I am an Irish photographer, based in London. My practice sits on the crossover of representational and abstract photography, blurring those lines to consider what is objective visual reality (is there such a thing) and what is subjective reaction, a dialogue with my imagination, memory or emotions. I have a particular preoccupation with landscapes that have been altered, displaying the visible signs of human activity and geo-politics and I recently published a book ‘Dividing Lines’ a post Brexit essay using the landscapes of northwestern Ireland as a metaphor for the absurdities of borders and artificial division.

I’m also a founder member of FIKA book & zine, a new photography book collective which published their first collaborative trilogy in 2024: there are more books, zines and essays in the pipeline. I have exhibited both nationally and internationally, from London to the USA, Greece, France, and the Netherlands and received numerous commendations from a variety of photography competitions. I had my first solo show at the The Photobook Cafe in 2023.

But what it's really all about: a sense of the outsider looking in, ‘outsiderness’. It permeates all my work, pretty much whatever the subject. It’s not judgmental - there is connection and empathy but it comes from a place (unchosen) outside, observing, intuiting, noticing and, often literally, sympathizing. I put it down to a peripatetic childhood, arriving too often in new places, the new girl in school. You assess your new circumstances, the groupings and connections between your new friends and you learn very quickly to adapt, like a chameleon, in order to fit in.

But of course, you never really do fit in, it’s in appearances only, you’re still on the outside observing, so intent on working out how you should appear that you forget who you are. Like the background to my early years, my images change in subject – there's an inherent assumption of change, from place to place, school to school, and I absorb the impressions of everywhere I go. So in photography, I switch regularly between landscape and incidental, to still life and abstract, representational and impressionistic, and back again. To me, they are really no different - in all there is the same underlying current, I’m still looking for the same thing, the same mood, the same feeling. I very rarely photograph people because my view is so subjective and observational and because, as an outsider, I would feel intrusive trying to represent the inner life of another person. I am not them, I am almost a ghost or a cipher.