My practice is engaged with how landscape is a carrier of meaning.Throughout my practice I seek to unite my mutual respect of material and land. I approach sustainability in practice with a contemporary mindset, thoughtfully collecting, selecting, and creating each material I use. My use of personally and emotionally charged materials and objects, imbues the artwork with significant meaning, and results in a much slower process of creation that celebrates the beauty derived from attentiveness to the natural world. I conscientiously select the material for my sculptural practice in an effort to retrace the landscape of my childhood and my ongoing grief overlooked by the Wicklow Mountains. I collected and cast rocks from these mountains in cardboard from moving boxes I used to move houses for over 10 years in Grief and Its Emblems are Inseparable. Each of these fragile forms serve as containers for my conflicting feelings of home and non-belonging, symbolising a landscape that has been transformed through loss. Terra Lacuna builds on this concept, miniaturising the Wicklow Mountains in my late mother’s jewellery box as a means to tackle my grief over her passing when I was 10. The idea of a home is deconstructed further in The Sky Is Low, where I trace the creases left behind from unfolding an origami house in pebbles of Wicklow granite.
