My body of work focuses on a ceramic practice including hand-built and thrown pieces, which investigate themes of time and memory, lineage and heritage, ritual, and art-care practices. Through my figural work, I explore direct and personal human experience, utilizing the human figure as a tool for symbolic representation and storytelling. My figures contextualize my experience as a daughter of Irish immigrants, and bridge a sense of connection to a land, lineage, and people that have always been physically distanced. Through engaging my work in visual elements of narrative stories, I am able to connect my personal experience to a deep heritage of storytelling. Employing the figural body as a medium of symbolism, I imbue pieces with visual representations of time and separation, memory and connection, and grapple with how these themes relate to the diasporic experience.

            I create large scale abstract sculptures as a method of art-care. Through creating shapes and movement that are born of a direct connection with and immersion in the experience of making, rather than planning the visual aesthetics of a final piece, I create sculptures that reflect art as a method of understanding a world around and within us through pure interaction with a material. As an art educator, I utilize large scale abstract sculpture to express a sense of longing for qualitative knowledge that cannot be expressed through linguistic academic research alone, and gained only through experiential learning.

            My thrown functional work incorporates the concept of daily ritual, considering how objects of intense meaning and intention can change our daily experience. In imbuing objects with deep intention, I explore how an intersection of ritual and functionality creates a more meaningful experience of daily activity through our relationship with objects. I see my functional ceramics as a reciprocal relationship between maker, object, and user, and I explore pieces that can be used to create a sense of meaning and purpose through day – to – day life.