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Art-Making

After Difference

Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland

9 April 2020

Unpacking two ceramic works by Soji Hamada and Bernard Leach from the Oregon Craft Museum as a material departure points, this lecture performance unpicks the complexity of these artist-craftsmen’s renowned “East-West” dialogue, provoking reflections on sanctioned “difference” in the creation of artistic value. Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, OR.

Cancelled due to Covid-19 pandemic.

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. This multi-year project is unfolding in parallel with my hybrid book in progress, Between Language. 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 prints and collage work has engaged with transgenerational trauma and cultural silences, 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