My practice is informed by personal history, religion, symbolism and human experience. I use my work to confront maternal anguish within my heritage that remains silenced. I aim to give a voice of defiance in reflection of the psychological and physical maltreatment to Ireland’s so called ‘fallen’ women under Catholic and patriarchal ruling. My research also looks to a global relation of mirrored experience, heavily impacted in the past by broader agenda of Papal supremacy in relation to the rights to one’s choice of continuity to motherhood. My work is individual to my experience as a child of a woman in grief of another. There remained a silent despair lingering that one of us would always be missing, a reconnection would always be a struggle, correspondence would be slow and held in review by others and remorse would hang over her head in attempt to rebuild her family. The impact of her hardship relayed anger in me and charged my work with emotion, to be a voice for her. I in turn create boldly with loud colour, telling a narrative through print and stained-glass utilising family photographs and sacred iconography to superimpose religious, political and personal imagery that aims to play on Ireland’s past heretical exploit. My work is a contribution to art for change, in reconciliation of those that are no longer with us.
