I use my practice to address and treat personal and societal wounds. Using cob, historically a vernacular building material of the Irish working class, consisting of subsoil, sand, straw and water; I host ‘Meitheal’s’ translating into English as “the working gang/group”. This cultural tradition is the way in which the working class Irish communities came together to accomplish goals, supplementing their lack of recourses, wealth and materials with community, sharing and collaboration. The combination of this embodied material and this culturally relevant methodology is the way in which I confront my wounded sense of relationship which resulted from my experience of the Irish foster care system and the events that led me there as a child. Now in my adult life, I look to indigenous knowledge and the wisdom in our cultural histories to empower myself in the present and reconcile a defined sense of place and purpose. My work is an intentional yoga, a process that forces me to do what I find most difficult, to sincerely connect with and trust others, relying on them and inviting them into my world with vulnerability. Over the course of many months, I worked with friends and family, strangers and the estranged, directly in dialogue with not only my own trauma and core beliefs but those shared by my family. My earthen multiples are thus a visual measurement representing these extensive physical and emotional processes or explorations. I have seen the transformative potential of these practices on the lives of my immediate community and myself. I am now absolutely determined to share this practice as a socially engaged artist, offering a humble remedy for the broader, increasingly devastating isolation crisis that afflicts contemporary societies in the West today.
