Solo exhibition – Working Artist Studios, Ballydehob, Co.Cork May 2026
Contents May Settle in Transit marks a significant shift within my practice. While my work has previously centred on materially driven sculptural processes, this body of work moves into painting as a primary medium while continuing my ongoing research into intergenerational memory, female experience, and the unseen structures that shape identity.
The work emerged through an extended period of reading, conversation, observation, and studio experimentation. During this time, I became increasingly interested in the ethics of perception and the ways women’s lived experiences are shaped, edited, and understood. Thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil informed this process, particularly ideas around attention, responsibility, and the act of looking.
The paintings are built slowly through accumulation, concealment, interruption, and removal. Layers of colour, marks, pattern, and texture are laid down and partially obscured. Rather than constructing a figure through addition, I work reductively — painting out the surrounding surface so that forms begin to emerge from within the layers themselves.
I often think of the process as:
“when the noise is painted out, the figure that was always there is revealed.”
The figures remain faceless or partially withheld, resisting fixed identity or easy narrative. Areas are deliberately obscured, echoing the ways histories are edited, redacted, authorised, and retold — both institutionally and personally. The work is informed not only by my own experiences, but also by years of facilitating community creative workshops and conversations with women whose stories often existed quietly beneath the surface of everyday life.
Framing forms an important part of the process. Each work is carefully considered in relation to how it is physically contained and presented, reflecting wider ideas around narrative construction and control. In Preparing to Depart, the large-scale painting featured on the exhibition poster, a hand-stitched blanket stitch surrounds the work. The stitch acts both materially and metaphorically — suggesting care, containment, repair, support, and the passing of knowledge across generations.
Rather than offering certainty, the exhibition sits within ambiguity and partial recognition. It asks what it means to look closely, what remains unseen, and how much of a life can ever truly be understood.
