Artist Profile

I am a visual artist working with photography, text and moving image, recently expanding my practice into other forms such as Super 8 film, fabric and string. This development reflects my keen interest in material culture and string/thread as an often underlooked artform. I have been making art projects since c.2007 with a track record of exhibiting both nationally and internationally over my career to date.

Over the course of my practice I have engaged with a range of concepts within the scope of space and place. The former Irish Times critic Aidan Dunne framed my practice well when he wrote that as an artist I am “often drawn to spaces that are contrived, or odd, or uneasy in ways revealing of human life and relations” (The Irish Times, 7/03/2017). He was referring to themes such as ‘extraterritorial spaces’ and ‘self- storage spaces’ to which I turned my camera lens and were also well received exhibitions. Ultimately, ‘space and place’ and, from my background in psychology, the human dimension within this most interest me.

I pursue interdisciplinarity, am research-led in my practice often blending ideas from science and art. Tadgh O’Keeffe (Archaeology, UCD) commented on foot of my doctoral work on seismicity and landscape that  "... [it] represents what cross-disciplinarity should be about, which is not so much about finding common ground as finding the new ground that can be created by examining the boundaries between disciplines; it is appropriate that your thesis achieves this rare feat given that seismic activity itself often creates new ground."

In summary, most of all I aspire to combine the strange with the familiar: to create a way of seeing the world through a different, slightly distorting lens making room for what is hidden within the seen.

Career Milestones:

I have been an artist [photography] since 2007, having had a previous career in organisational psychology, spanning nearly twenty years. I returned to graduate studies undertaking a degree in photography from the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland and early career successes included exhibiting twice in EV+A, Mermaid Arts Centre, SCAN, Tarragona, Spain, amongst others. Instrumental to my continued development, I completed practice-led doctoral studies in 2012 and joined the lecturing team at IADT from 2013-2023.

The practice-led PhD in Photography was titled Terra Incognita: Photography, Seismology and the Imagining of Southern California. Carried out at University College Dublin's Clinton Institute of American Studies, the research was one of the first practice-led PhDs to receive funding through the Irish Research Council (IRCHSS). I explored the unsettled, fault-lined landscape of Southern California through landscape and portrait images, and combined fieldwork practices, found objects, maps, and moving image in the final body of work which was exhibited in UCD Research Building, June 2012.

Space and Place in the context of California's social history and its representation has continued to inspire some elements of my practice whilst my interests also broadened in scope to focus on conceptual documentary projects. I created a body of work titled 'Extraterritorial Spaces' from c.2007-2012, visiting the reception rooms of embassies in Dublin, where crossing the threshold of the building became akin to crossing a border. This work was exhibited for the first time in EV+A - Ireland’s leading contemporary international art biennale and was selected for international exhibitions in Mumbai and Spain. It was last exhibited in 2022 in PhotoIreland’s Museum of Contemporary Photography group show. 'Mausoleums of Precious Belongings' was created over the course of 2012-2016 and was interested in exploring self-storage spaces around Dublin. It included portraits and quotes from interviews with the strangers I met in the storage space where people talked about why they were storing their belongings. It was solo exhibited in DLR Lexicon in 2017 and was one of the shortlisted exhibitions of 2017 by The Irish Times. It featured in Photo Museum Ireland ‘Politics of Place’ group exhibition (2024).

Along the way, I was also collecting obituaries from the Los Angeles Times and in 2021, I published and exhibited The Long Disease: LA Stories. The exhibition in RHA Ashford Gallery was identified as in the Top 10 exhibitions of 2021 by The Telegraph (UK) newspaper.

More recently, I have been inspired by exploring 19th century histories of relatively little known women aiming to weave potentially new and different narratives through photography and other media which have relevancy in our contemporary world. In this work I am focussing on Lola Montez. Some of these ideas can be reviewed in ‘work-in-progress’ sections of portfolio. 

Ultimately, themes of ‘the human condition’ most interest me - in a sense drawing from early interests in psychology - and mindful that ‘in the particular, is contained the universal’ (Joyce).

See Resumé and Exhibitions for more details.