I have had a long standing interest in photography (my mum handed me a camera at age 3 and talked to me about level horizons), and after some experimental work with film photography in my teens, and a long photographic hiatus, my love rekindled during the Covid19 pandemic. Since then, I completed a Certificate in Photography and Digital Media (2024) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Art and Ecology (2025), both at NCAD, the National College for Art and Design, in Dublin.

I work with digital, analogue, and experimental processes. My interests lie in investigating the entanglement between sense of belonging and the natural world – in how our sense of feeling grounded and at home is connected to landscape, and to our physical interactions with nature.

My background in archaeology and environmental education has influenced my visual practice and thought processes. Investigating past and present ways in which landscapes are manipulated by us, and in turn, how human behaviours are shaped by physicalities and memories of place, species, or types of environment are central to my work. 

My recent work includes: 

BLOW-IN, which reflected upon (not-)belonging, and the interplay between a sense of identity and the connection to place, presented in book format and group exhibition as part of the Certificate in Photography and Digital Imaging. Blow-in is an ongoing series considering the circumstances of blow-ins, in nature and human. 

LANDING, presented as exhibition piece for the Postgraduate Diploma in Art and Ecology in the NCAD gallery, is a visual representation of the interventions I made on our smallholding, aiming to support biodiversity. It is a consideration of human impact on the environment, of acts of care, and the willingness of nature to be thrive if we give it opportunity to do so, displayed in a grid of twelve 4×5 inch black and white pinhole photographs made on direct positive paper. The grid is representative of the way biodiversity is surveyed during ecological field work.

The surfaces of the photographs were manipulated by scraping and etching, a representation of my disturbing the surface of the landscape. I made ink from the plants growing on our land and used it to add colour to the black and white photographs, subtly highlighting the interventions made for nature. Manipulating the surface of the images allowed the ink to penetrate into the fibre of the photographic paper, mirroring the actions of disturbing the surface of the land. A shelf with samples of the colourful ink and living examples of the species they were made from were displayed below the grid of images. 

My work invites slowness. It asks viewers to notice the overlooked, to question permanence, and to consider how we belong to the environments we are part of.

For Photography updates, see https://www.instagram.com/sulli_vision/