Institution
National College of Art and Design (NCAD)
Medium
Installation
Graduation Year
Class of 2025
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I am a textile and mixed media artist whose practice is rooted in lived experience, matrilineal memory, and material culture. As a maker, I work with fabric, found objects, archival materials, and sensory elements to explore the emotional weight of domestic spaces, inherited objects, and intergenerational storytelling. My work often engages all five senses—incorporating scent, sound, taste, touch, and visual composition—to create immersive, tactile installations that honour the overlooked details of care, grief, and connection. 'A Love Letter to My Mothers' is a deeply personal exploration of matrilineal memory, domestic labor, and the quiet objects that carry our stories. My practice is grounded in material culture, particularly the emotional weight held in textiles—garments, fabrics, and everyday heirlooms passed from hand to hand, generation to generation. This body of work began with the garments sewn by my great-grandmother Bridie, a woman whose stitches formed the foundation of my family’s story. From there, I gathered letters and cards exchanged between the women in my family over the past 50 years—intimate traces of care, distance, and connection. Alongside these are found objects of personal significance, fragments that have traveled with us and now find new life as part of this unfolding archive. Using a fabric heat press, stitching, and appliqué, I create photographs and artefact labels that echo the tactile language of home. These processes are not simply techniques; they are gestures—rooted in the rhythms of mothering, making, and remembering. Through them, I work to preserve the ephemeral: the handwriting of a mother, the careful hem of a dress, the pattern of an old card. The final piece in this collection—three antimacassars made for an inherited armchair—marks both an ending and a return. It is a moment of stillness, a soft closure, and a gesture of care for the place where memory rests. This work is not only a tribute to the women who shaped me, but a way of keeping them close—stitched into the fabric of then.
