I am inspired by the weathering of the Irish landscape and the erosion of the female body over her lifetime. Increasingly, I’ve been thinking about the idea of ‘self’ and ‘other’ within the multiple roles of womanhood and exploring my personal relationship with the role of motherhood.
My painting practice starts by painting outside with materials I gather on my walks (e.g. dried seeds, grasses, roots and twigs). I use these found objects for mark making and mono printing. Sometimes the wind lifts and moves these objects, creating new marks, which capture traces of the movement of the wind.
Back inside my studio, I work on the floor with several pieces of raw canvas at a time. I manipulate diluted paint to stain the fibres of the canvas, creating natural tidelines of pigment as it blooms, fades and dries. The process is slow, capturing traces of time and gradually building up multi-layered forms. I have recently experimented with cutting canvases and sewing them into new compositions, suggestive of the marks, lines and scars in nature and on our bodies.
Within the process, there is little waste. Excess medium becomes the beginning of new paintings by using canvas to blot out what remained. Sometimes I work on a painting for months and then continue on the reverse. The marks of paint that bled through the canvas become a starting point for a new direction.