Institution
National College of Art and Design (NCAD)
Medium
Media
Graduation Year
Class of 2026
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I am a Meath-born artist working across installation, film, sculpture, and text. My practice examines the historical and personal entanglements embedded within infrastructure, exploring the residual conditions produced by the pursuit of modernity, speed, and efficiency. Through this lens, I question how these ambitions continue to shape contemporary Ireland, influencing both the built environment and everyday lived experience. Growing up in Meath and now living in Dublin has informed my interest in how infrastructure mediates our relationship to place. Roads, public buildings, transport networks, and other systems of movement are often understood as neutral or purely functional, yet they carry complex histories and ideologies that continue to shape how we inhabit, navigate, and understand the landscape. My installation ‘Apply Handbrake in the Moments Prior’ centres the West-Link Bridge and IKEA as sites where the banal and the spectacular convene. Developed in close collaboration with my father, whose career as a mechanic has directly influenced my thinking, the work adopts an automotive material language that reflects both personal memory and wider systems of mobility. An artificial horizon orients the viewer by appropriating the ambient conditions of these interstitial environments, while reams of text and reflective writing produced in response to these locations introduce a temporality that resists the logic of perpetual motion and infrastructural efficiency. Operating at the intersection of documentation, speculation, and material intervention, my work asks: what does it mean to move beneath a high-speed motorway bridge? Can harmony exist within the edgelands of motorways, car parks, or data centres? Rather than treating these environments as merely functional, I approach them as spaces of memory, uncertainty, and everyday experience, where histories of progress, failure, labour, and belonging remain embedded within the contemporary Irish landscape.
