STATEMENT OF WORK

My work considers the absences in the record of Irish material culture and thinks about the ways in which this loss of cultural memory relates to our history of emigration. I am interested in constructing a speculative art history, imagining what a "lost" art history of the Irish diaspora might have looked like. My painting practice and research interests are further informed by my own family history of emigration and the contradictions and absurdities bound up in this experience.

Ireland's rich traditions of mythology and story-telling has also been an important source for the work. Imagining how these traditions, along with artistic currents from elsewhere, might have informed an indigenous material culture has been a great source of fascination for me. My work speculates about the connections between the folk cultures of Irish emigrés and the cultures that they encountered on their emigrational journeys.

My paintings are often on jute. This material, because of its long use in global trade to carry commodities around the world, has associations with the movement of people, ideas and culture. Sculptures, and hybrid painting/ sculptural objects, which are suggestive of a ritual or magical function, have been a recent development in my practice. The materials of the work play with the notion of time. Clay, sticks, oil paint, rough jute, nails and varnish echo artists from earlier centuries working across mainstream European, African and folk art idioms. The works play with imagery and languages from historically and temporally disparate cultures, compressing time and history into the immediate space of the canvas or the sculpture. With this compression of time, the work can be read as a reimagining of an alternative indigenous visual culture- a speculative art history projected into the voids created by emigration and colonisation.