Institution
Belfast School of Art, Ulster University
Medium
Installation
Graduation Year
Class of 2026
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I am a queer and neurodivergent, multi-disciplinary artist, currently specialising in drawing, sculpture, and performance. My practice explores moments in the everyday and mundane where the abject body is at a threshold, caught in jeopardy physically, mentally, or through sensory inputs. A foundation of this practice is an interest in storytelling and worldbuilding, which I develop through drawings of “my ladies” existing within their void, liminal world that parallels our own. In the face of rapidly increasing femicide and domestic violence statistics in a post-conflict North of Ireland, my ladies act as narrators for my installation to explore how misogyny and surveillance directly impact female presenting bodies within the domestic sphere. My current body of work specifically interrogates how “tout” culture in the North of Ireland uses the ordinary person as a scapegoat to blame or threaten into silence, especially marginalised, vulnerable people, rather than paramilitary activity or the government. I consider how, within these systems of injustice, there is a voyeuristic expectation for the ordinary person to silently observe or dismiss pain and suffering of others/self to benefit authoritative figures, especially within online algorithms. I also explore “hard lad” culture in the age of the “manosphere” and its associated toxic masculinity, interested in void devotions and mass mind washing to appraise the cisgender white male. I investigate these ideologies using taxidermy to explore female-animal relationships in terms of Aristotelian tradition, which places marginalised humans and non-humans together at the bottom of the patriarchal, anthropocentric hierarchy to justify cisgender, white, male domination and oppression. Considering transgressive ideas of becoming, I use the motif of the fish as an animal I am unable to become with all its blokey associations, only feminine or neutral when it has been caught, devoured, or associated with female genitals in a derogatory fashion. I aim to question the authority of perversion and subversion, and who gave some hard lad bloke in tighty whities his ma washed for him that much power anyways? If you or someone you know is suffering from domestic or sexual abuse, you can contact the domestic and sexual abuse helpline at 0808 802 1414 or info@dsahelpline.org, anonymously and free of charge. You will be contacted when it is safe to do so, within 24 hours. If your matter is urgent, you can contact emergency services at 999.
