Holding Space

Molesworth Gallery, Dublin

7-28 November 2025

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The Paintings

 

A friend of mine once told me you need a touchstone in your life, something that grounds you no matter what, immediately painting came to mind. Painting has been the touchstone of my life, and my life the subject of my paintings. Often the images depict moments of happiness or hilarity. This is the first body of work I have made from a truly dark period, so fraught with pain I wasn’t painting. Between April of 2023 and January of 2025, I suffered from unexplainable dental pain. This period began in West Cork and in searching for answers and relief it brought me to Sweden, Portugal, Utah, and North Dakota. I spent five months in North Dakota back in my childhood basement bedroom. Pain didn’t leave me during those days and only increased. My life became very small, and I was put through mental and physical torture that is difficult to track or explain. I didn’t know how I would get myself back, let alone my career.

 

Sara Baume and I met in 2022 and became fast friends, she gave me lifts and books, we shared swims and lunches. She was the first person I encountered who seemed to be doing life in a way that was like me. When the pain started Sara was my closest friend and was there from start to now.

 

When I flew to Utah in late March of 2023 Sara downloaded WhatsApp. We quickly started voice noting. This became my lifeline. Most days she would assure me the pain would go and that I would get myself back together. I relied on her to keep saying this even when I didn’t believe it. I flew back to Ireland in August of 2024. She was in Cork and collected me. She watched me roam my old cabin and resettle myself, she brought me on long walks or for seaside picnics as I was still in tremendous pain.

 

When this show was proposed Sara was the one who convinced me I was capable. I was fearful I couldn’t make a deadline if the pain returned. She knew the pain wouldn’t get in the way if I had a goal. I feel increasingly like myself these days. Looking back on these moments stings but it has been a privilege to see my memories of this time with my own hand and not just in my mind. It has been a step of growth for me artistically to paint painful memories, and I have found some fulfillment in it.

 

The paintings I have made for this show are all visual love letters to the people who got me through this period, thus the change up in my titling simple dedications rather than nonlinear phrases. Collectively the paintings are all dedicated to Sara the one who knows me like a mirror and saw me in the best and the worst. We are collaborators in a unique fashion in that we don’t have a hand in each other’s work, but we have a role in each other’s scenes, themes and symbols. Quietly my works are talking to her works upstairs and hers to mine downstairs, like voice notes across an ocean. We both like control and possession of our work — to let another in has happened organically. We are friends first which is part of the collaboration, and why it works.

 

The Drawings

 

The drawings are from the offices or medical treatments I received and remembered. The rawness of these operations or waiting rooms were viscerally and emotionally often awful. To labor over paintings was not something I had desire to do, but drawing on treated paper and play with paint and graphite allowed more of a rawness with material that related to the experiences being depicted. Of course, there are stories attached and I am happy to share them, but instead of giving text like the paintings I am leaving this out, just leaving the images and letting them be for now.