Biography

I started to take photographs five years ago. I didn’t know how to use a camera properly. I still don’t. When people ask me about camera aperture, I panic. But I remember a photographer saying that a painter didn’t obsess over his paintbrush. This gave me comfort and confidence. In the beginning there was no agenda to what I took a photograph of, I didn’t give it any thought. But I did take them, I pointed the lens at something that caught my attention and I pressed the shutter button.

I remember walking into a small photographer’s shop in Powerscourt Shopping Centre when I lived in Dublin. He had a framed photograph leaning against a wall on the floor waiting to be hung. I stared at it. And then the next day I returned and stared at it again. It was the first time a photograph had made me question something inside of myself.
One day a friend of mine who is an artist was looking through the images on a small camera of mine. He said they were interesting and that perhaps I should take it more seriously. My focus had always been on other things but for some reason I listened.

I have lived and worked in many different cities, always moving back and forth. When you travel alone, you spend time looking up from your book and watching people. I went to an exhibition of Honoré Daumier and was inspired. He was fascinated by people doing the most normal, daily tasks. He made everyone distinctive, as they should be. In big cities you can feel lost in a crowd of faceless people. But I felt at home when I took a photograph of someone eating a sandwich on their lunch break or a family walking together down a street on a Sunday. It is the simple things that are beautiful to me.

After completing a photography course in the Victoria and Albert Museum London, I made a portfolio of my work. I approached a cafe in Belfast to see if they would be interested in displaying my photographs. They were. This led to me starting to sell my work. I didn’t expect that anyone would feel anything from looking at them. I felt something and that had been enough for me so this was a pleasant bonus. A lady from Chicago bought two from my West Strike Spark Series, she said when she looked at them she felt she was coming home. I don’t think I could have received a nicer compliment. Now I have had three exhibitions and I am preparing two more.