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Art-Making

Silence/If the stillness is volcanic

Works on paper

2022-2023

This series of prints, drawings, and mixed media works on paper circle around tensions between withholding and expression. They incorporate volcanic imagery, as well as traces of disappeared and in-between spaces. The subtitle comes from an Emily Dickinson poem.

These works were made in tandem with the writing of my hybrid memoir, The Shape of Silence.

Related pages

Art-Making

My current work engages with (disappearing, diasporic, and minor) languages and their landscapes as intertwined topographies, using the Irish language (Gaeilge) as a departure point. Related video, photos, and prints explore orality and the resonance of language. Other work in progress uses language to enter Irish immigrant history, the complexities of identity, and my experiences in the present-day US. These works are unfolding in parallel with my hybrid book in progress, Between Language– A Love Song.

Forthcoming exhibitions include a 2026 solo exhibition at Suli T. Go gallery at Kahilu Theatre, Hawai’i, that will explore shared values and imaginaries in Gaeilge (Irish) and Ōlelo Hawai’i. In recent years, I have worked on an experimental play that engages with cultural belief systems and the limits of knowledge, and two lecture performances that seek to challenge hierarchies in the perceived cultural value of art. A further series of multi-media works on paper has engaged with cultural silences, withholding, and expression in tandem with my cross-genre book, The Shape of Silence.

My installations, video, photography, performance, printmaking, and artist’s books have been included in solo and group exhibitions in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the US. I have recently performed, screened, or staged readings of my work at venues such as the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland; Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Otis; Concordia University, Montreal; the Public Nature series at Ramona Art Farm, Portland; Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans, and 1430 Contemporary, Portland.

I was a year-long project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation, Portland (2024-5), with other recent and upcoming residencies at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, California (2023); Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Oregon (2025); Camp Colton, Oregon (2024, 2025), and Vermont Studio Center (2026).

Selected Recent Work

Artmaking is an exercise in precision and ambiguity. Each closer examination reveals another hidden gesture, a play between withholding and expressing. Sometimes I think that everything I have ever made is a collage. An oscillation between materiality and metaphor, an attempt to open up cracks between surfaces.