My distrust of the photograph formed at age eleven, when my own face was spread across the newspaper as a non-descript token of peace-building next to the grinning face of Ian Paisley, following a sectarian attack on the school I attended. The unease I felt in the representation of that moment, which I recalled entirely differently, motivates my work as an artist.
Grounded in my perspective as a ‘cease-fire baby’ and as a woman living in a persistently religious and patriarchal society, my practice communicates the tension of what we have inherited in post-Agreement Northern Ireland.
When asked if my photographic practice is akin to “picking at a wound”, it struck me that the phrase typically refers to a “scab”. A scab forms over the wound as it heals. In order to heal, a wound must be cleaned – which hurts. A wound left uncleaned, or with dressings unchanged, festers. My practice confronts what is healing and what is festering in Northern Ireland, and by extension, in myself.
