My practice explores contemporary rural Irish identity through sculpture, printmaking, installation, and performance. Growing up on a farm in County Wexford, I draw on my own experience of moving between agricultural life and contemporary art. I am interested in the tensions that emerge where tradition, community, labour, and cultural expectation meet shifting social realities in rural Ireland. For this body of work, I developed an immersive stage-set installation that combines recorded performance, sculptural elements, printmaking, and found farm materials. Alongside this, I wrote a one-act play based on the true testimonies of young Irish farmers and rural voices I gathered through interviews with farmers, members of Macra na Feirme, and local residents. The script became a way of holding these lived experiences together, translating them into performance. I am inspired by artists such as Laura Fitzgerald, whose approach to narrative and material deeply informed my thinking, and Jon Hozier Byrne, who supported me significantly in developing the structure and direction of my script. I use humour, storytelling, and familiar agricultural objects to create work that is both personal and socially engaged. By bringing together the farm and the studio, I explore my own position between these two worlds while reflecting on wider questions of identity, isolation, belonging, and inherited expectation in rural Ireland today.
