I am a visual artist, my practice is multidisciplinary. I work through the medium of painting and I have recently expanded into sculpture, installation and animation. My current body of work has become more introspective and I have explored themes of life with a chronic illness, reflecting on this experience of nostalgia through examining the use of alternative objects and symbols such as, inflated surgical gloves, soft fabrics and vessels of water used within treatments. I am interested in examining the themes of invisibility and distorted reality, exploring restriction and reclamation of movement, through the use of the human figure. This is further influenced by the comfort of our environment, through association with nature within my rural home in Kildare, and how this became a fundamental therapeutic setting. The tactile sensations of textures that are found within these natural settings and how they encompass us as humans and the subsequent experiences impact our emotional identity. Through the medium of painting, I practise my more recent strategies of expressive painting techniques, such as applying paint through moving, splashing and pouring. I am interested in manipulation of vibrant pigments and light to create the illusion of space, adding to the distorted atmosphere. I also want to bring attention to the experience of feminine identity and pain, by challenging the idea of gender dynamics in relation to colour. Emphasised through exploration of colour symbolism, relating to the individual and learnt interpretation of colours having specific meanings and conveying certain emotions. Such as, red having associations to love, pain and femininity and blue having connotations to calmness and depression. I have recently expanded into portraying movement through animated drawings. I feel they are extensions of my paintings, portraying the movement captured within the stillness of the figures in my compositions. I intend the outcomes to create a sense of disconnection, the feeling of being in a state of unresolve, conveying my experience of long-term illness and the techniques of leaving areas of my composition in a sketch-like state.
