Institution
MTU Crawford College of Art and Design (MTU CCAD)
Medium
Installation
Graduation Year
Class of 2025
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My installation 'A Tail of Two' navigates the shifting boundaries between the human and the more-than-human. Working across drawing, animation, and installation, I explore the self and otherness through a lens of Irish folklore—guided by the Púca, a shapeshifting trickster spirit. In my practice, the Púca is not simply a subject but a methodology: a way of working that embraces transformation, intuition, and the unknown. The work revisits and responds to archival footage from my infancy, where I appear playing with my shadow as a double or animal other. This footage is projected onto a circular screen suspended above a reflective base, framing the self not as fixed or singular, but as shaped through ongoing encounters over time—with stories, places, and others, both human and non-human. These early experiences resonate in three large-scale charcoal works, where figures shift between human, non-human, and hybrid states. I use charcoal to render shadowy beings that behave as guides—simultaneously familiar and uncanny, informed by mythic and ecological entanglements. Each drawing becomes a threshold or mirror, emerging through intuitive processes of mark-making, erasure, and discovery. The drawings lead towards a stop-motion animation, which follows the Púca on a metamorphic journey through shifting terrains, where beings continually transform. This piece reflects on identity, myth, and reciprocity—where creatures, narratives, and marks converge in a world of constant flux. By reconnecting with the embodied gestures of my childhood and drawing from tales of the Púca, my work engages with ecological consciousness, the multiplicity of being, and challenges to anthropocentric frameworks—through the perspective of the self/other as shapeshifter.
