I am pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition at Interface in Connemara.

As part of The Ceramic House project EDGES curated by myself and my collaborator Dr Joseph Young, we undertook a residency at Interface in June 2023, which was a period of intense inspiration and deep immersion into the timeless and ancient landscape of Connemara. Interface is a unique and very special residency and exhibition space, set in a former salmon hatchery in the Inagh Valley. Over a four-week period, we investigated the geology and ecology of Connemara. Each day was spent walking the land, exploring the inlets, bogs, and pathways of Connemara, uncovering its histories and topographies. We were extremely well looked after throughout the month we spent there and, subsequently, during a following residency at Watts Gallery, we each created new works in response to the landscape of Connemara.

I discovered that each grain of sand covering the beaches of Dogs Bay in Connemara is the fossil of a single-celled organism that lived mostly on the mud of the ocean bed between 640 and 540 million years ago. When they die, billions of their calcium skeletons, bearing many chambers and holes, and not visible to the naked eye, wash ashore to form this unusual sand. This is such a rare occurrence that Dogs Bay beach is the only one composed of foraminifera in the northern hemisphere. The body of work I created is called Foraminifera.

The results were exhibited as part of a group show we curated including works by three pairs of ceramic and sound artists from Estonia and Ireland who each collaborated to create new pieces. The exhibition was called EDGES and was initially displayed at Wexford Arts Centre in February – March 2024 and from July-November 2024 at Watts Gallery, where we worked closely with the curators to display the works within the historic house, Limnerslease. In addition to the work I made for Wexford, I created two site specific pieces for the nook in Limnerslease, which formerly contained Mary Watts’ gesso decoration, and for the stunning Watts Cemetery Chapel. Joseph Young designed an audio trail around Watts Artists Village and his focal piece, listening to the wind, inspired by Tom Robinson’s writings and wanderings around Connemara, was geo-locate din the chapel.

These two works, Foraminifera and listening to the wind, will be returned to the source of their inspiration in a new exhibition at Interface in June 2027.