Works
Nests
'Nests' is a series of 43 soft sculptures, made using the deconstructed fabrics and laundry starch, each one measures between 5cm and 15cm.
In the winter of 2020 I visited the site of the former Clifden Industrial School in Co. Galway. This institution, run by the Sisters of Mercy, was better known locally as Clifden Orphanage and had a bleak history of child neglect and abuse, eventually closing in the early 1980's.
The site had lain vacant ever since the last of the children left and was due to be redeveloped and partially demolished in the coming months. The complex originally contained the main orphanage building, the convent and a laundry. The convent had already been redeveloped some years prior and when I visited in 2020 only the main building and laundry remained. The orphanage and laundry buildings had been broken into and vandalised on a number of occasions and were in a terrible state of disrepair when I visited. The top floor of the laundry had caved in and the top floor of the main building had partially collapsed.
When I visited I had initially only wanted to photograph the site as I didn't think anything of interest would remain. I would be proven wrong when I entered the old laundry. To my amazement, I found items of clothing, coated in layers of dust and dirt. They had been pressed into the filthy floor and were caked in mud. I rescued them and took them home. The laundry on the convent grounds was a particularly infamous part of the convent's operations as the children who lived in the orphanage were made to work there for long, hard unpaid hours by the nuns at the expense of their education and wellbeing. The laundry not only serviced the orphanage and convent but operated as a for-profit business, servicing many businesses and private homes in the local area. The nuns also ran a farm and bakery staffed by the children. It is not clear whether the clothing I recovered belonged to the nuns, the children or to people who left them behind in the laundry. The small sizes suggest that they might be children's or teenagers' clothes.
In 2021 I secured funding from the Arts Council of Ireland to develop a project in response to the clothing I had found. Between 2021-2025 I created two bodies of work in response to and using the clothing I had found, these are 'Nests' and 'Convent Compositions'.
I decided to make the clothing into nests for a number of reasons, empty nests are commonly found in abandoned or dilapidated buildings such as this, the building itself was also an empty nest of sorts, a place where children once lived but was now a decaying shell with no human life left inside. While the children who lived in this institution were called 'orphans', few of them actually had no living family to take care of them. A large number of children who were sent to places like this were actually sent there when their caregivers could not financially provide for them. There were also many children born to single mothers who were not able to raise them due to the social stigma of being unmarried and pregnant that prevailed at the time. I wanted to reference the homes that these children were taken from as these are a kind of 'empty nest' too. The swirling forms of the artworks also resemble how clothing that is being washed in a laundry swirls around in water. The nests are held together with strongly scented laundry starch, creating an olfactory connection to the laundry environment.
Convent Compositions
This series of wall mounted works is a sister series to 'Nests', created from the same clothing salvaged from the laundry building of Clifden Industrial School. The nests were created first and these works were created using the offcuts from that project. There are eighteen works in this series. They are intended to be viewed in pairs, like the pages of a book.
The works take visual inspiration from children's copybooks as well as the fading pages of old archives. They also take visual inspiration from the blocked out text of the redacted pages of sensitive documents.
Convent Composition 1 and Convent Composition 2 were both chosen for the Extended Longlist of Jackson's Art Prize in February 2026.
Confronting Resilliance
Luffa Cylindrica is a type of vine that produces fruits that are usually dried out and harvested as sponges. These natural luffa sponges have many desirable properties, they are compostable, non-toxic, self weaving and fast growing.
I spent my final year in NCAD investigating this material as it is my belief that in the future, luffas could be used as an important alternative to unsustainable synthetic meshes.
This project is conceptually underpinned by the theme of resilience. I was forced to confront the limitations of my own resilience as a maker during the pandemic as well as the limitations of the luffa, which resisted many of my efforts to work with it. It is my hope that this project will increase the visibility of the luffa as a natural fibre and spark further discussion about sustainability in the textile industry.
My work 'Deimatic Collar' from this series was exhibited at Dublin Castle in 2021 as part of the Keep Well exhibition with the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland.
I also exhibited two photographs from this series with the Íova photography group at the 2021 Íova Winter Show.
Stigmata
My installation "Stigmata" was the 2020 winner in the Visual Arts category in the Island of Ireland Region of the Global Undergraduate Awards. It was also longlisted for the 2026 Superioritas Award.
This large-scale work aims to represent visually the scale and severity of the abuse of boys by the Christian Brothers at St. Joseph's Industrial School, Letterfrack and touches on the wider societal implications of institutionalisation and the long term effects of trauma and stigmatisation. My great grandfather was just one of 2,819 boys sent to Letterfrack between 1887 and 1974. This institution is now notorious as one of the most brutal industrial schools to have operated in Ireland. This institution and others like it were set up ostensibly to teach children from underprivileged backgrounds a trade, the reality was the systematic physical, emotional, sexual and financial abuse of those that were sent there.
The survivors of these institutions and their families were then made to suffer further upon their release due to the enormity of the stigma associated with their institutionalisation. The word stigma is Greek in origin. Its original meaning is a mark made by pricking or branding the skin but more commonly refers to a metaphorical mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person. It is from stigma that the word stigmata originates, referring to the marks said to have been impressed onto the bodies of saints by divine power to match the wounds inflicted on Jesus at the crucifixion.
This installation is composed of 2,819 communion wafers displayed on a large white altar-like table, one for each person known to have attended the industrial school in Letterfrack. Each piece has been stained with red wine and some have been crushed, burned or damaged in other ways. Each piece is totally unique.
Guardians
In 2018 my childhood home was gutted for a full renovation. Part of this process involved the removal of the fireplace. The fireplace is often considered to be the soul of the home. I wondered how I might preserve the essence of the old home once the fireplace had been removed. This caused me to think about how in many homes, the soul of the home is no longer the fireplace as furniture is now usually arranged around the television or other technological devices. As I cleared out the old house, I found a number of broken pieces of old technology such as old remote controls and dvd players. I wondered if some part of the soul of the home had already been transported into these items, long before the fireplace was removed. I decided to make these house guardians to preserve small pieces of these objects as a physical manifestation of the soul of the old house to bring into the newly renovated house. They are shown here installed in the bootscraper of the front of the house. These bootscrapers are a unique feature of artisans dwellings such as my childhood home and bear a resemblance to the structure of many kinds of shrines.