Institution
National College of Art and Design (NCAD)
Medium
Painting
Graduation Year
Class of 2025
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I don’t follow a clear theme or style or even a medium. I make things the same way a child does: with full imagination, no rules, no need to explain. My art is a kind of becoming, never fixed, never finished, always shifting into something else. I like when people see something in my work that I didn’t, when it sparks a different story in someone else’s head. That feels like the best kind of conversation, one where no one is trying to be right. I paint, draw, write poems, and invent stories. I create from impulse, from urges, from feelings I can't always name. The work isn’t about delivering meaning. It’s about making space: for wonder, for curiosity, for strangeness, for play. I like when I don’t even know what I’ve made. My hope is that the viewer doesn’t just look, but imagines, that they follow their own strange trail through the work, the way I followed mine in making it. Sometimes my pieces nod to people or places I’ve known. Sometimes they’re just fragments of thought or fantasy, things stuck in my head that needed out. Art is a place I go to let things spill, shift, and settle. It relaxes me. This is the poem I used to describe my work for my degree show at NCAD. 'Pegasus' - "When I was little I pulled out my eyelashes with a clip, / I closed it around them, tugged it hard with a grip./ I rubbed them on my head to make hundreds of wishes, / I rubbed my bum on a cat, collected crumbs for the fishes. / Now I paint mountains and horses and willows, / I paint goats and fat babies, I watch people through windows. / I wished for a Creature I could summon by whistle, / Not a pig or a cow or a wasp or a beetle. / I explore and sing songs, forage stones, take flight, / But I can’t whistle or rust or tell my left from my right. / In the forest, casting spells and flicking shit with a stick, / Brushing my hair, and my teeth, having swims in the nip. / No whistle, no creature, my wish can’t be, / But it’s fine, maybe soon — found a spot, had a wee." When I was small, someone told me that if an eyelash falls out, you can make a wish by rubbing it on your head, so I used a hair clip to pull them all out at once. I thought: more eyelashes, more wishes, better chances. On each eyelash I wished for a pegasus to come and pick me up and we would fly away into the clouds. The pegasus never came. I decided it was because I couldn’t whistle for it. I still can’t. But I still believe. And if it turns out one day that I whistle perfectly and nothing arrives, I’ll just come up with something new. I believe in nonsense. I believe in things that don’t add up. I believe in magic. My work is made to make space: for dreaming, for wondering, for noticing things that logic overlooks.
