NEST | The nest of the title had fallen from a tree in my mother's garden at home in the Netherlands. I brought it back to my studio in Ireland, not knowing how it might be transformed in the future. Ten years later, and two years after my mother had died, I returned to it as it contained so many resonances – both personal and universal. The slow pace of the video belies the inherent violence in the act of the destruction of this shelter. My two hands calmly and systematically take apart the bird’s nest twig by twig until nothing is left but detritus and dust. Once a home is undone, it can never be put back together in its original form.
BLINK | Blink addresses what it means not to see. Each image disappears in the blink of an eye, only to be replaced by an endless stream of others. Blink is an ongoing project. Its first edit was made in 2016. As the world changes, I gather more images. I made a second edit in 2018, and in 2022, the vocabulary of images was updated with refugees from Ukraine and Afghanistan. The never-ending march of refugees throughout history connects humankind everywhere and every era. It condemns those who fail to assist people who must leave their homes in our time.
MOMENTS | From one moment into another, in a split second, life changes irrevocably, sometimes in a most disturbing way. A series of animated line drawings portray children caught in the violence of Syria’s war. Their portraits are traced verbatim from news report clips. The drawn portrait underlines the unknowing complex of trauma and the impact of violence so graphically encountered by these children, impelling their unfathomable experience of loss into a shared one. It is not possible to get the whole picture. What we see are fragments. Razan Ibraheem, a Syrian Journalist, and I first talked about how to bring these stories of intense human suffering to a greater audience.
HOME | Home is a film poem made in collaboration with poet Enda Wyley. Together, we worked with participants from the Dun Laoghaire Active Retirement Group. From our first meetings, conversations ensued around ideas of home. How we think, and have to adjust our thinking, about ‘home’ as we grow older, how home is a physical space that we turn into a place of belonging. A place that evolves and is reshaped by us in time as we age. Perhaps we primarily reside at ‘home’ in our hearts and minds and in memories.
FUGUE | Fugue was shot with a handheld camera by someone running through a dark forest, conflating the point of view of predator and prey. The projection’s circular frame simultaneously suggests the surveillance of a scope and a flashlight’s illumination. The ambiguity and disorientation echoes the experience of both migrant and border guard.
SOMEWHERE ELSE | The premise of Somewhere Else is a fugitive place where the binary opposite of home and displacement is played out by two cell-like structures of thousands of minuscule lines and dots that mirror and move toward one another. As minute figures and domestic gadgets are unleashed, the cells break down and transmute constantly.
PIAFFE | Piaffe explores the image of the horse as a symbol of power. It is a visual metaphor for resilience. The emotional strength lies in its poignant fragility: the horse is nothing but a thin ray of light, and its power is pent-up and never to be released. This video plays with physical stress and the constraint of body power constantly held in check.