I think that drawing is really at the root of my practice. Usually, a drawing emerges when I am the most focused on creating images. However, for works like the photographs that recently entered the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, I did not make drawings beforehand. I use drawing as an end-in-itself and each one is a completed piece. It is not an experiment or a sketch.

I like to work with several techniques. I had very classic training, even conservative, in the 1980s, when we were learning to paint and draw. But the end of that decade was a fascinating period when I began to discover women artists who were not talked about in school. For example, Louise Bourgeois who opened the way, Helen Chadwick or Cornelia Parker, who broke the mould in terms of what might be done in art and especially the fact of using one’s body or lost-and-found objects. At that time, we were just emerging from the new expressionist painting, highly popular in Germany, with those giant formats, works mostly carried out by male artists. Therefore, a lot of artists evolved towards another creative space and I was lucky to be part of that generation. In addition, I came from a rural background and felt that this might also be considered as an art subject, even though it was a domain regarded with some disdain. I realized that I was attracted by what was marginalized and detested or neglected and I began to work with materials coming from the earth itself… or insects or snails…

Probably, I consider that the landscape is inside me rather than outside. I am not interested in what it resembles or in making images, but rather its relation to a human being or animal. There again, I come from a rural and farming background which nurtures a different connection with the landscape. For us, it was space where you had to work hard and I have no romantic notion about landscape. I am also interested in it because it is a territory linked to colonisation, a story of revendication and the reconquest of the land.
There was a concern about seizing a space for yourself, as a human being and indeed as a woman.    

All of this is part of my own experience and stories we were told as children and as an Irish girl. The earth was considered as being alive. Then I got interested in world mythologies and the way in which these stories are told and why they are told. I like to go back over myths and find how to deform them in a way. For instance, I worked on Cassandra, whose words were scorned and considered to be nothing more than babble… I wanted to dress her in a necklace of languages, as if to give her a multiple voice. This is also connected to our own Irish language, which got lost because it was forbidden in the colonial period. I wanted to insist on the notion of having a language within the body, a real and physical language. In this way, you enter the body and come out from the inside as if in a dream that you wear… like a jewel.

It is more about a portrait of the relationship with materials. But more globally, I think the profound meaning of injustice is engraved in my work. Gradually, I have become militant about the changing of my country’s constitution… However, I produce art as an artist but do not know how to separate the two. I allow what I feel to show itself, which is especially true in drawing as it offers the possibility of accessing the subconscious. We think that we can easily get in touch with it but that is not true… we must give it permission to function. Then it is interesting to observe how to find images from the inside. I look at images a lot from art history but also medical books or maps…But when it comes to my drawing, in some way I must find the image within myself.

I am quite physical with my drawings. Mostly, they are quite big, so I stand when making them. Especially with charcoal, you must make choices, distance yourself, gradually change things…or I can quite simply let the drawing develop itself. I erase a lot which is part of the drawing, like a thought process. The latter can come and go, like a line…and when we look paper we see where it has been erased. Therefore, we can really follow the drawing’s thinking.

When I started, I used collage. I applied silk paper, then I removed it and that created a shape within the space. Nowadays, for small formats I use crayons and charcoal for the bigger ones, to which I may add some chalk. My drawings are never placed in a decor but rather as if they are suspended in space.

No, because myths and stories have an eternal life and continuously change. Each story is transformed when it is told, therefore myths evolve in relation to the context. For example, Cassandra’s story was looked at very differently 30 years ago and represented a bad lesson to follow. But today, it is read from another perspective. The myth is like a relationship with the gods, as it were, and with the eternal. But folklore nurtures a relationship with life and the vernacular language of the people, also very interesting. Incidentally, I read a lot, everything… and I am pleased that at the present time we have young poets who write in Irish. I also admire Angela Carter’s work on folklore, or Marina Warner, who wrote a fabulous book about the Virgin Mary.

The entire history of the Catholic church has been created by female contradictions, such as the Virgin Mary and the sinner Mary Magdelena, thereby creating only two options for women…but we have grown up with these figures so they play an important role in our psyche.

I think we live in very interesting times today, because we talk a lot about interspecies and the fluidity between the sexes. This is a space where I have tried to evolve since I became interested in marginality, in misunderstandings or other things which become a dominant trend. Back in the old days, we thought that animals were separate to us, yet now people begin to have more respect for animal life or even the life of plants, looking at how trees can communicate between themselves.

I suppose I feel like a hybrid… and sense a deep connection with the animal world. My creatures are hybrids also, half animal, half like centaurs and half like mermaids.
Think about all those creatures created by our imagination because we aspire to connecting ourselves with our animal-self.
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This subject is also totally part of my culture. We Catholics, we live in the absolute and we have been colonized and repressed. The martyr plays a fundamental role in the historical origins of our State. Like the Kilmainham prison, symbolic of the struggle for independence and where the nationalists and revolutionaries rose up in masse during Easter 1916 before their execution. In Northern Ireland there were also many hunger-strikes and deaths.

Yes, but I do not do it in a didactic way and there is no preaching. But it is true that recently I realized a large textile piece called The Map, which is like an historical one…