I am an artist, sculptor and designer living in county Mayo, Ireland with my patient husband, Cormac, and my manager, Spuddy the cat and Luna(tic) the dog.
I graduated from the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire in 2010 with a degree in Model Making for Film and Media. After 5 years working in the field I returned to my roots in Co. Mayo and began to explore some of the techniques I had learnt while working as a model maker.
In a society today where so much is explained, the world can lose its magic.
Architecture, history, folklore, stories and nature are all huge interests of mine but, it is the action of wondering that fascinates me in all that I do. The things I see spark my curiosity and intrigue, what happened, what made it like that, who lived here? I find myself constantly drawn to fantasise about places and life, to a world without limits and a world of ‘what ifs’.
When creating my collection of work, I remove physical things from their context and thus, hope to provoke the viewer to sew together a new dimension, beginning a journey of wonderment without the confines of reality. I try to provide the opening lines, “Once upon a time…”, or the visual “rabbit hole” for Alice to fall down and escape to a land where anything is possible.
The work is outwardly solid and gives the illusion of appearing quite real, but if you examine it in detail you realise it is a dream, or an illusion. The ‘solid’ building is, in fact, hollow. The edges crumble and crack and the colours are only suggestions. The sculpture is the beginning of a story, where the rest of the details have yet to be filled in.
I want to share my own sparks of wonder in the things we take for granted with others, and to enjoy the experience of wandering through the world exploring not just the explained but the ‘what could be’.
