BRIEF BIO
I am an emerging professional visual artist; a painter, an illustrator and qualified architect.
My default state of being is creating images as a way of making sense of the world around me.
I am normally to be found drawing, painting or exploring in the environs of my native town of Tralee, Co. Kerry. Other places I have called home at one point or another include; Murroe, Dublin, Dingle, Melbourne, London, Ennis and Conna.
My professional and educational background is in architecture, holding a masters degree from UCD (2013) and postgraduate diploma from the University of Westminster (2016). Whilst working in architectural practice for a number of years both at home and abroad, I was concurrently developing a burgeoning artistic practice -specialising in painting and illustration. Since 2018 I have been working as a professional artist and Illustrator, dividing my time between my personal artwork and select commercial or editorial illustration projects.
ARTIST STATEMENTMy arts practice is principally borne of the traditions of oil painting and pencil drawing, but extends to a form of hybrid digital image making and vector based art.
I am inspired by many things: places, people, stories.. (both real and imagined).
However I am particularly intrigued by the phenomenology of place. There is a kind of personal, existential and phenomenological inquiry at the core of my work. I’m interested in the way in which our experience of places and the relationships we forge with them exist as an ever evolving, jumbled and reciprocal flow across the material, -immaterial and -emotional realms. I think there’s always a kind of quiet unseen interplay between our phenom- enal experience of a place in the moment and our own internal meta-narratives.
As such my personal work is often an exploration of this complex relationship between self and surroundings. I try to create work that makes manifest this elusive interaction, the fluid dynamic that exists somewhere between the immaterial and the material, -the literal and metaphorical.
My ambition for the work is that it might communicate or illicit a tacit human understanding of the wholeness of our spatial or ‘platial’ experience; ..a particular sense of place, a subtle suspended narrative or emotional state. The work I produce usually contains a narrative quality, imbued with autobiographical elements - drawing on the personal experiences, relationships, feelings and emotions that connect me as an individual to the world around me.
In this way I view the paintings I make in fact as vehicles for the exploration of many further interrelated and recurring sub-themes that will often permeate the work, including but not limited to an interest in; liminality, self- isolation, introspection, loneliness, masculinity, change and impermanence, the passage of time itself, concepts of being and belonging, the coming to awareness of embodied experience, landscape as protagonist in the emergence of identity and becoming of self.
The methodology I employ is partly intuitive, partly analytical. I engage in a mix of field-work and studio time, borrowing at times from techniques gleaned from my architectural background. I usually begin with immersion in and empirical observation of a given place-world. I use a mix of drawing and photography as a means of gathering situated knowledge. I then enter a phase of experimentation in the studio setting - sifting through reference material.. -attempting to draw from various sources of experiential and auto-biographical reference; be they recorded, remembered or part-imagined. From these fragments an outline composition will ultimately coalesce. Time is often key to this process. Time to dwell.. to drift away.. to drift back.. before ultimately performing the final translation of an idea in the form of a drawing or painting.
