This is my workspace
My compositions are often a simple design that captures a ‘sense of place’. I carry my own native landscape from the west of Ireland inside my heart and merge it with the landscapes I have connected with in Australia.
Back at the studio, I connect half-remembered landscapes and the feelings they evoked. There are periods of simplicity in my art, where less detail serves its own purpose.
After completing a degree in Fine Art in Dublin, with a major in sculptural ceramics, I was soon drawn to the sculptural qualities of oil paints. Oil is my main medium with which I paint, it's also not surprising that the many years of working with clay led me to painting the land and the feelings from it.
After moving to Melbourne from a small town in the west of Ireland in 2011 with 3 small children, I had a very deep need to connect to the land that we would be calling home.
I was so excited to be in this wonderful new place of opportunity, but at the same time I felt the loss of leaving my birth place, not only the people, but the actual land.
This brought me on a journey in finding my own belonging, one of becoming grounded from the ground beneath me. Using memory, imagination and the sense of this new place, I started making visual my emotional responses to time and space.
This is how my style of artwork was conceived.