Of Place

Our connections to place are deeply embedded and fundamentally inform how we perceive our environment. Open to multiple meanings and interpretations, place is something known, but difficult to explain; physical and imagined, spatial and temporal, emotional and sensual.
This work explores attachment to and engagement with place through the medium of ceramics. A wayfaring engagement with Slievenamuck Hill in the Glen of Aherlow, Co. Tipperary and the matter found here – organic, ceramic, animal and anthropological - acts as an anchor line for this investigation.
Paths are explored and materials are gathered, tested and manipulated. Created exclusively from materials collected onsite, primal forms evolve from the place itself, responding to temporal and physical diversities in the obtainable gathered materials.
While ceramics is often valued for its resistance to the effects of time, this work instead acknowledges the ephemeral qualities of place. As a location changes each time we encounter it and is never finished, so these pieces evolve from their unfired to fired forms and beyond, questioning the notion of a finished piece and instead embracing change and evolution in all its guises.