I am a visual artist working with sculpture and craft-based processes to explore contemporary relationships with land and material. My practice focuses primarily on wood as a material both natural and engineered as well as native and non-native to the island. My art-making process consists of physical acts performed on a singular material such as shaving a wooden plank with a draw knife or bending a branch by hand. These human interactions with the material are documented in both sound and video. Through this experimentation, a point of tension emerges between the request made by these acts and the material's potential. A branch breaks or a knot in the wood refuses to be shaved down. This stretching of the material's potential and its response forms a collaboration point from which an artwork emerges. Weaving stitching and balancing are the primary methods used in my sculptural work, avoiding glue or other adhesives that could be used to push past a material's individual potential. Currently, my work focuses on the relationship found between land, exploitation and Irish craft. With attention to our relationship to material and tension in our contemporary production brought about through a culture of domination and ordering of Irish land for resource extraction. Irish woodlands and the island's history of de-forestation under British control have been a current interest of his alongside contemporary efforts that focus on re-forestation for commercial and extractive purposes rather than ecological rehabilitation. Through my work as an artist, I hope to enable reflection on our contemporary relationship with local materials and landscapes, inviting questions of possible alternatives.
