LOSS ANGELES (CA)
LA Magazine
January 17, 2019
By Catherine Womack
Church was a refuge for Trina McKillen when she was young. Growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during “the Troubles” of the 1960s and ’70s, her neighborhood was a hotspot for political violence. When bomb scares threatened her elementary school, McKillen and her classmates were led into a nearby church for safety.
“That had an unbelievable effect on me,” the artist says. “I felt like, well, they might bomb the school, but they’ll never bomb the church. So I had this sense that the church could never be destroyed, that I was always safe there. I have so many beautiful memories of sitting in church. I remember feeling this sense of transcendence, an escape from the war in our streets outside.”
McKillen eventually left Northern Ireland for Dublin, Ireland, where she attended art school. She then moved to Los Angeles, where McKillen’s made her home since 1989. She doesn’t attend Mass much anymore, and she and her Jewish husband did not raise their son Catholic, but she still prays daily.
“You can’t take the Catholic out of me,” she says.
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