ARTIST STATEMENT

My imagination is drawn toward words, music, paintings, photography and moving images. I began to perform my poetry when I lived in Paris and London. When I moved to New York I wrote and directed my plays in downtown Manhattan because I enjoyed the collaboration I discovered in the creative process. I then began to write and direct for film because plays vanish like sandcastles and film lasts forever. In my artistic process I explore what it means to build community.

In my most recent film work, Tumbling Towards Home, I have combined three different visual aesthetic styles, super 8 footage, animation and live action. I am a process-orientated writer and director who enjoys using fragments from the subconscious, that help me to explore the relationship between reality and dream. I blur the boundaries within dramatic narratives, by creating a juxtaposition between the romantic and the real to expose a poetic truth hidden beneath the images. I am intrigued by the line between a child’s and adult’s perception and their relationship to wonder as a way of seeing the world. 

I am fascinated by the unknown and am a risk-taker. I write to uncover, I direct to reveal, and I create stories to deepen my understanding about life on the margins. I reveal human stories, emotional states, and provoke self-reflection. The journey is a narrative that stops and starts reflecting the creative impulse.  Despite simultaneously contemplating stillness and silence in context to a world driven by internal and external rhythms.

I am drawn to urban and rural spaces as a point of curiosity to both culture and non-culture. In a nocturnal way, I am a cultural misfit. Growing up in the countryside in Ireland, the barren landscape and the culture of religion drove me to observe and reflect on the world and characters that inhabited those settings.  It was Freud that said, “the Irish were impervious to psychoanalysis.” There is a magical mysticism that haunts rural Ireland, that inspires my practice. My aspiration is to unfold the mystery of humankind in an unquiet, poetic way to cast reflection and light upon the infinite liminality of life.

The Milk Thistle Fountain - Still Image from The Seamonster & the Milk Thistle

The Milk Thistle Fountain - Still Image from The Seamonster & the Milk Thistle