Thoughts from a dying activist

(2026, protest signs, digital drawing printed on corriboard with wood)

2026

Installed at Luan Gallery, Athlone 2026

For Affective Forms curated by Aoife Banks

Four pink posters with black handwritten text mounted on wooden sticks are displayed against a white wall in a room with wooden flooring and windows.

This body of work was made during a prolonged period of severe illness that left me largely bedbound. The conditions of its making: fatigue, pain, isolation, and radically reduced capacity are foundational to the work. These works emerge from a world narrowed to a bed, a room, and the fluctuating rhythms of an extremely unreliable body. I was seeking ways to be involved in activism from my bed.

Pink sign attached to a wooden stick with handwritten message in black ink that reads, "Thoughts from my year" and part of another message below, reading "(in hell)."

Pink sign with handwritten rules for personal behavior in bed, including no TV, music, or phone, no sitting up, no lights or smells, arguing, explaining, sadness, or pushing.

Pink protest sign with black handwritten text that says, 'Another world is possible and that is a threat'.

Pink poster with handwritten black text listing a will for all my things, attached to a wooden stick, leaning against a white wall.

Rather than pausing my practice, this period forced a recalibration of how art can be made, shared, and encountered. Scale, humour, repetition, and text become tools for working within constraint. The signs, gestures, and playful declarations function as both documentation and refusal: records of living through ongoing illness, as well as acts of resistance against narratives that equate incapacity with absence or silence.

Playfulness is central to my work and especially here where it has been central to my survival. Dark humour, exaggeration, and mess became strategies for survival. These works insist that joy, wit, and imagination persist even in states of exhaustion and confinement. They hold space for the many contradictions of my current existence: fear alongside laughter, grief alongside defiance.