Having trained as a visual artist I went on to pursue academic studies. My doctoral thesis explored the conflicted and fragmented nature of belonging in place in Northern Ireland, looking to the visual arts, literature and small-scale community prac...More
Having trained as a visual artist I went on to pursue academic studies. My doctoral thesis explored the conflicted and fragmented nature of belonging in place in Northern Ireland, looking to the visual arts, literature and small-scale community practices for alternatives to sectarian public narratives. I published several papers based on my thesis in peer-reviewed journals including Cultural Geographies (vol.12 no.4 2005), Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (vol.25 no.5 2007) and Gender, Place and Culture (vol.15 no.5 2008). After this I spent three years gathering oral histories along the Irish border for AHRC-funded Ulster University project Irish Border/lands, and with Catherine Nash and Brian Graham authored Partitioned Lives: the Irish Borderlands in 2013. I moved into freelance work as an artist and academic and worked on New Sites-New Fields and Fields of Vision with Leitrim Sculpture Centre in 2008 and 2009. I was involved in Rhyzom, a Europe-wide project about cultural production in marginal spaces, between 2009 and 2011 through PS2 in Belfast, producing artwork and an essay for its publication (Translocal Act: Cultural Practices Within and Across, 2010). Between 2010 and 2013 I worked on Troubling Ireland, convened by Dublin's Firestation Artists' Studios and Danish curatorial platform Kuratorisk Aktion, as a cultural geographer and artist, publishing 'Reflecting on Troubling Ireland: a Cultural Geographer's Perspectives' on www.troublingireland.com and exhibiting artwork 'the disappeared' in Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2013. In 2010 I co-founded quarto collective with my sisters and we have worked since on community-based projects largely to do with place and the past. We carry out library, archival and oral history research and fieldwork and write exhibition content, publications and reports; we have developed creative community engagement methodologies and guide and facilitate community groups in producing their own work; we curate and make our own visual work. We are currently working with Lough Neagh Landscape Partnership on the recovery and community restoration of ancient peatlands; carrying out action research with Kids' Own Publishing Partnership on arts education project Virtually There; and creating learning resources for primary schools from a family archive. In 2013 I co-founded artists' collective Loci and have exhibited artwork with this group at Queen's University Marine Laboratory in County Down in 2015 and the Sea Scout and Masonic Hall in Moville in County Donegal in 2016, as part of the centenary reflections on the Easter Rising. As an individual and as a member of quarto, I am committed to interweaving theory and practice, and to working wherever possible on an interdisciplinary and collaborative basis.
Less