Since I was a child, I have always loved the natural world; that which I could personally see, the plants and animals in the countryside of England and Ireland where I grew up, but likewise in nature documentaries or encyclopaedias. Similarly, I am attracted to those artists who interact with ecological subjects; Dorothy Cross, Mark Dion and Marcus Coates or with the landscape like Robert Smithson or Richard Long. These are the areas I am drawn to in my own practice. My current research also looks at the loss of ritual in modern culture – as explored by Byung-Chul Han in The Disappearance of Rituals (2019) – and how this links to our detachment from the natural world.
As a recent graduate from the Crawford College of Art, for the last three years my work has been a response to the environmental impact of the Anthropocene on the biosphere. Taking inspiration from the Jungian archetypes present in ancient mythologies from around the world, I used the tree as a proxy for the body of the earth on which to project the damage that human activity has subjected to the landscape and planet. This body of work began with largescale drawings depicting manmade objects growing on trees in the patterns that parasitic plants like ivy or mistletoe make on their trunks or in their branches. This evolved into sculptural installation which has been the main medium of my practice since 2023, using storm-damaged trees from my family farm in West Cork. I initially took inspiration from performance artists like Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden who would use their own bodies to echo the trauma of war and political oppression through acts of self-harm. By partially sculpting the wood with drills, saws and chisels, I performed comparable acts of violence and damage on the branches.
My latest work has progressed with these themes and methods. The complexity of the wood carving has developed and I have introduced copper into my installations to both represent ancient ritualistic practices and acknowledge this metal as the electrical conductor for our digital and industrial societies.
In my solo exhibition ‘Reach out, Pull me Closer’ (Backwater Studios, Cork, April 2025), I attempted to create a ritual space, using limbs of partially sculpted branches, each embossed with copper. The installation invited the audience into a space that encouraged a renewed empathy with non-human life.
Returning to the examples of artists such as Nancy Holt and Mary Beth Edelson, I am drawn to reimagining elements of prehistoric monument construction and recreating ritual practices as a method of questioning the structures of modern society. And through shifting my focus to prehistoric copper casting, I want to explore rehumanising our relationship to this material whose industrial production has become divorced from human experience and ecologically destructive.
