ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is inspired by landscape and humankind’s interaction with landscapes throughout time.
Today’s technological developments inadvertently affect the shape of the world but also our experience of it. I am interested in focusing on these effects and exploring them through material constructions that engage specific materials for their own ‘matter reality’. Underlying my work is a belief that all physical matter inherently has a spiritual dimension.
In recent work my focus has been on the intrusion of utilitarian infrastructures into the landscape. I have been thinking about of these forms existing within a landscape of time as monuments to our society. I often arrive at work by employing an archaeological perspective to view what is commonplace today and how they could be read in another light as pertaining expressly to the spiritual.
Currently my focus is on the experience of landscape and how our experience of material reality is affected or coloured by a simultaneous absorption of the world in the form of information. Through an ambiguous use of familiar forms I hope to disrupt the relationship between physical reality and information and give form and space to a ‘matter reality’. I hope to create works that make reference to the constant and infinite potential of matter and world.
Simultaneous to my personal practice of physical structural work, I am also concerned with developing new social structures and fostering the social conditions from which new and challenging artworks and ways of being can arise. These social structures have taken and continue to take various forms; The Good Hatchery (2007- present): an artist led studio and experimental residency programme that I co-founded in a remote bogland area of the Irish midlands. The Good Hatchery is housed in a building that was sourced for free over the Internet. The Good Hatchery sets out to challenge artists to work outside of their comfort zones and endeavours to create a sustainable way for artists to work. Mercedes Fire 2010: a 7day touring Summer School around Ireland exploring ‘contemporary monumentality’ for 3 invited artists from the UK. Aerial Blue 2011: a 4day Summer School on an uninhabited island in Clew Bay for 19 international artists and thinkers to experience life on an isolated landmass. TERRAFORM: an interdisciplinary collective of artists, architects and engineers exploring structures, both physical and societal, through research and action.
I am interested in the potential of collaborative work to alter societal structures and to undermine or go against the increasing high levels of specialisation that lead to divisions in society. I am interested in these collaborations both as structures in themselves but also as a means towards realising more ambitious projects or a greater scale and scope than one can achieve independently.
This website documents some of my recent work.
