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

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.

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.