Using paper printed texts and plant materials current work explores the collection and classification of plants. Much of this work is concerned with the relationship between botany and colonialism.
Images include:
Individual commisioned work based on Victorian specimins under glass.
Work created for “Aground” 2016, a site specific visual arts exhibition and event by Loci artist’s group as part of the Donegal Centenary Cultural Expression programme for 2016/1916. Instaled in the Masonic hall in Moville, Donegal, in the South of Ireland, the illustrated work explored aspects of cultural identity and narratives of ‘Irishness’ associated with the potato and the shamrock.
The triptych “Migrating Species” 2019 uses the notion of ‘native’ flora to question notions of nationalism, migration and belonging.
These work all play with illusion and realism shifting between realistic rendering of specimens and less finished details that highlight the illusion of any finite explanation or knowledge of a given subject.
All works are lifesize in scale. Made using mixed media, original documents, books and other papers.
“Every photograph is a certificate of a presence, a reality one can no longer touch”
Roland Barthe
Many of the images in this exhibition have been photographed from the original manuscripts plates in historical atlases of anatomy and pathology. The original act of drawing from life has been retraced on the computer lifting these images out of their original context allowing an opportunity to explore our shared fear and fascination of our inner body.
The work has all been produced through digital technology. Scanning electron microscope images, that allow us to see blood cells in minute detail, sit along with life sized pinhole photographs of dissected bodies dissolving into darkness.
We are confronted with the presence of many artists, many lenses through which the images are filtered before they pass through the lens of the viewer’s own eye. When we look at an image we are always seeing through someone else’s eyes.
We are looking at medical images but the authority of the institution is stripped away. The objectivity of the images is unsettled by their removal from a medical context. We are no longer looking at ‘the’ body but a particular body.
Within the largescale pinhole images the individual bodies occupy a life sized space but each body is fragmented - they remain elusively lost in darkness. The more sharply focused circular images allow us to look closely but we are never allowed the whole picture - something is always beyond the frame. Even with the minute detail of blood cells seen through a scanning electron microscope we are faced with what we cannot see.
Visceral Knowledge was funded through an Engaging Science Award from the Wellcome Trust and produced during a Research Fellowship in the Anatomy Department of the School of Medicine at Queens University Belfast.
We photograph to preserve our memories our children’s innocence, youth and beauty. Not only does cancer affect the practical possibilities of all these photographic moments the very act of remembering is loaded.
When your child is diagnosed with cancer you entre another world. Your relationship to the world makes a shift as monumental as the one that took place when you became a parent. The medical staff take responsibility for the disease, others offer support, but the parent, most often the mother, carries the child through the new world as if repeating their gestation.
The mother of a child with a life threatening disease occupies an ambiguous place. The disease is in the child’s body not her own. Yet the separation of adulthood has not taken place, their physical and emotional connection and dependency is still intense.
The role of mother is conflicting, physically and emotionally she nurtures the child yet she colludes with the medical world to hurt her. She has to give the child’s body over to be examined, touched, probed and poisoned. Rather than encouraging her growing independence the mother must restrict and isolate her child from the world.
With cancer comes a renegotiation with life, with time. When it occurs in childhood this renegotiation has an even greater urgency and poignancy. The child with cancer exists within two worlds of significance, which attempt to fix her as an individual. Childhood and cancer are socially imagined and constructed by those outside the experience. These photographs explore some of the struggles and constraints of the worlds they have entered.
These pictures are the product of imagination and a child’s presence. They offer glimpses of a world that is always changing, vanishing, coming into being.
This exhibition takes the form of a trunk or travelling chest containing the clothes of emigrants from Scotland and Ireland around the turn of the century. Made individually and in collaboration with women living in Glasgow, Derry and Donegal. Each garment represents someone whose real existence has been visibly restored by women now living in these places touched by emigration.
The work was concerned with discovering and making visible the past of individual emigrants who have remained voiceless and unseen by history. There is a wealth of written material on emigration, but for the most part emigration remains a dense image of the masses: The individual identity of the person is lost in transit. In Ireland emigration is, even now associated with a strong sense of loss, in the past wakes were held for those who were leaving.
These garments form a series of monuments. Cloth, as it is folded and unfolded, stored away and unpacked, seems suitable for representing memory. Shroud-like the works in this exhibition suggest a sense of the clothed body or presence of the person. Placed in the old Derry harbour office boardroom. The walls are lined with the painted portraits of those men who controlled the shipping. The room and the portraits are dark. The faces of the men appear dimly out of these oil paintings. Women and children, who may have entered the room as servants, shadows in the background now are bright and unlike the men these emigrants have both body and face.
“With time history must become a fairy tale it becomes once again what it was at the beginning.”
Novalis, Werke und Brief, Ed. Alfred Kelletat
A series of hand printed C type colour photographs based on Celtic fairy tales. The work concentrates on female characters within the tales, exploring elements that are recurrent in Irish stories. These images celebrate the oral history that preserved deities worshipped in Celtic religion before the conversion to Christianity. The work is a response to the vivid and powerful visual imagery of shape changing, animal symbolism and strong female characters within these tales.
All of these images were produced in camera using slide projections within the images retaining the richness and the multiplicity of meanings within the tales. The images like the tales are unsettling, mysterious not easily read.
FRAGMENTS NARRATIVE
Fragments of the Past was made individually and in collaboration with local older people, the work taking many forms including; written texts on papyrus and on scrolls of paper, an audio tape of personal memories and stories and photographic images of objects from the collection of the original Belfast Museum.
In creating this work the half forgotten, former life of the building was unearthed. The observations of local older people were placed together with images of the objects from the collection of the original Belfast Museum. Objects that had once filled the rooms did so once again but now transformed into photographic images. The museum objects became survivors or witnesses of past events, accusations of what had been missed by the museums collectors.
The historian’s facts and the museum's objects are never neutral but are selected and interpreted subjectively. They depend on their position in time and the objectives of those who use them. The same period which had seen the amassing of the museum’s collections had seen the mass dispersal of the poorer Irish population.
The Old Museum Art Centre in Belfast. Originally built in 1831 to house the collection of the Belfast Natural History Society, this was the first provincial museum in Ireland. The Belfast Museum was founded by Victorian gentlemen full of the fervour of their time for the acquisition and organisation of natural and anthropological objects. The founders and members of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, gathered together objects from the four corners of the earth.
Implicit in the collecting, classification and ordering of things is a process of fragmentation.
These objects have all been removed from their natural scientific order placed in strange and imaginary orders. These represented objects escape the reduction of the nineteenth century museum’s classification. Provoking us to extend our reading, to invest the objects with more of the imaginary, the symbolic and the mythical.”
Much of my work has been a development of effective ways of collaboration with others. I am interested in a deffinition of the artist that is based in relationship with others one that redefines the role of the artist in the work of art. An artistic identity formed in association with others, one that accepts as central the shared or social nature of our perceptions and understandings.
