SETU Degree Show, Waterford Campus, May 2023.

I am a painter concerned with digital folklore, affectionate anthropology and curated spaces of self-hood. I seek to visually investigate the assemblage of the digital excess we hoard, through playful and tactile means. The mutability and flattening of culture today inspires me to challenge material specificity and representation.

My source material largely stemmed from my adolescence in Tramore, which I excitedly documented and preserved in pixels. Aspiring child stars loitering in seaside suburbia, wholly consumed by the transfigurative appeal of Tumblr and the seduction of cute customizable self-surveillance.

In this body of work I investigated how memory constructs a new form of reality akin to file degradation over time; compressed and meshing with the static of overstimulation and a decade-plus nutritional diet of curated algorithmic content. The daily shifting between  ‘IRL’ and ‘URL’  manifests as intuitive layering of imagery, abstractions loosely inspired by my experience of post-seizure hallucinations from childhood epilepsy. Fun, confusing and chaotic fragments of the subconscious coalesce and congeal.

I embraced my inner voyeur in this work. My friends becoming the idiosyncratic strangers I see on the streets of quiet Waterford and the easy-watch assembly cast of peculiar characters, anthropomorphic creatures and the ceaseless succession of incessant Instagram sexbots. Chimeric dreams of utopian deliverance from ubiquitous technological stimuli falsely-harmonise with our lizard-brain’d world in perilous flux. I dream of freeing all the clothed performing monkeys trapped inside my phone.