Ancient Futures
🗓️ Wednesday, 24 June — 12:10pm
- 1:10pm
(60 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
Ancient Futures: Connecting Home, Spirit and Heritage Through Painting
My creative practice research investigates anam áite (the Irish concept of “soul-place”) through a painting-based, practice-led inquiry grounded in phenomenology, materiality, and the affective dimensions of place. It asks how contemporary painting can evoke the spirit of place and engage environmental, ancestral, and emotional resonances. Situated between Aotearoa New Zealand and Ireland, the research positions painting as a means of articulating lived relationships to land, memory, and heritage.
The inquiry is materially driven and process-based, foregrounding the agency of matter and the reciprocal relationship between artist, medium, and method. Cold wax medium is central for its capacity to hold uncertainty, flux, and transformation. Wax, pigment, and surface operate beyond intention: they crack, absorb, resist, and reconfigure. These material behaviours generate their own methodologies, shaping the work through collaboration rather than control. This approach aligns with phenomenological and new materialist perspectives, where matter is understood as an active participant in meaning-making.
The resulting artworks function as durational artefacts that hold traces of ecological, ancestral, and perceptual time. Through material transformation, painting becomes an attentive practice of worlding in which spirit, matter, and memory converge to evoke the complexity of place.
I propose to exhibit work that has been created in Aotearoa New Zealand - depending on the size of the exhibition space I will bring large unstretched canvases that can either be wall-hung or draped.
In addition, I can offer a workshop (1-2 days) introducing people to cold wax medium - a beautiful, transparent medium that, when combined with oil paint and other media can be excavated, accreted and scraped. Its transformative qualities seduce and concurrently, hold sediments of time and place.
My creative practice research investigates anam áite (the Irish concept of “soul-place”) through a painting-based, practice-led inquiry grounded in phenomenology, materiality, and the affective dimensions of place. It asks how contemporary painting can evoke the spirit of place and engage environmental, ancestral, and emotional resonances. Situated between Aotearoa New Zealand and Ireland, the research positions painting as a means of articulating lived relationships to land, memory, and heritage.
The inquiry is materially driven and process-based, foregrounding the agency of matter and the reciprocal relationship between artist, medium, and method. Cold wax medium is central for its capacity to hold uncertainty, flux, and transformation. Wax, pigment, and surface operate beyond intention: they crack, absorb, resist, and reconfigure. These material behaviours generate their own methodologies, shaping the work through collaboration rather than control. This approach aligns with phenomenological and new materialist perspectives, where matter is understood as an active participant in meaning-making.
The resulting artworks function as durational artefacts that hold traces of ecological, ancestral, and perceptual time. Through material transformation, painting becomes an attentive practice of worlding in which spirit, matter, and memory converge to evoke the complexity of place.
I propose to exhibit work that has been created in Aotearoa New Zealand - depending on the size of the exhibition space I will bring large unstretched canvases that can either be wall-hung or draped.
In addition, I can offer a workshop (1-2 days) introducing people to cold wax medium - a beautiful, transparent medium that, when combined with oil paint and other media can be excavated, accreted and scraped. Its transformative qualities seduce and concurrently, hold sediments of time and place.
Biography
I am a contemporary visual artist whose practice engages with place, time, affect, world bending, and materiality. My drawn-paintings are characterised by texturally rich, excavated, and striated surfaces that evoke ancientness, the hidden, the unseen, and the ephemeral.
In 2025, I led an international collective called Meitheal (an Irish term for people who support each other to bring in the harvest) —a collaboration born from time spent at the Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland. The collective includes women from around the world. Our work Faultlines was exhibited at the Sluice World Building exhibition in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, in May, with a focus on inclusivity, art-making, and shared joy.
In 2025, I led an international collective called Meitheal (an Irish term for people who support each other to bring in the harvest) —a collaboration born from time spent at the Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland. The collective includes women from around the world. Our work Faultlines was exhibited at the Sluice World Building exhibition in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, in May, with a focus on inclusivity, art-making, and shared joy.