Tell us a little about yourself and your work
I am working part-time as an Art Teacher in a secondary school in Lucan, Dublin. I teach art across a variety of year groups as well as teaching a module in fashion design and running the photography club. My first year of teaching, I found it difficult to balance teaching and creating. I was at an art teachers’ conference when I discovered the Sketchbook Circle. I have always loved post correspondence and couldn't wait to sign up! Being part of the Sketchbook Circle has pushed me to carve out time for art and get involved in more creative projects outside of the circle. I am drawn to abstract art - immersing myself in colour, texture, pattern and mixed media just resonates with me. There is nothing like getting lost in the flow of painting. In recent years, I have focused more on alcohol inks as a medium but I also work with paint, collage, printmaking and mixed media. I am lucky enough to have a little art studio at home where I create a lot of my work, but I love creating out and about and in the garden in the summer. I consider myself an intuitive artist, constantly drawing inspiration from my surroundings, what I collect and my travels.
Describe your creative process
Keeping a sketchbook and a camera with me to record inspiration when it strikes usually helps me to form colour palettes and ideas for my paintings. When I sit down to paint I will usually have a look at all my materials and focus my attention on my immediate environment or a recent experience in which my surroundings inspired me. I will usually start by creating colour swatches, playing around with the inks and seeing where they take me. Depending on the effect I want, I use an air blaster, heat gun or blow on the inks to push them around, sometimes turning the paper to control the flow. I love the element of surprise that comes with this medium. I usually finish a painting by adding some gold or silver embellishment, with ink or gold leaf. When I am working in my sketchbook, responding to my partners work and having a creative conversation is super inspiring! I love to work with mixed media-print, painting, collage, layering and inks. Myself and my current sketchbook partner will often start working into the pages, with a mixed media background or a drawing and there will be a back and forward collaboration working together to complete the artwork. It’s always exciting to see the end result arriving in the post!
Where do you get your inspiration from?
Inspiration comes from so many different places. Travel is a huge source of inspiration for me, exploring a different way of life, nature, new colours, textures and patterns to draw inspiration from. I was lucky enough to visit Japan last summer and it has definitely influenced the way I work and the materials I use. The sketchbook circle trip to Berlin last Easter sparked off lots of ideas and got me interested in texture explorations, making postcards and being more experimental in my sketchbook. Creative conversations through the sketchbook circle keeps me inspired and visiting galleries and discovering new artists is a great source of inspiration as well. Finding time to play with materials, discovering new techniques and bouncing ideas off other artists keeps my mind fresh with ideas!
What materials do you like to use?
My favourite materials right now are alcohol inks, Yupo paper and a magical glue brush pen I got on a recent trip to Japan which allows me to embellish my paintings with gold leaf. I love gold and silver leaf and inks for little glowing details. Paint markers, pens, book pages picked up on travels and creative papers are all materials I am constantly drawn to.
What are you working on right now?
I am still working with alcohol inks and trying to steer them in a new direction. I am working on a new series of circular ink paintings and plan on exploring layering resin over the inks in the coming months. I am finishing some collaborative mixed media work in my sketchbook at the moment, playing around with brush pen and gold ink. I also hope to take all the bits and pieces I collected on my recent trip to Japan and create a little artist’s book.
What's your biggest challenge as an artist?
Finding time to create is always a challenge for me. Being part of the Sketchbook Circle has definitely helped with this and is a constant reminder to carve out time for art. I had my first solo exhibition of my ink paintings in Container Coffee, here in Dublin last summer and hope to use my holidays and spare moments creatively and exhibit again soon!
What's the first arty thing you can remember making?
My dad would always bring home reams of green and white stripy fax paper from work. I remember rolls of this paper stretched out covering the sitting room floor and sitting there drawing for hours! This was a regular occurrence in our house! I'm very lucky to have had parents that have always encouraged me to create!