I create figurative, expressive oil paintings. My work explores the use of paint to capture the relationship between specific moments of perception, emotion, and memory. I sift through found imagery and imagery from my own personal photographic archive, and I piece them together. Different visual motifs merge through paint to collapse time and perspective to create a new, dream-like reality. The imagery is ambiguous and open, free from any specific narrative; the figures are anonymous, blocking themselves from view, or painted in a way that they fade from easy perception. Tensions between conflicting images and how they interact through paint creates an otherworldly, uncanny atmosphere. Reoccurring motifs permeate the work to build a visual language: empty chairs, figures in altered states, murmurations, strange taxidermy. I’m interested in how memories and emotions can be triggered by paintings, how the symbology of mundane, everyday objects can have charged emotional significance, and how paintings can transport the viewer somewhere else. The titles are as Gaeilge to intertwine the works ideas and emotions to the Irish language; it’s richness, complexity and its intrinsic connection to the landscape and our internal worlds.
