STATEMENT
I make paintings about the strange experience of being a person. My work draws from memory, grief, identity, perception, biology, and the environments that shape us. I am interested in the things that make us who we are, and how fragile, contradictory, and difficult to understand those things can be.
My paintings bring together distorted figures, neurological networks, aquatic life, American landscapes, and unfamiliar biological forms. Images emerge from personal experiences, places I have lived, things I have lost, and ideas I am still trying to understand. My mother's dementia changed the way I think about memory, consciousness, and identity. Leaving the Irish coast and beginning again in the American West gave me a different relationship with place, displacement, and the persistence of memory. These experiences enter the work indirectly, transformed into strange environments where the personal and the imagined become inseparable.
I work primarily in oil painting, allowing each piece to develop organically without sketches or predetermined compositions. I am drawn to the physical behavior of materials, the push and pull of color, and the tension between control and accident. Figures become landscapes, bodies become networks, and recognizable objects drift into unfamiliar territory. I want the paintings to feel alive, imperfect, and in the process of becoming something else.
My work does not aim to explain experience so much as to make it tangible. I am interested in the point where something familiar becomes strange, where beauty meets discomfort, and where an image can communicate something before we have the language to understand it. Humor, wonder, loneliness, and grief often occupy the same space.
Ultimately, I see painting as a way of making sense of a world that rarely makes sense to me. I want to bring beauty to things that are overlooked, uncomfortable, or difficult to name, without smoothing away their contradictions. The paintings are not answers. They are attempts to understand what it means to exist, to remember, to lose, and to keep moving forward.