Artists Statement

​Primarily, my art practice and research interests explore the transitory and embodied aspects of a personal experience of migration. Underpinned by the legacy of an itinerant family history that is defined by the Irish Diaspora, my cultural identity, and a sense of belonging is and remains an unresolved condition of migration.  To that end, I continue to move between the Northern and Southern hemispheres searching for visual, and textual touchstones that negotiate the past while informing the present to regenerate ideas.
 
I am particularly interested in the process- material interdependence between drawing and painting, that when modified and expressed in equally represented terms has the visual capacity to translate migration, a current global phenomenon, as felt experience.  As such, thinking through the process of making addresses some of the complexities that surround the question of female migration, but continues to be an ongoing temporal dilemma that I have yet to resolve artistically.
 
My approach to art-making is interdisciplinary.  A fluid, spontaneous and intuitive mark-making strategy connects the two disciplines, drawing and painting that is expressed using traditional materials.  Abstraction is the vehicle that I employ to link form and content as a means to explore the space that exists between making, thinking and feeling.
 
Rendering first-person experience, as such, is characterised by a methodology that I developed during postgraduate studies that weave wet and dry mediums and materials into grid-like sgraffito.  This process is interrupted by free-flowing gestures that might seem disparate but, are interconnected through the space they occupy.  As a visual image, these two opposing forms present a sense of unity through their aesthetic value and variety of line that direct the viewers gaze towards no fixed point, creating an all-over spatial experience.