,” she says.

She found on returning to Shinrone a space, support, and a strong sense of connection that made it possible to stay and build something meaningful.

“It’s home,” she says.