As an installation artist and printmaker, I employ woodcut, monotype, and screenprint in combination with sound, animation, and projection to create immersive environments for my audience to inhabit. I utilize woodburning techniques to create the woodcuts because the act of woodburning can be ritualistic and meditative. I use monotype and screenprinting for their painterly and expressive qualities, and work with projection to mimic how light operates in the Passage Graves found in Ireland, where my paternal grandmother is from. These mediums are important in my studio practice as a way to process grief while exploring my family history. In the past few years, I have had different relationships with grief, and while it is often painful, my grief at times has been comforting and beautiful, a reflection of the important relationship, now transformed, and a realization that my memories of that person are fragile, relentlessly manipulated by time. Inspired by artists within the Spiritualism movement and my research around Neolithic funerary rituals in Irish history, my installation employs projections to represent the sacred use of light in these death practices. I start with a woodcut print, project the white lines from that print onto reflective mylar, photograph the reflections, and use those photographs as a base layer for large–scale monotypes. The audience enters a dark room, illuminated using only low levels of lighting mixed with the bright lines offered by the projection. On the right hand side there are six richly layered monotypes, each 10’ tall. This scale is meant to loom over the viewer to capture my relationship with grief. Balancing ambiguity and intensity I work with multiple media and processes to provide a meaningful resonance between my work and the experiences of my audience. Each step of the process is a distortion of the last, and I do not view these steps as individual works, but instead selected parts of a larger whole. These distortions abstractly represent how fragile our memory is and how easily it is affected by the passage of time. Categories All Tags #thesis2023