“Fuil Fréamh & Lus Mór / Bloodroot & Foxglove was developed during my project at Lismore Castle Arts in 2025. The work was made through conversations and walks with International Protection Applicants, using plants as metaphors for belonging, healing, and connection. Many of the images were taken during a night walk with the group through Lismore Gardens, using disposable 35mm cameras.

In this work, I draw on intertwined legacies of migration and cultural memory. Through experimental photographic techniques—including anthotype, lumin printing, and phytography—combined with digital processes, reimagining the garden as a contested space where beauty and brutality, order and disorder coexist.

Materiality is central to the approach. Pigments derived from beetroot, blackberry, and rose slowly change under sunlight, evoking both the body and the weight of history. These tactile, time-based processes emphasise the physicality of photography and its capacity to hold memory.

Walking is integral to my methodology. Dusk and night walks through botanical gardens become sensory acts of engagement, where touch and the haptic reveal how the garden is both carefully cultivated and quietly concealed. These experiences shape the images, where shadows unsettle opulence and bring hidden narratives to the surface.

In addition, I reinterpret eighteenth-century Eurocentric pastoral imagery, referencing the French fabric Toile de Jouy—produced in France and later in Northern Ireland’s linen mills. Beneath its decorative surface lie narratives of colonial exploitation.

Through this work, I ask who defines paradise, who tends it, and who is displaced, inviting reflection on the political and personal entanglements of land, growth, and identity, and the urgent need to interrogate the spaces we inhabit.”

Circulation(s) Profile

Website