Artist
Howl of the Banshee is the second of two videos, which includes recorded fears and images and video as a contrast to those fears. What are you howling for? Is the title of the series. This video showed at the Raconte Arts Festival in Tiferdoud,Algeria, where the voices were recorded and the visitors walking past became a part of the installation of the video, with the projections onto their bodies and their own shadows on the walls, as shown towards the end of the video. As an Irish and American citizen, I have combined the idea of the character from Irish folklore, the Banshee, a woman who appears as old, monstrous, or as a witch, similar to the characters in Algerian folklore: settut, (a witch), teryel (ogress) temgart (old woman) and the poem by the American poet, Allen Ginsberg, Howl. In Ireland, the Banshee was known as a woman spirit who appeared at the house before someone in the family died and the poem Howl speaks about the downfall of many great creative thinkers of an era. I found that in Kabylie folklore, there is a parallel in the relationship to the image of a woman as a witch, a monster, and an old woman.  The sound is of the voices of people who were at the festival sharing their personal fears, which becomes the howl of the Banshee. The video images are from events at the festival, creating a positive contrast to the fears. This performance includes the predictions of the Banshee who is the messenger of the death of an era, but also of the birth of change and positivity. The artist as the Banshee becomes not someone to be feared but someone to be welcomed as she brings positivity to the world by night, as dreams can when we sleep.​ ​
​​​Howling Banshee was the first video for the project What are you howling for?, which was created from submissions of sound clips from different parts of the world of people talking about their fears. Next, I took images and video from different parts of my daily life and from past experiences, to create a vision of positivity for the future.
It was important to feel close, to feel close to you, but I had no idea where you might be
I was wondering and wandering and then I saw a part of you
Your skin now hardened into the crust of time and transformed into a sieve at either end, as if the coral might be growing there
You thought it was me when I left, but it was all you
I lifted you again and again
A portion of the sky within you now, touches your sounds and holds them inside
I am listening 
The wind and the sky faintly whisper, 
but no one will believe me 
unless you surface again, arise from the sea, follow me
As I walk, you bruise me, your weight on my shoulder, your rough touch. I fall for you, and then I stand up
I place you upright and test the ground to affirm our foundation our miracle
You speak again and again, and I just want to hear your voice once more
But it is only a whisper, only a heartbeat in a cavernous world

Walking I admired the way the leaves rustle under my feet.  I felt hopeful as the sidewalk changed from a dark gray moistened by the rain to a brilliant yellow edged by green.  Childhood always rushes back in unbounded memory when I hear the crisp leaves crush under my feet. Fall will soon crystallize in winter’s icebox. But, there is no way to preserve marriage born in Samhain.  Surrounded by death and layers of masks, we were linked in change and mystery. A fire. The smell comforts me and it feels like home before I ever thought about relationships-  before my father died. When my dog was still alive and slept on the rug before the fireplace.  I pass the playground and I have felt half my life in an instant. 
 
I imagine the babies swimming underwater in that movie Amelie.
The title of the project, memory reconstructed 
(originally titled Hvalreki), means when you encounter, by chance, a whale washed up on shore, in the Icelandic language; it is used colloquially to mean good luck, because when your family is starving and you encounter a whale on the beach, it is exceptional good luck.
When I found the whalebone,  it was amongst a few others. It was raining. I picked it up, it was heavy and it swayed as I walked because of the torsion in its structure. I carried it in my left hand at first and then I hoisted it up to my right shoulder finding it easier to manage this way. I was able to use my right hand to hold it fixed on my shoulder and my left to keep it from swaying too much as I walked on the black sand. With the bone on my shoulder, I imagined myself as an immense whale navigating the ocean.
As I carried the bone, I came upon an old vehicle, just a rusted frame and tires on the beach. I placed the bone upon it to get a sense of it in space, I could see it better this way, how it curved, how the light caught it and the contrast in the green, gray and white of the bone with the deep dark rusted metal of the vehicle. The green and grey tones were formed from nature attempting to inhabit the bone, moss and sand dyeing its surface. Next, I had to climb the small cliff. I placed the bone on the edge of the cliff. I kept walking and tried to create an arch with the bone by wedging it in a crack in the soil, it kept falling down. I leaned it against the fence, forming an arch to look back at the beach in the distance, it was beautiful to see it there, but I preferred it against the cliff edge. Next, I placed it on a small ladder, balanced and crossing the fence on both sides. Then, I placed it on the road, this connected well to its origin, the same volcanic sand used to create the pavement mixed with tar, had rippling patterns that echoed the shape of the bone. Finally, I arrived on foot back at Fjuk Art Centre, where I am an artist-in-residence. I placed the bone in the studio on the concrete floor. The texture and the colors were similar on the concrete floor to the bone. Within the studio there is a room 
that no one uses that used to be an old freezer for the fishery here. I placed the bone inside and took a photo. As I worked on this piece it evolved and so did my consciousness about public art. At first, I thought that I would just take two pictures, one in situ and the other displaced. Along the way, I took many pictures and realized that the action of moving the bone was becoming more important than the end result, but that the photos were becoming an independent history of the event, manipulating the viewer into seeing only what I chose to document. I thought about the ancient people here, discovering a beached whale by chance, that could feed many and would help them get through a winter with its harvest. I went to the Husavik Museum here and I learned more about how people were able to survive in the past hundred years, sharing the rights to these beached whales with many other people, so they wouldn’t starve. At the local pub, I talked to Icelanders about the modern whaling industry as well as other foreigners like myself. I read about the policies of the International Whaling Commission and the scientific whaling that was done to enable continued killing of whales even when it was banned or limited to kill whales in and around Iceland. I was greatly moved by this art piece; I was the one who changed my awareness of the subject matter, a metacognition.
As a performance, it relates to Alys’ work, The Green Line, where he used paint to mark the borders. I created a line between the beach and the freezer where whale meat once ended up. It also relates to Adrian Piper and her use of bad smells to get a reaction, the texture and painful weight of the whalebone on my shoulder acting upon me as a bad smell on the public, a physical effect on the viewer/participant. My work’s relationship to placement and experimentation in nature is like Smithson, but ends up being more ephemeral like Andy Goldsworthy.​
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​Read more about it here
Music changes me, so do you
My anger causes things to rise like the tides and you evaporate like mist in the sun
At my hand, a click and we are no longer connected
How simple it seems and cruel all at once
Why would I bother to talk to know the reason to wait?
Thoughts drift as I meditate 
It is easier to stay at the surface of things floating
With no knowledge of what lies beneath the liquid steel of our connection
I can’t, I can’t, I close the lid
The shell around me, it feels cold, and harsh
But here I am safe

Lines in darkness
Etch my desires and your lies into my heart
You don’t even know me and yet you complicate my life
Be-tray-al
Betrayal
Consequence
Loss
You aren’t even in this world, and yet I know you in all of your forms
Be tray al
Darkness reveals your form
Ash and red reflections on the trees
Allow me this perception allow me the chance to hate
And yet, I twist my form, not to do this wondering how I will see you again
What it would take how much it would cost me
Lead lines in the night poison me with the frightened feelings you invested in this muse
Not real to you, I am blocked, invisible
You must see me
You must know
But you won’t and I twist and twist and twist
Lead lines poison me in my heart I am lost​
These two videos, Flight and Freeze, are part of a three part series about the common responses that people have to rape- Fight, Flight, Freeze. I have not completed the third piece, Fight, yet. In Flight and Freeze, I have tried to create works that could help to explain to loved ones and friends what it feels like to have flashbacks and to be in a situation where your response to fear becomes an element of one of these three instinctual reactions beyond your control, as if you are in a different state of consciousness. Having gone through the experience of being raped, I found that it was very difficult to explain to people close to me, what I experienced and how it affected me afterwards for many years.  I hope that these videos will help people to better understand and to be more compassionate in response to victims of rape and sexual assault. ​
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This work is about rape culture in the United States and is meant to resist the plethora of negative attitudes towards women, which push them to tolerate inappropriate touching by men in place of standing up against them because of fear of retribution and being misrepresented and treated badly by others when they do stand up for themselves. This work is particularly relevant in light of the president-elect, Trump's remarks about women that convey the basest perceptions and misogynistic responses towards women. As a victim of rape, this piece represents my experience and my willingness to stand up against sexism.