My current practice is an auto-ethnographic reflection on place, uncovering the phenomena and the reverberations of growing up near the Northern Irish border, a complicated and unruly place dominated by colonial legacies and conflict, which is explored through research, memory and anecdote, and realised through painting, sculpture and text.
Whether writing or making, a process of unravelling and unpicking, of spinning yarns and weaving narrative threads takes place, and through the tacit processes of creating, the joy and panic of physically working through fabric, paper, plaster and paint, I construct a neo-narrative and re-enchant the history and the geography of my place.
In the end, I dig where I stand in order to ask – do we know our place from the ground or from the air? From books or from stories passed down? From assumptions or misinterpretations? Or do we really just need to make our own map?
