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Art-Making

cloch: 42 words for stone

2024–, In progress.

cloch: 42 words for stone [working title] is a body of video work, photography, and mixed media prints, taking disappearing (Gaelic) words as an entry point into personal and collective (postcolonial) imaginaries. An exploration of alternative forms of knowledge, and the possibility of decolonizing the tongue and mind.

Art-Making

I am currently working on a body of video and mixed media work, entitled Cloch: 42 words for stone, which engages with (disappearing, diasporic, and minor) languages and their landscapes as intertwined topographies. Together with related drawings and prints exploring orality, this project is unfolding in parallel with my hybrid book in progress, Between Language– A Love Song. In recent years, I have also worked on an experimental play, engaging with cultural belief systems and the limits of knowledge, and two lecture performances that challenge hierarchies in perceived cultural value in 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 artistic practice has encompassed installation, video, photography, performance, prints, and artist’s books, with solo and group exhibitions and performances in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the US. Venues include Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; Aachener Kunstverein, Germany; 1430 Contemporary, Portland, US, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland; The Globe Gallery, Newcastle, UK; Mehrwert e.v., Aachen, Germany; Wexford Arts Center, Wexford, Ireland; Basement Gallery, Dundalk, Ireland; Art Hive, Cork, Ireland; Bilderhaus Bornemann Galerie, Germany; Outpost Venice, Italy; Lavitt’s Quay Gallery, Cork; and the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, US. My artist’s books are held in the New York Public Library art collection.

Selected Recent Work

Artmaking is an exercise in precision and ambiguity. Each closer examination reveals another hidden gesture, a repetition foregrounding difference, a play between withholding and expressing. Sometimes I think that everything I have ever made is a collage. An attempt to open up cracks between surfaces, an oscillation between materiality and metaphor. An incessant dialogue that never stops preceding and extending itself beyond itself