Invasive (2024)

Developed during a three-month residency in Lisbon, this body of work explores alternative photographic processes using natural materials such as sunlight, water, nasturtium leaves, and other plant matter. The project considers how certain internal forces can quietly take hold and spread. Invasive internal states can quickly occupy mental landscapes, altering the environments they inhabit and reshaping relationships to place, self, and others.

Using chlorophyll printing, images are created directly on Nasturtium leaves, an invasive species in Lisboa, collected across the city. Photographic negatives are placed on the leaves and exposed to sunlight over time, allowing the light-sensitive chlorophyll to slowly record the image.

Alongside these works, cyanotypes on glass incorporate weeds gathered from the streets of Lisboa as physical subjects within the printing process. Here the body becomes a site of germination, suggesting a process of taking seed while invasive growth begins to take hold.

How do we persist within altered environments and unsettled spaces? The project reflects on forms of life that adapt within shifting ecologies, drawing quiet parallels between ecological imbalance and the internal landscapes we carry.

Generously supported by Breaking the Patterns Lisbon 2024, Capacity Ireland, Nowhere Lisboa, Synopsis Practice, and Wexford Arts Office