Wake
2026
dimensions variable
silk, natural dyes and inks, starch
Installed at Arts and Technology Research Lab, Trinity College Dublin, for Reclaiming Nature. Photographs courtesy the artist.
Commissioned by The Douglas Hyde for Reclaiming Nature curated by Aoife McCloughlin, 2025 Provost’s Fellow in Curating, Wake draws inspiration from the hazard tape strewn around my neighbourhood – used to temporarily bound toppled trees but ultimately thrust onto branches like plastic line drawings in subsequent storms. Using materials on the brink of transformation, she recreates these as emblematic tipping points – their colours hewn from plant debris scavenged in the wake of storms and human activity, and the resilient evergreens predicted to prevail in the face of climate change. Among these, ubiquitous Ivy – underminer of walls and trees but, at some point, an essential stabiliser of rotting remains. Spliced together, Wake hangs like silk streamers after the visitors have gone.
Wake deploys the hatched lines of these streamers as a tangible expression of human interference in the places I gather dyestuffs. Using screen printed and block printed natural inks, tangled up, the mark making draws the manicured suburban garden and wooded hinterland closer together, casting light on consequences and complicity in fusing swatches of colour from native plants with invasives known to steal light from others. I translate this competition for light by pasting preservation grade Tyvek to my studio window to draw lines on dyed silk with sunlight. Normally used in storing the textile collections of museums, the Tyvek masks diagonal stripes as the dyes fade in the sun’s rays from Grianstad an Gheimhridh to Imbolc as a subtle marker of time.