Tethered once, now torn (2025)

Artist Statement: At the core of my practice lies a reckoning with cultural heritage, a dialogue between the land I live upon and the lineage I carry. My Celtic cultural heritage is not a measurement but a beckoning from the past, a call to listen for what remains beneath the surface. I often dwell in the space of two worlds, the rhythms of Celtic traditions and cultural connection and the rare, elemental beauty of the Australian landscape that shaped me. This in-between is occupied with absences. The loss of a language and story is felt not only as a sadness, a recognition of cultural destruction, but as a yearning, a visceral desire to reconnect, to reimagine my belonging. My work becomes a symbolic vessel for this longing, a way to trace the silhouettes of identity through materials.

I anchor this exploration in two mediums: cyanotypes and glass. Cyanotypes deep indigo blues stain a memory, its chemical imprints the act of preservation. Glass, delicate yet enduring, becomes a metaphor for cultural transmission: what persists, what ruptures, what alters. In both, there is a tension between permeance and vulnerability, between what is held on and what slips away through the generations. 

The triptych form, drawn from Celtic religious architecture, offers a structure for continuity of past, present, future as a time of healing each stage. Through these forms, I engage with broader questions of identity and belonging: How do we inherit culture when its language is lost? How does place shape our understanding of self? And how can making become a form of reconnection?