Between Growth and Ground, 2024, 60cm x 40cm, Pigment Print
My practice emerges from chance encounters with the world, moments where I as subject meet place, material, and light as object. Working across painting, photography, video and installation, I allow things to present themselves rather than imposing predetermined meaning upon them.
I come from a family of makers, shoemakers, cabinet makers, painters, dressmakers, and trained as a cabinet maker from age twelve. This lineage of craft informs how I understand materials through the hand's knowledge. My BA in Fine Art Painting from NCAD evolved toward photography in my final year, yet painting has remained central, informing my approach to weight, balance, pattern and form through the lens.
Influenced by Lee Ufan's philosophy of encounters with the other, Richard Serra's spatial investigations, Tacita Dean's patient attention to time and materiality, and the documentary traditions of Robert Adams and Alec Soth, my work seeks to reveal a sense of humanity in each encounter. After a decade leading Gorey School of Art, where artists come first and education follows, my return to exhibiting in 2025 was catalysed by the loss of my friend John "Bonzo" Byrne. The investigation continues, seeking those liminal spaces where my own subjectivity meets the world, where encounters become the substance of the work itself.
Temple of Hephaistos, 2005, Lamda Print on Aluminium
Space and Place, 2005, installation of 7 artist made projectors, MDF, glass optics, photographic slide, light, dimensions variable
Beginning at NCAD in the late 1990s, through painting I discovered that photography and installation. This understanding deepened through working with sculptor Michael Warren, an experience that profoundly shaped my appreciation for the subtle interplay of light, form, and human presence within environments both natural and built. My MFA in Art in the Digital World (2004-2006) crystallised this approach. In *Space and Place* and *Genius Loci*, I explored the Acropolis not as a tourist destination but as a site of layered meanings, social, historical, personal. Using handmade projectors whose proportions referenced Greek architecture, I created installations where moving images acted on each other through calculated and chance juxtapositions. Light became the constant element, the transformative force that activated space and created thresholds between seen and unseen worlds.
Genius loci, 2006, 2 video projections, 243cm high timber structures, dimensions variable
This work, investigating topophilia and the genius loci, the hidden spirit of place, garnered national and international recognition. My lens-based practice appeared in exhibitions from Dublin to New York to Shanghai, and in 2006 Patrick J. Murphy commented in the OPW publication *Reflections*, accompanying art purchased for the Irish Government's collection, that my work demonstrated the potential in lens-based art at the time. In 2009, I was an invited artist, to exhibit at Éigse Art Festival in Carlow alongside other invited artists including Jackie Nickerson.
Here Nor There, 2009, MDF, gesso, acrylic paint, bitumen tar, gloss paint, vinyl, lamdachrome prints, dibond and acrylic glass.
In 2011, I became Director of Gorey School of Art, a centre I had helped co-found in 2003. What followed was not an abandonment of artistic practice but its expansion into new territory. Over the next decade, I channelled the same values that animated my installations, transformation, threshold-making, collective meaning, into building a vibrant centre for contemporary art. I developed Periphery Space, providing support and mentorship to emerging artists across the Southeast. I established programmes ensuring arts accessibility for learners from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with disabilities. I secured funding for state-of-the-art facilities. This work of fostering creative expression, of creating spaces where others could find their voices, was deeply connected to everything I had explored through my art practice. The hiatus from exhibiting was not absence, it was a different form of practice, one that honoured the communal alongside the personal. During these years, my focus expanded to include what matters most: family, the daily rhythms of home, the quiet work of building sustainable structures for art and life.
My practice now stands at the convergence of all these experiences: the technical rigour and conceptual frameworks of my early career, the deep community engagement and knowledge from the GSA years, and the wisdom that comes from loss, from family, from the passage of time. The dialogue between the tangible and the ephemeral continues, but with greater understanding of what is at stake, and what endures.