Institution
National College of Art and Design (NCAD)
Medium
Sculpture
Graduation Year
Class of 2025
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I am a Sligo based artist recently graduated from NCAD. I have always had a love for working with my hands; carving wood, moulding clay, pouring casts, building installations, embroidery, folding paper. Regardless of the materials I work with, the thing that has always drawn me to sculpture as a medium is the slow process of forming an idea in my head into a physical object, using my hands. As a student of both sculpture and visual culture, my research practice and my art practice have always been intrinsically linked. The ideas, inspiration and insights formed from my visual culture research projects directly inform and influence my art work.In general, both my artistic and research practices tend to revolve around themes of; culture, identity, community, perception, ecologies & biodiversity, Irish mythology, sensitive objects, social media & communication in the digital age, postcolonial & anticolonial practices, and deception. In terms of media, I mostly work with wood, metal, paper, found materials, video, and various casting materials. I enjoy working with salvaged and reused materials where possible, as I have a keen interest in environmentalism and sustainability. My most recent project, titled: “W.atch(ed) C.losely” addresses both my own concerns around surveillance in the digital age, as well as my tendency to try and avoid the perception of others when in public. I sometimes get overwhelmed with the feeling of being “Too Observed”, and a public toilet stall is something of a sanctuary for me during these times, as they tend to be small, private, and free of cameras. For this piece, I constructed a full sized toilet stall, covered with one-way mirrors. I wanted to offer a space for people like me, who would like to watch the crowd passing, without the crowd watching them back. I also wanted to provide an opportunity to those visiting who do not share my tendency to hide, to enter into what I would usually consider a private sanctuary, and perhaps experience some of the peace that toilet stalls tend to offer me, despite their somewhat “disgusting” reputation. The inside of the “toilet” stall held a projection of hours of video footage of myself, captured mostly from publicly available live webcams -from places such as a busy boardwalk in my hometown, and the inside of my local church- as well as a live doorbell camera, an item that has become increasingly popular in homes in the past several years. The outside of the stall held cyanotypes of the cameras used to capture the footage. These video feeds - accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a screen - have become seemingly ubiquitous in recent years. This project was my way of asking: ‘At what point should we put a stop to this? How comfortable can we become with surveilling ourselves, and each other, before the damage starts to show?’Currently, I am re-focusing on process based work, carving wood sculptures and developing cyanotypes at home in Sligo, working on developing my physical making skills before I start in on my next research based project.
