Danny Foley’s work navigates the shifting boundaries between the human and the More-Than-Human World. Working across drawing, animation, and installation, he explores the self and otherness through a lens of Irish folklore—guided by the Púca, a shapeshifting trickster spirit.
In Foley’s practice, the Púca is not merely a subject, but a method: a way of working that embraces transformation, chance, and the unknown. Drawing from archival footage of his infancy, where he is seen playing with his shadow as a double or animal other, his work considers the self as unfixed, formed by ongoing encounters with the other—both human and non-human.
These themes now echo in his largescale drawings and stop motion animations. Using charcoal, he renders shadowy figures that act as guides. Shaped by mythic and ecological entanglements, each drawing is a threshold or a mirror, emerging intuitively through the act of mark-making, erasure, and discovery. His animations unfold as metamorphic journeys across empty terrains—creatures transforming in and out of form, mirroring shifts in state and being.
By reconnecting with the embodied gestures of his childhood and drawing from tales of the Púca, Foley’s work contemplates ideas of ecological consciousness, the multiplicities of being and seeks to disrupt human-centred hierarchies through the perspective of the self/other as shapeshifter.
