Artist Statement

         Born to an Irish Mother and a British Father in England in the 1960s as a child I moved to Ireland at the height of the so-called troubles in the 1970s. I grew up keenly aware of the political border and religious struggles between my place of birth and the Republic of Ireland where I now live. This conflict, with all its complicated histories, has directly formed my identity and my sense of place. These religious and political borders that clearly still exist in today’s contemporary world are the major focus, difficulty, and issues that inform my artwork.

 

         Through abstract painted images, installation, and sculpture I use my own experiences to reflect this undercurrent of political concerns. This discourse is reflected in my working methods and materials, which includes boards, bricks, plastic sheets and gloss paint, that I splash, drip, pour, and scrape to produce marks and traces left behind by the undervalued the desperate and those with little agency. I have used the grid and more recently geometry to generate and test surfaces and colour combinations. For me, process-driven abstraction is a means to capture an emotion or a mood, it is not located in formal discussions of paint. The behaviour of the paint ‘escaping’ or ‘leaving’ the canvas and the way the surface of the paint wrinkles and moves, either by gravity or by the moulding and shaping of the paint, becomes a metaphor for human agency.

 

         In these ways, the work addresses and uncovers these violent borders, walls, and zones, highlighting the two sides of any division; those inside and outside, or those with and those without. This for me is the clearest metaphor for our increasingly disparate world which is full of division, displacement, forced migration, and segregation. The work then seeks to create a dialogue, and by the act of engaging with the sculptural form, to physically ask the viewer to consider their role in this ongoing tension and resolution.