The Belfast-based artist’s new exhibition is inspired by Irish mythology, especially The Children of Air …
I’m a contemporary Irish artist whose work explores identity, belonging and our relationship with landscape. I draw on Irish mythology and the landscape as a starting point, but the paintings are ultimately about emotional experience rather than narrative.
Colour is central to my practice, and I’m naturally drawn to painting at a larger scale. It allows me to work more instinctively, and create immersive pieces that feel both contemporary and quietly powerful.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t painting. It was a constant throughout my childhood and gradually became the way I made sense of the world. As I got older, I found myself returning to painting whenever life felt busy or overwhelming. It became less about making pictures and more about creating a space to think, reflect and slow down.
I’m entirely self-taught. At 18, I applied to both art school and medical school, which probably says a lot about how torn I was between the two. Medicine won, and I spent more than a decade working in psychiatry and public health. Throughout those years I painted constantly, often as a way of decompressing from work. During lockdown, I shared my work publicly for the first time on Instagram. The response was immediate and unexpected, and it completely changed the direction of my career.
I work from my studio at home. I have two daughters under two, so most of my painting happens late at night once they’re asleep. My process is very intuitive. I rarely begin with a fixed plan and usually work across five or six paintings at once, allowing each piece to develop at its own pace. For me, the studio is a place to reflect, process change and make sense of the world.
I’ve always been fascinated by Irish mythology, but this collection isn’t intended as a literal retelling of the Children of Lir. Instead, it explores the emotional themes that run through the story – identity, transformation, belonging, loss and endurance. My years in medicine taught me the importance of creating the conditions for wellbeing. In a different way, I hope these paintings offer that too: a space where people can slow down, reflect and bring their own experiences to the work. The paintings aren’t prescriptive. If someone leaves having felt something they can’t quite explain, then I feel the work has done its job.
Swans are central to the exhibition. Several years ago, my family rented a cottage in Clonakilty, where a pair of wild swans lived on the inlet beside the house. The image stayed with me. Around the same time I had become a mother for the first time, and my own sense of identity was changing profoundly. The themes within the Children of Lir suddenly felt deeply relevant – transformation, belonging and finding your place in the world. Today I also think of the swan as a quiet symbol of Irish identity. Wherever it travels, it remains unmistakably itself, and I find that an interesting metaphor in contemporary Ireland.
I love that painting doesn’t demand certainty. There isn’t one correct interpretation or one fixed meaning. The most rewarding conversations I have are when someone sees something in a painting that I never consciously intended. Art creates space for ambiguity, reflection and connection, and I think that’s increasingly valuable. If my work encourages someone to pause for a moment and reconnect with themselves, then that’s incredibly meaningful to me.
Need to know: The Children of Lir is on view at Gormleys Dublin until July 27.
