Here is a page of some of my visual art - what I do to research performance projects, nourish writing projects, and muse. This page is in development right now, as I am currently using it to apply for residencies. My main audiencing procedures for visual art are installations - often in connection with performances - and online displays in journals.

Here are glimpses of three current (2025/26) bodies of work, all in some way part of my geology/animacy research: In/Visible Colors (watercolor/gouache + recycled canvases and acrylics),  the Dingle Caravan (small sculptures/encaustic drawings, often in relation to rocks), and Medical Livelinesses (encaustic painting).

My substrate for this investigation is mineral paper, made from recycled rock, from calcium carbonate. This paper does not buckle with wet media, different from conventional watercolor paper. My excitement to experiment with this paper stems from its sustainability implications – it has radically reduced water consumption when compared to graphic printing stock, and does not use any bleach, acid or optical brighteners in its production. Its smooth, semi-organic surface (some compare touching it to the membrane of an egg) is also photo-degradable, i.e. it decomposes eventually in daylight. Many of my ongoing artistic obsessions are intriguingly combined – mining/earth work, sustainability and its complexities, the decay of organic/inorganic materials.

In my work with this paper during the residency and beyond, I found myself shifting from close observation of a rock into a dreamy, color-field abstraction. My process is akin to slipping into the rock’s cracks, taking its color information as a guide to its make-up (iron content, quartz crystalline structures, or the presence of copper derivates, all shaping different colors). In this journey into abstraction, I enter into conversation with the rock and its geology.

I love the way the color pools on the rock paper. What happens in these beautiful pools reminds me of the origin of rock in lava, magma, and of crystals in super-heated water suspension. The rocks display their earth character, but are also becoming animate to me as I drown in the rock, let my eyes be flooded, let the rock swim in its liquid, watery or fiery magma medium as I apply the color. 

These dreamy processes have long roots in the history of creative engagement with rocks and crystals. I can trace my personal obsessions back to German fantasies of the early 1800s, at the beginning of geology as a science: to poet/scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or to art fairy tale teller Ludwig Tieck and his sexy mineral mountain women. Another one of my personal stories connects to a local (to me) lineage, my exposure as a young adult to the work of performance artist Joseph Beuys and his ritual engagement with monumental materiality. More recently, my artist kin include Irish feminist performance artist Kira O’Reilly, who grows crystals that evoke alchemy, or Brazilian artist Luana Vitra, who charges her explorations of extraction industries on Indigenous land with spiritual invocations of crystal fields. 

In the slipstream of these obsessions with rock’s materiality, join me and step into these color pools: I invite you to enter, to see life shimmering in rock crevices, allowing us humans moments of a quasi-transcendent touch with different temporalities and energetic vibrations. 

Invisible Colors: Lake Rocks series

In this series, I am working with recycled canvas or canvas boards and acrylic paint, usually on 11x14 formats, sometimes on 24x36, depending on what I find in our re-use stores  (i.e. all still highly portable, and intimate).  I love how the older paintings shimmer through - material upon material, the stuff of imagery... the quickness of human life vs the long timespan of rocks.

Rocks in Performance: a developing body of work in community

Medical Livelinesses

This body of work focuses on animal/human/rock relations. Each of the creatures on these encaustic panels relate to poisons and biological mechanisms that biomedicine developed from more-than-human living creatures: the Gila Monster, the Fer-de-Lance snake.

Snake/Rock: Open Writing

Shedding – here is my snake in the painting, twisting in on itself – its upper half flared, cobra-like, with a deeper under belly of a muscular expanse rolling over itself. Beneath the ink marks that make up the snake, diluted acrylic paint makes a shadow, an inky pool, from which drips course down the whole length of the canvas board. As I look at it, that shadow could be a cloud, or maybe a shedded remnant skin in darkness – something oozing away, oozing out,

separating from the snake’s body proper. 

Those dark drips echo the much more creamy streaks of greens and yellows above the snake, the rain forest or jungle territory of its habitat – this is a South American snake, and its poison was useful in developing medications that keep blood pressure under control. In particular, its poison allowed scientists to figure out a mechanism for how a medication can spread quickly and evenly through a body – that’s what the snake’s poison does, instantaneously paralyzing its prey. Poison = gift: gift means poison in German, my mother tongue. French critical theorist Jacques Derrida made much of the pharmakon and this cross-over of the gift, the present, and the poison: each gift, each thing gifted to us, also holds a poison, a sting.

We are exploiting animals that threaten us, defanging them into medications that allow us to live longer – with their poison. This chiasm, cross-over, fascinates me, as an unequal exchange between reptiles and humans. The fer-de-lance of exotic adventure myth becomes the gift-giver to medicine, just as Indigenous knowledges from around the world are leeched by Western pharmaceutical industries. In the middle of this muddle, I live, and breathe, take my pills, shed my skin in my circles of renewals, living with the meds that thin my blood and keep inflammation and pain at bay.

Shed my snake skin. Renewal, a new way of being. Curious, exploring, the pink tip of my tongue out. The world of multicolor rock, purple drips of watery flow, the textured expanse of a palimpsest canvas on which to create a new picture. The gesso like a new skin, flaky when rubbed the wrong way by my ink nib’s sharp tip. Brush strokes and old textures like guide rails, easily overrun, decisions to make, generous big brush swirls of color or tiny brush dabs.

Shed my shed skin, my closed-in skin which needs to grow and expand in new ways, glistening like fresh wet paint in the sunshine, in the hollow of my dark night-time studio. Now it’s time to enclose the vulnerability, to harness against time: a wax coat awaits.

I love when I put on my heating surface, and the whole studio quickly warms up, my whole being warmed by the sweet smell of beeswax (with the door ajar for ventilation), a bit of demarr resin for hardness. The moment where the studio goes from cold to hot, everything radiating from the slowly melting wax containers, my eye on the thermometer to make sure all stays safe and well. The giant brushes come out, to luxuriously cover the tender ink and acrylic painting with a new satiny skin. Everything becomes hazy, retreats, finds its own hollow, edges become a little bit less distinct, sink into myth.

A satiny new skin stretches soon across the painting, first still malleable and soft, so soft, with little dimples, then hardening quite quickly, shedding its heat back to me as I hold the canvas board in my hands. Given the dimensions of the board, its middle is close to my own middle. We are belly to belly, the snake and I in heat-exchange.

Then, we fuse: I take up my heatgun to melt the freshly applied wax again. The heat chases small lakes of pigment across the underpainting. The liquid wax pools, find its equilibrium in the hollows of this recycled object. A lake projects my fingers’ warmth right back to me. Heat exchange. Energy capture. Skin contact.