Do you have any early memories of being interested in the arts?
I was one of seven children, and while my bio says I was born in Dublin, I was actually brought up in County Tipperary, the mid-west of Ireland. I did have artistic parents and there was a creative atmosphere at home, at least in the sense that we played with objects and made things at home.
Where we lived in North Tipperary, there really wasn’t much around. I was born in 1971 so there was no internet, but there were books around the place and I do remember books with pictures of art in them.
I don’t think I saw an art exhibition until I was in my teens, so you couldn’t really say we had an education in art, maybe my parents knew a little about art history.
You had some sense of support at home?
My grandfather was an amateur artist, he was an Irish teacher in Dublin, who died, sadly, very young and my mother was a classical musician, she trained in London, she taught music, and had, as I said, seven children.
My father was an English teacher. There were lots of discussions about literature, but I don’t think my family had a deep knowledge of art history. They wouldn’t really have known about modern art movements.
What about school?
We didn’t have a privileged upbringing, with seven children, there was always financial stress. We had a very kind childhood, but we lived in a remote area; there was quite a bit of worry about where we would go to school.
We were bullied at school because we spoke differently, and we didn’t come from the local area originally, so we experienced those difficulties, and eventually my parents scraped together some money to send us to different schools at a distance.
Which school did you end up going to?
I was sent to a very good, quite privileged boarding school called Alexandra College. It was an all girls’ school. The school had an incredible art department; very well resourced.
There was a teacher at that school called Mrs O’Sullivan and she was the one who tapped me on the shoulder to say that she thought I could be an artist.
That was a real light-bulb moment which allowed me to think that I could actually do something, I could be an artist and I could also be good at it. I was good at English and History, but I wasn’t particularly good at the Maths and Sciences. I was about 14 or 15 at that point and I really did love art.
From that moment on, I stayed in that school until 6th year, I felt encouraged to work on my art by the other teachers, and I really embraced it, and I spent about 50 per cent of my time in the Art room making art.
An additional element to the main conversation
I do think the experience of growing up in a rural area, where we grew up it was very restricted and we felt that. There really wasn’t much to do or much on offer, and not having much exposure to an urban environment, urban spaces, and then moving to the city where it felt very much like a free place to be. There was a substantial contrast between the city and the urban spaces being much more open and freer than our rural upbringing.
I think that impacted my later interest in how people respond to their built environment and how crowds react to that environment. It makes you think about how people operate within cities. This was very influential on my later work.
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