Killusty, Co Tipperary, is perfect territory for the rural idyll. You pass through Fethard, where the remains of the 14th-century town walls are amazingly intact, and follow a serpentine route that leads you right to the foot of Slievenamon, which is where you'll find Austin McQuinn, painter and sculptor.
McQuinn moved here three years ago from Dublin's north inner city, though he is Kerry-born. His relocation was one of necessity, though it is hard on a golden evening in late summer amidst the shimmering green and razed stubble of Tipperary meadows not to think it was a very canny move on his part.
With its second-home ethos, the Celtic Tiger economy has aided and abetted the yearning which beats deep in the heart of many a city-dweller to banish dull care and return to the simpler life. But it's not always that simple. Earlier this summer Lorcan Roche, a freelance journalist and writer, drew fire from the rural constituency by sharing his rather jaundiced version of the great urban escape - in his case to Co Kilkenny - in an article in the Sunday Times.
After only a year, the rural idyll failed him - or he failed it.
It is this kind of failure, or disillusionment, that interests McQuinn, the contradiction of being in an idyllic place and being unhappy. He quotes Thoreau: "It is vain to dream of a wilderness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature within us that inspires that dream."
It was probably inevitable living and working beneath the dome of one of Ireland's most mythical mountains that the landscape would enter into his art.
It is a shape which predominates in McQuinn's latest work, a series of sculpted pieces and paintings, which feature huge, calcified mountains, luminous white monolithic presences set against a black background. Think of Richard Dreyfuss in Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Remember the towering primal shape that haunted him and nearly drove him out of his mind? And there you have it.
Nature throws that shape at us all the time (Freud, of course, would have a field day with this) and we are inexplicably drawn to it, despite its dangers. After all, humans have been known to nestle under volcanoes. And in McQuinn's studio there are snaps of natural rock formations as far away as Turkey and New Mexico to remind you of how universal and familiar an image it is.
The painter Georgia O'Keeffe who spent a lifetime rendering the folds and fall of New Mexico's landscape once remarked: "It was the shapes which fascinated me, the shapes of the hills".
And so it is with McQuinn. Moving on from its raw state, he recasts the shape of the hills in increasingly baroque and contrived forms to show how we try to domesticate nature, embalm it, contain its dark side. And how artists try to tame it through artifice.
There is, for example, a mock 18th-century screen with cloth panels of nymphs and shepherds gambolling across the bleached cotton. For anyone with even a passing relationship with 1950s chenille sofas, or that other 1950s stalwart, the tapestry fireguard, the fabric's images will have an instant resonance.
"We don't like untidiness, displays of appetite, things that distract from our struggle towards some idyllic state of being. We ignore the barbaric savagery of nature and re-create the elements that reflect our civilised selves," says McQuinn.
In a more sinister manifestation, he has fashioned miniature black latex moulds of the shape in various states of evolution - one as smart as a first World War German helmet, another no more than a fried egg, a third in a state of fluid disintegration - perched on regimented rows of infant-school chairs. It is both a disturbing and malevolent sight. But as McQuinn reminds me: "Taste has nothing to do with art."
As I drive back through Fethard, I notice that along with its ancient town walls, its 15th-century church tower and the remains of an Augustinian abbey, the ruins also boast a sheila-nagig. It seems an apt image, after contemplating the worm at the heart of the rural idyll, the holy and the profane, as always, at close quarters.
"Idyll" opens at the Project Arts Centre on September 1st