Delighted to be part of this show.

Cork was the place my Dad went to for treatment for cancer in the 90s. When I should have been in school I was in the hospital opposite Wilton, where the library was built some 15 years later. We use to walk across to Wilton for tea, just to people watch and to get away from his illness. He use to come with us. Sometimes in his wheelchair. All these years later my art is in an exhibition there. He would have just loved that. He was a farmer with a poet’s soul that didn’t know how to tap into it. But I do. Funny thing is the first art I sold went into an important public collection in the Cork School of Music…Dad was an avid banjo player and would have been beside himself that my work is in such an important institution. Anyway, this is a great exhibition, the talent of Cork Textiles Network is……unreal. I don’t have the words for it. Just go…just go.

February 2023 – Bishopstown Library, “A Bale of Horses” with Cork Textiles Network’s Re-emerging . 2nd February – 28th February

Artist Statement

I create visual poems/poetry objects, sometimes in response to the poetry collections by Beir Bua Press. The work can be read as a veiled graffiti steaming up as ribbons or words minced by the pulmonary postmodern machine as if a deck shuffled by tornadoes. I’ve never been the best at précis…as an artist, I am constantly exploring the intersections between Irish heritage and the visual arts. Despite being seemingly disparate fields, heritage and art share a common ground in their focus on visual culture, material history, and the ways objects can speak to larger issues such as aesthetics, identity, and social relationships. Both disciplines are shaped by discourse and engage with the complexities of Irish female representation, Hiberno-English language and Colonisation. I play with space, form and expose moulds. I am particularly interested in how these shared concerns can be used to challenge and subvert traditional notions of historical time and place, and in the ways in which both heritage and the visual arts can be viewed as performative acts. I am drawn to acts of deconstructing language and reconstructing poetry objects from fibre, copper weaving, concrete, paint and label it Irish “indigenous” tapestry art. I am intrigued to imagine it as art discovered in a bog field; blued and tarnished copper weaving with textile – a surrealist mythology. Or creating a poetry object and not sure if it is a charcoal drawing of a 3D object made from concrete. And begging questions of alternative Irish Art History. An overarching theme is the feminine meeting the masculine through the act of digging – digging into concrete, digging into paint, exposing the shadow and leaving it rest for the viewer to finish its potential. Essentially my art holds space for  intention to divorce meaning/attachment/ and the perceptions of the reader/viewer to dig up new meaning.