Each year I devour views from photographs stored underneath the staircase, an endless cycle of rediscovering images that bring life to hazy memories that waiver between dream and reality. Carefully, and often unsuccessfully, I peel apart pictures of my Irish childhood, trying to fill in the ripped gaps of ink and piece together fragments. Yet I can only rely on my mind so much, as I flip through stories of a country that no longer belongs to me, delving deeper into a past I can no longer claim as my own but instead wish for.
Images long before I was born. Images of my parents growing up in a country I would never get the chance to do the same.
I long for a lost Irish childhood and am left forever grappling with the thought of a country I once knew so well having transformed into unfamiliar territory.
'What's Mine is Yours: A Lifetime of Love and Longing' considers the image as a tool to reminisce, restructure, and analyse, particularly once it has been fragmented and distorted. Each work explores whether the attempt to collect fragmented documentations the past serves as simply a method of highlighting what is lost and forgotten, or can it represent something far larger and far more healing than that?
These body of works are heavily informed by my experiences as an Irish immigrant living in Australia and the forms of healing and reconnection I have begun to embrace.
