Artist Statement

 
 
At its core, my art practice explores the transitory and embodied aspects of migration from a perspective that considers personal experience and a legacy of an itinerant family history whose cultural identity is defined by the Irish Diaspora. As a contemporary migrant woman the movement between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, as a lived experience,  provides a sentient touchstone that shapes my ideas, practice and research interests to date. Defining one’s sense of belonging and the never-ending feeling of longing to belong is an ongoing temporal dilemma that has yet to be resolved artistically and emotionally.
 
I am particularly interested in how material language, the rituals and traditions of Western Art’s history has the capacity to articulate, personal and physical spatial experiences into contemporary art objects. As a condition of migration, decoding the complexities of one language into that of another for the purpose of operative communication has conditioned and maintained my deepest curiosity; discovery is made tangible through the process of making.
 
My art-making practice is interdisciplinary. I employ the vehicle of abstract painting and experimental drawing, digital photography and video installation to examine spaces that exist in-between: continents, cultures, the here and now, the here and there. A personal painting and drawing methodology that uses wet and dry mediums, hand made, knitted and woven surfaces and materials are employed to reflect a sensory aesthetic that is engendered and culturally specific. Overall, my art practice is fluid, spontaneous and intuitive, allowing for an open-ended negotiation between processes that find form and at the same time inform one’s understanding of the space that exists between making and thinking.
 
As a condition of practice, my work explores the concept of liminal space, which is described by anthropologist Victor Turner, as ‘a place that is not a place and a time that is not a time’. The implicit ambiguity in this analogy succinctly frames the persistent challenge I encounter as an artist - how to effectually/articulately translate the felt experiences of migration into an accessible aesthetic for ready consumption by proponents of contemporary art.