the edge is where everything happens

the ongoing material reconfigurations of nothingness, 2022, Interactive projection and camera installation, light, paper, charcoal, ink and wire, dimensions variable

Exhibited at Reagenz Ost, Graz, April 2022

A mixed media installation that invited audience into a very dark space. Their presence was captured by small areas of light, and created drawings in projection on the wall space. The walls were covered with paper designed to feel like an underground, ‘liminal’ space.

This work was made on residency at Swap Space, a pilot project at the University of Music & Performing Arts Graz that focuses on novel forms of collaborative artistic research in which otherness, difference and distance between the participants are central and are brought into a cohesive form via the concept of the spatial.

The collective were Nayarí Castillo (Venezuela), Shane Finan (Ireland), Franziska Hederer (Austria), Jackie Karuti (Kenya), Alisa Kobzar (Ukraine), David Pirrò (Italy/Germany) Daniele Pozzi (Italy) and Hanns Holger Rutz (Germany)

The title is a Karen Barad quote from What is the Measure of Nothingness?

The Swap Space project is documented at Research Catalogue. View here.

something moved, 2022, online interactive (HTML/CSS), video, dimensions variable

Created for ecoversities to accompany the long-form essay 'something moved', about material technologies, refusal and peripheries.

A video and interactive online artwork about the complex geologies that form our technologies. This artwork considers the network and web technologies that we use, and the underlying time and materials that make up the miniscule parts like microchips, to consider briefly the deep time in every object.

crotall agus fearann, 2022-23, research, drawing, photographs, scans, microscope images, interactive computer program,

Beginning in March 2022, I attended a month-long artist residency at Artlink, Fort Dunree, spread out across one year. I returned every three months to observe changes in people and place.

Early on in the project, I began making kin with the lichen fuscidea cyathoides, a common lichen in the area. It took my interest after a misunderstanding from a conversation with Martha in the Artlink team. I took macro photographs, made drawings, scanned with a scanner and created images with microscope from the lichen.

The lichen’s prothallus (the black areas) first spread into an area and are then followed by the plant part of the symbiotic creature. This work is looking at how borders are understood by nonhuman critters, and uses multiple technologies as ways of observing and understanding these borders.

A documentary video (10 minutes) about my project was recorded by Artlink and is available on YouTube at this link.

féth fiada, 2023, 3-video installation, 110 x 61 x 40 cm

A 3-screen visual essay from the perspective of myth and magic, a reminder of the earthly properties of material technologies while also considering the extraordinary depth of environmental, social and cultural entanglements these objects. The work took my first mobile phone as a starting point for a critique on contemporary technologies.

In Irish mythology, the Féth Fíada was a mist or cloak that was used by members of the Tuatha de Dannann to make them invisible from human sight. The veil allowed them to act in this world without repercussion, unseen but powerful.

Contemporary computing technologies are shrouded in many veils that obscure how they work, how they are made, and how their used parts are disposed. Everything from the inherent bias in social media or search engines to the invisible labour that extracts, transports, packages and delivers these items is a veil. Each time one is revealed, another seems to appear, obscuring the full picture. One way to explore this complex issue is to consider it from an ontology that is not rational, but instead is magical or mythical.

Made for How It's Made, Creative Places Balbriggan, curated by Valeria Ceregini