A photograph is often understood as something complete.
It hangs on a gallery wall, protected behind glass, its edges defining where the artwork begins and ends. It asks us to look, to observe, perhaps to remember.
But I have become increasingly interested in what happens when photography leaves these conventions behind.
What happens when an image is released from its frame? When it is no longer confined to the gallery but enters the landscape, exposed to the wind, rain, sunlight and the changing rhythm of the seasons?
With I Am Bird, photography becomes something else entirely.
Created as a site-specific installation for the Mountshannon Arts Festival, the work transformed large-scale photographs into flowing textile forms suspended throughout the Aistear Maze. Printed onto fabric rather than paper, the images became responsive to their surroundings. They moved with the breeze, absorbed changing light, cast shadows across the pathways and shifted continuously throughout the day.
The photographs were no longer static objects.
They breathed.
Fabric possesses a unique ability to blur the boundaries between image and environment. Unlike a framed photograph, it carries movement within it. It folds, drifts and responds. Every change in the weather alters the work, making each encounter different from the last. The landscape becomes an active collaborator, shaping the experience alongside the viewer.
Alongside the digitally printed photographic textiles, the installation also incorporates cyanotype fabric prints, created using one of photography’s earliest processes. Hand-coated textiles are exposed directly to the sun, with leaves, flowers and other botanical materials placed upon the fabric to create luminous blue impressions. These works are not simply images of nature—they are created with nature.
The sun becomes the printer.
The plants become collaborators.
Time, weather and season leave their own delicate traces upon the cloth. Every cyanotype is unique, carrying the memory of the place and the moment in which it was made. Working with cyanotype allows me to surrender part of the creative process, embracing chance and allowing natural forces to become co-authors of the work. It reminds us that photography has always been a dialogue between light, material and time.
This transformation lies at the heart of my practice as an interdisciplinary artist. I am interested not simply in making photographs, but in exploring how photography can become an immersive experience—how an image can occupy space, invite movement and create a dialogue with the places in which it exists.
When photographs are enlarged beyond the scale of the body and translated onto textile, they cease to function merely as representations. They become places in themselves. Visitors do not simply stand in front of them; they walk amongst them, discovering fragments, shifting perspectives and moments of quiet contemplation.
Every site brings its own history, atmosphere and emotional resonance. A site-specific artwork does not impose itself upon a place. Instead, it listens, responds and allows the place itself to become part of the work.
This September, I Am Bird begins a new chapter as it moves to the historic Irish Workhouse in Portumna as part of the Shorelines Arts Festival.
https://irishworkhousecentre.ie/
The installation will be presented in the Workhouse Yard and hung at the back of the dining hall building, a space that witnessed profound human suffering during one of Ireland’s most difficult periods. Its walls and grounds carry stories of poverty, hunger, displacement, resilience and survival. These histories remain present within the architecture and the landscape itself.
To bring I Am Bird into this setting is both a privilege and a responsibility.
The installation cannot erase the past, nor should it. Instead, I hope it offers another layer to the story of the place—a gentle presence that invites reflection, stillness and connection. The flowing photographic textiles will once again move with the wind, introducing moments of beauty into a place where beauty once felt absent.
Art cannot rewrite history.
But perhaps it can create spaces for healing.
It can invite us to gather, to pause, to acknowledge what has been, while allowing new memories to emerge. The photographs speak of freedom, migration, transformation and belonging—ideas that resonate deeply within a place shaped by journeys both chosen and forced. Here, the work enters into a quiet conversation between past and present, suffering and hope.
Yet this is not the final destination.
At the beginning of October, I Am Bird will continue its journey to Flagmount Wild Garden, where it will become part of Birds in Paradise, a retreat created with Slavek Kwi and Ruth Wieder Magan.
The installation will be suspended amongst the trees of the remarkable ecosystem lovingly created by Brendan Sanders.
This final setting feels less like another exhibition venue and more like a homecoming.
Born from an ongoing fascination with birds, freedom and our relationship with the natural world, the photographic textiles will once again move with the wind, filter autumn light through their translucent surfaces and settle amongst the trees where birds gather and sing. The cyanotypes—created with sunlight and botanical forms—will return to the very elements that made them. Surrounded by trees, wildflowers and birdsong, the work comes home to its natural habitat.
There is something deeply moving about this final chapter.
The installation no longer simply depicts birds.
It exists amongst them.
It sways with the branches, breathes with the wind and, in its own quiet way, sings with the birds.
From the living pathways of Mountshannon, to the historic grounds of the Irish Workhouse in Portumna, and finally to the sanctuary of Flagmount Wild Garden, I Am Bird traces a journey through landscape, memory and renewal. Each place reshapes the work, offering a new conversation between photography, ecology, history and belonging.
Perhaps this is what draws me most to site-specific practice.
The artwork is never fixed.
It grows through the places that receive it, through the weather that touches it and through the people who encounter it.
When photography is released into the world, it no longer simply represents life.
It becomes part of it.