Institution
National College of Art and Design (NCAD)
Medium
Visual Communication
Graduation Year
Class of 2025
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I am an illustrator and designer based in Dublin. My practice is led by concept and narrative, working across animation, image-making, textiles, and soft sculpture. I’m interested in how emotional states, especially those shaped by absence, memory, and home, can be evoked through visual language and material response while maintaining an aesthetic joy. My illustrative practice expands into movement and spatial forms, as the narratives demand. My final year project, Wish You Were Here x explores how emigration continues to reshape the emotional fabric of home in contemporary Ireland. It is both rooted in personal experience and shared narratives across a generation marked by housing precarity and a fractured sense of belonging.The work holds a tension between themes of loss and childlike playfulness. It uses softness, colour, and tone to express nostalgia, longing, and an underlying hope for change. A series of illustrative textile banners draw on Irish craft and protest traditions. The textiles evoke domesticity and feelings of home, brought into public view, prompting reflection on shared emotional ground. The figures are suspended in a moment that suggests both longing and potential disruption.The soft sculpture takes the form of an imaginary friend. Absurd, tactile, and engaging, it offers comfort in absence. A red heart marked with a harp connects national identity with emotional vulnerability in a gesture that is both satirical and sincere. Textiles became both a practical and thematic tool. It allowed the work to suggest intimacy, domesticity, vulnerability, and comfort in ways that deepened its emotional resonance. The hand-drawn animation moves through memory and imagined ritual, shaped by friendships that define our sense of home in adolescence and early adulthood. Scenes transform from one to the next, echoing how the moments of home often slip away unnoticed at the time.I worked to retain the immediacy of the hand-drawn, using line, gesture, and texture to preserve emotional presence across formats. My work does not seek to define home. It evokes the feeling of it and lingers in what remains.
