My work is concerned with light, shadow, color, material and perception. Using drawing, painting, video, poetry and installation I ask questions like, what do we see when we pay attention? And how can color, light and shadow effect our perception of form, space and material? I explore color as a subject in itself. There is also an interest in the associations that can arise from the application of sparse and reductive painterly techniques.
 
It seems natural to seek to understand the gestalt or the whole of our experience with the world. How do we occupy space? How accurate are our perceptions compared with the true nature of reality? Such a desire however limits and frustrates us. As finite creatures our faculties of perception grow, develop, and deteriorate over time. Even at our sharpest we influenced by countless factors relating to environment, culture and our place in history. A claim to truly know or understand seems at best arrogant and at worst extremely dangerous. I try to understand the ever- shifting relationship between what we perceive and what we claim to know.
 
Some work begins in childhood memories. Paintings and poems rooted in emotions, people and places as they meander around present world events and life in 21st century America. They consider territory, ownership, politics and landscape. My dear friend and mentor Renee Van der Stelt has pointed out that they are whatever arises on a given day. The present evokes the past. A rainy afternoon, a vivid dream or a chance encounter with a total stranger, suggest new ways to describe the experiences that shape me.
 
Personal content moves, rises and falls. It becomes color, line or verse. It forgets and remembers its original intention as it leaves a door open for the next moment, always in a state of becoming. Action comes from impulse, the need to capture, before it moves on. Tomorrow’s painting and poem will be entirely different. Bound to the past, while aspiring to mindfulness of the present, I seek the instantaneous and the static, the slow and the moving all at once, with a hope to articulate something of these ever- shifting states.
 
 

This body of work was exhibited at Harford Community College in the Spring of 2017. The works are all directly linked to a series of poems I wrote. The poems were read in front of the work at the exhibition opening,

These small works were made on un-stretched raw canvas and then sewn on to linen. They explore a  link between language, personal history and landscape. They are linked to a recent body of poetry.

Painted in the winter of 2015/2016 these works use the fluidity of water and acrylic to stain raw cotton canvas with colour. The results recalled the landscape I grew up in, in the Dublin Mountains. The title of the works Tigh an Chnoic is the Irish for house on the hill.

This is a reworking of a piece made in 2012 in the old Load of Fun building now the Motor House. The piece centers around the windows in my former studio space. Using both analogue and digital methods I alter the one shot of the windows to explore how colour, light and space can continually alter our perception of the same scene. The soundtrack was provided by Irish musician Paul Murphy.

As an artist I explore the gap between what we perceive and what we claim to know. Yet, a claim to truly know or understand seems at best arrogant and at worst extremely dangerous.

Part of a series of digital videos made in the winter of 2013. The idea began with an interest in the site of an old shed near my house in White Marsh, Maryland. At the time I was reading Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of Novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. In the second novel, Malone Dies, Beckett does not disclose the location of the story. Although, Malone describes his surroundings frequently he remains unsure of his exact whereabouts. I was very taken by the descriptions and began to imagine the novel was taking place inside this shed near my house. This openness in Beckett’s work inspired me to write my own poem. My thoughts of Malone began to interchange with similar situations and events in my own life, as at the time my mother was very ill back in Ireland.

The History and Objects of an Imaginary Shed  also play with the idea of place and how it informs my creative process.

This series also deals with the natural process of mourning, which takes place after the death of a loved one. While it seems natural to seek meaning behind such life events, the desire to do so can limit or frustrate us. Our environment changes over time as we grow, age and get old, as do our faculties of perception. Our desire for consistency and clarity is thwarted by constant change. We live with an inability to reconcile the fact that we do not fully understand the true nature of the world around us.