My work is interested in investigating the nature of what defines a place; its specific qualities, within its geographical, cultural and socio-historical context. Working through a variety of media including sculpture, drawing, installation, photography and archival research, my practice is rooted in a desire to understand connections between the past and present, across geopolitical boundaries and different cultural, linguistic, political and other traditions.
At the core of my practice is an exploration of the sense of identity and location within place and connections across time. Working through sculptural processes and materials across disciplines, I consider the distinct characteristics of places, people and communities, the geographies of memory and the histories of the material and also the intangible – to question what has become the dominant narrative.
I am a current active learner of Irish and my recent work has employed Irish texts from a range of archival and other sources to create sculptural-typographic work that responds to its location and context. Over the last few years I have become fascinated by the Look-Out Posts as signifiers of Ireland’s complex twentieth-century history in relation to the tectonic shifts of the 1940s. I am also drawn to their locations at the extreme geographical points of the Irish coastline and their inherent function to this day as nodes between land and sea and sky, places for watching, observing, and today for peaceful contemplation.
