Over the past two years I have been birthing a big beautiful project called Lake Burst. This project emerged out of a connection I’ve been cultivating with a local lake called Lough Bré.
When I first started visiting the lake I had no intention of making a work about it. I was visiting because I was seeking solace and being with the waters helped me to access a sense of calm reflection inside of myself.
I had just come back to Ireland from living in Trinidad and it was still early on in the global shift back to “normal” (after the governments of the world had decided the pandemic was over). I was having a “tower” moment -tower in this instance refers to a tarot card that shows up in a reading when the ego-structures and patterns in your life that you previously relied on (thinking they were useful, natural and safe) are revealed to you as being harmful and imprisoning causing everything that you had built on top of those patterns to start crumbling (often dramatically!).
I actually had a great reminder of the essence of the tower this week. I went up to my studio which is on the same site as a set of very old buildings and met the caretaker as I was getting out of my car. He told me that one of the huge chimneys had collapsed into one of the rooms and showed me some pictures. The room is filled with rubble from ceiling to floor. He said that they had known that there were cracks in the walls and under the windowsills for years but instead of fixing the issue they had chosen to plaster over the cracks and put foam under the windowsills. On the surface, the building had looked great, but the reality is that were cracks in the foundations so, of course, the structure collapsed.
“Wow” I thought, when he told me this “what an amazing reminder of how we as human beings so often try to pretend like everything is fine and we can just keep building our lives, when in actuality we haven’t addressed the cracks at the base of our lives.”
Anyway, when I came back from Trinidad I was in the middle of a full scale tower breakdown. A series of events had brought me to rock bottom, and I knew that I had to make some serious changes in myself and in my life if I was going to start spiralling upward again.
Lake Burst has been a big part of my healing journey, it has been the funnel for all my creative energy from that rock bottom moment to this day, two and a half years on.
My work has always been really personal exploring my identity, ancestry and lived experiences. But up until this point I’ve preserved some false sense of distinction between my healing journey and my artistic one.
I believe that one of the most profound changes that has happened in my practice in recent years is that I am no longer as interested in concept and theory. The more rational, intellectual and analytical methods of approach that used to define my artistry and my sense of self worth no longer do.
I’ve made a slow and conscious move to embrace the sensual, embodied, intuitive, responsive, emotional, mysterious and spiritual aspects of artistic practice. This way of making art requires me to embrace a new way of being in the world; to be more present and less controlling, more reponse-able and clear sighted, more real and honest about my impulses and my desires.
This monumental shift in my artistic practice has only been made possible through my commitment to my healing journey and Lake Burst is the project that I’ve been making whilst transitioning more fully into this new way of being and approaching art making.
I’ve been making Lake Burst as I’ve been crawling my way back up to the surface from the bottom. It has been healing me as I’ve been birthing it, and my healing is what has been allowing it to be birthed.
Now, I’m at the stage where I perceive my artistic practice and my healing journey as one and the same. The more I heal and grow, the more I can embody and channel my aliveness into creativity and the more I create, the more I encounter myself and see the challenges and blocks I face leading to more healing and growing… and so it loops round, art feeding healing feeding art feeding healing in an endless upward spiral.