About me

I was born in Meath and now live with my family outside Castletownbere, on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork — a landscape that has quietly taken over my work.

I studied Fine Art at Crawford College in Cork, specialising in printmaking, before moving into a career in digital marketing and marketing consultancy within the tech sector. Alongside running my own consultancy, I mentored with the Design & Crafts Council of Ireland from 2013 to 2020. It was during those years, surrounded by other people's creative work, that I felt the pull back to my own — and in 2019, a year after the birth of my daughter, I returned to painting.

My early work as a painter looked at rural Ireland, the roads, the scenery and the landscape. The series shown on my Past Work page, focusses on the concept of home, what it means to people and what changes in a landscape when people leave it, or return to it, or visit it only for a season. How the starkness of empty of abandoned houses along the Western seaboard are so incongruous against the vast and stunningly beautiful landscape along the Beara Peninsula where I call home.

I continue this series but now looking at the changing seasons

I paint in acrylic, on paper, canvas and occasionally canvas board, and I always have several pieces going at once. I work with a combination of knife and brush, and my fingers too — there's a point in every piece where I need to get right into the paint.

Each one starts loosely: a rough idea of a colour palette, a stack of surfaces in different sizes. The first layer is where I'll sketch out some sense of foreground against sky, but it's the second layer where the paint starts to lead — mark-making takes over, and the composition begins to define itself. I keep layering from there, looking for direction. There's always a fork in the road: push on and the piece can come together, or I can overwork it and lose it entirely. Some pieces stall completely and go onto what I call the unfinished mountain, to wait until I know what they need. The ones that make it through, I know are done when they're done — not before.

I share this work as it happens — sketches, studies, the paintings that don't work as often as the ones that do — in my Artist's Diary. It's the best way to see where the work is headed next.