My work deals with the construction of subjectivity through space and storytelling. I use a wide range of materials—often returning to drawing, furniture, and audiovisual installation—to stage the physical and narrative orthopedics that prop up the desiring, powerful, ridiculous, rational, and violent embodied dominant subjects of society. These typically white, male subjects are often shown to be failing to live up to their own self-narration through an itchy, slapstick, inability to keep it together. The audience sees these figures through the prisms such as architecture, games, national identity, love songs, museums, speeches, and other constructions. The narrative constellations that inform these constructions vary widely from project to project, often drawing from art history, fiction, folklore, and my own personal and family history.
Stuck, a decomposition
Although Georgian houses are a familiar sight in much of the Irish urban landscape, they are rarely thought of outside the antagonistic paradigms of a barrier to progress or a conservational responsibility. Conceived in response to the built heritage of Limerick, this exhibition encourages a deeper consideration of the impact that these houses, their spatial principles and aesthetic conventions, have had upon the Irish psyche.
Stuck, a decomposition (opening performance)
A performative walkthrough of secret passages and stuck positions, drawing visitors' attention to some lesser-noticed corners of the exhibition, and reading to them from hidden texts.
Duration: 30 minutes.
Stuck, an inheritance (pamphlet)
A pamphlet published as part of an ongoing research project into the genealogy of my voice. The research treats this specific inflection of Hiberno-English speech as a complex colonial, cultural and familial inheritance.
The pamphlet was published by Short Pieces That Move!, a reading and writing group with an emphasis on collective learning and permission-giving: the permission to experiment, sometimes for the first time, with writing, and to work with or against English as a material.
Stuck, an inheritance
Solo exhibition in Video, Rotterdam, March-April 2024.
Non Player Character Creation Workshop
A workshop for teenagers as part of the exhibition Control Center Charlois. Using methods I developed when making my game "Is Registration Possible?" we explored the neighborhood around the gallery and used collage and drawing to construct characters who spoke for its streets and atmosphere.
Riso Paper Scissors Screenings
My film Frankenstein (2021) was included as part of the Animation Screenings in the Exhibition Riso Paper Scissors at Roodkapje, Rotterdam.
Control Centre Charlois
An expanded version of the exhibition Coordination Centrum Charlois first shown at another world project space in December 2021. This exhibition was developed as part of the Pallas Project Studios Artist Initiated Project scheme.
Kerbstone 52
A performance by the Postpeople, my collaborative project with Tracy Hanna. Through the framework of an Irish state examination question about a stone age monument, the performance explored the ways cultural memory is variously held and transmitted through rigid institutions, instinctive bodies, and fragile imaginations. It obliquely addressed the void left by a colonial project that erases language and oral tradition, and the compromised creative acts through which we re-narrate it.
Coordinatie Centrum Charlois
A solo exhibition of drawings, video and installation work centered around my roleplaying videogame Is Registration Possible? This work was kindly supported by an O&O (research & development subsidy) from CBK Rotterdam.
Y O U N G F O S S I L
A text and image work that appropriates the form of a board game to serve as the score for many possible performances about the collective construction of narrative. The work was printed on a sculptural furniture platform made by the collective Forerunner, and exhibited as part of the exhibition 'YOUNGFOSSIL' in the meadow of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, July - October 2021, and again in July - October 2022.
NEF Animation Residency
FRANKENSTEIN
A frame-by-frame animation made at home during the 2020 coronavirus lockdowns, departing from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. The work was shown in a two part IRL/online exhibition in April-May 2021, first screened for a month in Available & The Rat, Rotterdam, then hosted online for a further month at wetfilm.org. Frankenstein was kindly supported by an O&O (research & development subsidy) from CBK Rotterdam.
a dialogue with my point four child
A father / son recitation in the Bachelor Pad Museum, Rotterdam for xmas 2019
The Bachelor Pad Museum
A critical and experimental house museum in my flat. The work explored how modernist dreams of new forms of domesticity relied on the continuing exploitation of women, children, and servants, and how the institutionalized aftermath of those dreams survives through the medium of the house museum. The figure of the Bachelor was employed as a site of potential for compulsory heterosexual regimes, whose parameters could be shifted and potential wasted by reconfiguration of the space he occupied.
The Beatles Monster / The Bealtes Machine (exhibition: Sesamstraat)
As part of the exhibition Sesame Street I presented The Beatles Monster / The Beatles Machine, a work comprised of a static puppet show and a series of mixed media drawings positioning the Beatles as a single melted together male subject. The work explored the way the 1960s legacy of community and love has survived and refracted through mediation, memory, mimicry and myth.
Architectures for One (exhibition: Change Nothing)
This work was produced as the culmination of the Snehta residency program in Athens. A psychogeographic mapping of the neighborhood of Fokionos Negri, crystallizing characters from its dense streets, faltering kiosks, and stacked "polykatoikia" apartment buildings. A ghostly recorded voice - at once naive tourist and experienced hustler - hung among the installation, sycophantically attempting to sell the items on display to the audience.
The Bachelor Party (performance event: BAFGFF)
I presented a puppet show / polyphonic monologue, in which I played the role of a bartender speaking for all the men lined up at his bar. The drinkers were represented by assemblages of domestic and studio material, each speaking in a different tone and register. Together they formed an uneasy collective awaiting the arrival of a heroic Bachelor who never showed up. To pass the time they awkwardly discussed the Bachelor's upcoming marriage and delivered strange performative set-pieces.