Selected for AFI '25 by Crawford Art Gallery, Cork
What compels you to work with moving image, and when did you first become interested in the medium?
“As someone who is very interested in working through lots of different mediums, film and moving image allows me at different times to combine aspects of the visual, audio and spatial making that I enjoy. I often use writing as a starting point to generate ideas, and I find that lends itself to filmmaking. I made my first short in 2023 (‘The Immeasurable Grief of the Prawn’) and since then film and moving image have become central in my practice.”
Can you speak about the potential that dreaming and altered states of reality offer individuals and societies? How do you feel this is reflected in filmmaking and in your artwork specifically?
“I believe that the worlds we inhabit are constructed by inherited stories, and that it is very possible for these worlds to be fundamentally altered by imagining something else. If it’s possible to imagine something else, then it is possible for that something else to be. ‘Wild Geese 2: Wilder Geese’ explores this in a light-hearted way, playing with the idea of cosmic nihilism (“what if instead of the universe being indifferent to our existence as some people believe it to be, it is overly concerned”). To some extent the capitalist-realist truism ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of capitalism’ is right, but what if we continued to imagine a capitalism-ending world into being anyway?”
Please share a list of books, music, films, artworks, thinkers, spaces and places that inspire your practice, and in particular have fed into your thinking around this film.
“This film is a response to the poem ‘Wild Geese’ by Mary Oliver, and was filmed while on residency at the Fish Factory in Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland, which I loved. Aside from these, and in no particular order, ‘The Summer Book’ by Tove Jansson, ‘Grosse Fatigue’ by Camille Henrot, ‘The Gastronomical Me’ by MFK Fisher, ‘Tampopo’ directed by Juzo Itami, and ‘The Visitors’ by Ragnar Kjartansson each scratch a particular funny romantic itch in my brain.”
What new projects or lines of research are currently preoccupying you?
“I am currently researching a new project concerning the migration of women from Ireland to the United States in the late 19th-century in tandem with the migration of plant matter. This is framed by the story of my great-great-great-great aunt, Charlotte Grace O’Brien, a writer and botanist who campaigned on behalf of emigrant women to improve their living, working, and travel conditions.”
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