Artist Statement

My practice explores materiality, instability and the stories through which we understand the world. Working from my Irish-English heritage, I am interested in how collective beliefs, inherited narratives and social structures shape our understanding of place, identity and belonging.

I approach these ideas through painting, using material processes to explore the tension between what appears stable and what remains uncertain.

Working with earth, clay and mineral matter, I introduce synthetic pigments and unexpected ingredients, allowing different substances to interact without a predetermined outcome. I leave mixtures to dry in the sun and wind, where environmental conditions alter their surfaces before I return to scrape, excavate, mark and reconfigure them.

I am interested in the point at which materials resist control: when they become muddy, unstable or seemingly ruined, and when unexpected forms begin to emerge. Rather than treating these moments as failures to be corrected, I use them to examine how beauty and value are constructed, disrupted and recovered.

This process connects to my interest in modern folklore: the stories, assumptions and shared beliefs through which societies explain themselves. Ideas about property, wealth, security and belonging can come to seem natural or inevitable, even when they reflect unequal systems of power. I am interested in what these narratives conceal, what sustains them and what happens when they are challenged. Exposure may be necessary, but it is rarely uncomplicated; what is revealed can unsettle as much as it clarifies.

Through layering, abrasion and removal, my paintings hold these contradictions in tension. They do not seek to resolve disorder into harmony, but to explore what becomes possible when established forms are disturbed and new meanings begin to emerge.