Mixed Media Works from Dublin City Facades

About my practice

Since moving to Dublin in 2008, I have been collecting fragments from the surfaces of the city, plaster, paint, cardboard, the residue of weather and decades of use. I am not drawn to these materials for their appearance. I choose them for what they have been through: smoke-stained walls, blistered paint, the trace of a phone number on a toilet wall. These are not aesthetic details. They are evidence. My work begins outside, in the city, and moves inward to the studio. When I remove a fragment from a wall, I am not erasing its history, I am making it visible. Placed on canvas, a piece of peeling plaster becomes a carrier of time: a compressed record of weather, repair, neglect, change, and the history of a place. The Irish climate has been my longest collaborator. Wind, rain, and cold do something to a surface over a hundred years that no studio process can replicate. I am interested in the hidden past embedded in building materials, layers of plaster and paint like memories painted over and lost. By transferring these fragments into my work, I attempt to build a new system of references. It is about the trace. The marks that still exist beneath the surface, pulled out and revealed in a new, fresh context.The city I keep returning to is Dublin. Its fractured, accumulative texture, the onion-like layers of history pressing against the present, is something I find in James Joyce too, in the way Ulysses holds an entire city in a single day. I work in a similar register, though my medium is material rather than language. Or perhaps both.

My work has been discussed in the context of archaeology and material culture by historian Paul Mullins at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis.

Examples of works:

• I’m the Memory of Mannix F. – collage created from materials collected on Ormond Quay, Dublin
• Cleaning Souls Over 7 Decades – collage created from materials collected on former Magdalene Laundry site, Dublin
• I’m The Street – a series of works created from fragments of urban facades

You can see examples of this work in the Work section.