Roisín O'Connor

My practice explores the relationship between home, memory and migration, focusing on what happens when a place becomes increasingly distant and exists primarily through recollection. Working from my experience of leaving Ireland, I am interested in the gap between the physical place we call home and the version of it that persists in memory. Over time, memories shift, details disappear and familiar places can become increasingly idealised, distorted or mythologised.

I use the landscape of Ireland, particularly its fields, as a recurring visual language. By progressively reducing the landscape into simplified shapes, colours and textures, I explore how a specific place can become detached from its geographical reality and transformed into an emotional image of home. Roads, houses, trees and other identifying features gradually disappear, leaving fields that become increasingly abstract and unfamiliar. The landscape is therefore both recognisable and imagined, becoming a place that can be remembered but never completely recovered.

My central installation, Weighted Blanket, brings these concerns together. More than 360 individually made ceramic tiles are stitched into a blanket weighing approximately forty kilograms. The blanket emerges from a suitcase and extends towards the floor, combining ideas of migration, portability, comfort and burden. Its material contradiction is deliberate as its form alludes to something conventionally associated with warmth and protection that becomes hard, fragile and physically overwhelming.

Ceramic allows me to give physical weight and permanence to something fundamentally intangible, while oils allow memories to remain fluid, atmospheric and unstable. Stitching introduces the labour of constructing and reconstructing an image, making the physical act of remembering visible. The handmade nature of my work is important. Each ceramic tile is individually formed, glazed and stitched together, making labour, repetition and imperfection visible. Breakages, irregularities and repairs become part of the work rather than being concealed. This process reflects the attempt to reconstruct something that can never be recovered exactly.

Alongside this, my paintings and smaller ceramic works trace different stages in the process of remembering. Some begin with specific geographical information, such as maps or remembered aerial views, while others reduce the landscape to fragments, colour and texture. Together, the works suggest that memory continually reconstructs home rather than preserving it unchanged.

Ultimately, my practice asks what remains of home when we can no longer experience it directly. Rather than attempting to recreate Ireland faithfully, I explore the increasingly strange, fragmented and emotionally charged version of it that memory and nostalgia produce. My work gives physical form to the intangible weight of carrying an impossible imagined home.