My Practice
Before I began my MA Fine Art, I didn't consider myself to have a practice, just a hobby that I cared deeply for. As the year has gone on and I've dedicated time to exploring my artistic identity, I've come to develop a practice revolving around memory making and the intersection of personal and national identity, and how memory informs the migrant identity.
Artist's Statement
Roisín’s artistic practice investigates how memory, material, and place are reassembled through textile and clay-based processes. Working across embroidery, beadwork, painting and ceramics, she treats surface as a site where personal and collective histories gather. Her work frequently begins with aerial perspectives of the Irish landscape, translating fields, roads, and boundaries into stitched, painted, or assembled compositions. These cartographic fragments are not documentary but imaginative reconstructions shaped by distance, migration, and recollection.
Repurposed fabrics, natural materials and slow crafts are central to her methodology, reflecting an ethical commitment to material use and allowing material histories to remain visible. Through slow, repetitive handwork, she explores memory-making, thoughfulness and identity, using making as a form of thinking. Gaps, spacing, and fragmentation recur, suggesting both separation and connection across geographies. Tiles, panels, and textiles operate as modular units that can be rearranged as puzzle pieces, echoing the unstable and curated nature of memory and identity.
Her practice engages questions of belonging, absence and imagined return, particularly in relation to Irish migration and diasporic longing. By embellishing embroidery with labour-intensive detail, she elevates the overlooked and revalues the domestic, positioning craft as a critical language for negotiating self, culture, and place. Works invite viewers into contemplative encounters with layered surfaces and fractured compositions