I am a visual artist from Dublin, engaging with an expanded painting practice. Through processes of painting, drawing and welding, I make figurative and abstract works, which consider our constant entanglement with the more-than-human, visualizing these transformations and somatic experiences. Materially, I work on entirely hand-made stretched canvases, with oil and colour pencil, while steel and thread are utilized as expansions of these surfaces.
My practice draws on ideas within the post-humanities and explores identity and the body as relational, fluid and unfixed. I’m motivated by an on-going interested in how we can reposition the human subject in relation to a more-than-human future, and how artmaking can be instrumentalized to realise this.
Water Deeply, but Infrequently
This body of work is a series of expanded paintings that oscillate between figuration and abstraction, accompanied by metal forms that encroach upon, frame, or extend beyond the pictorial space. In Water Deeply, but Infrequently, I explore my relationship with the more-than-human world through speculative fabulation. I use my name, Tansy, derived from the plant Tanacetum Vulgare, as an entry point into ecological identity.
My paintings form a relational logic through recurring marks, colours, and materials, with turquoise bodies emerging as shifting, corporeal manifestations. I position figuration and abstraction in continuous dialogue. Figuration reflects embodied human experience, while abstraction evokes non-human ways of knowing.
Drawing on post-human and post-anthropocentric thought, I integrate research across art, philosophy, botany, and feminist theory. By incorporating materials such as thread and steel, I disrupt conventional painting boundaries, emphasising entanglement, fluid identity, and the continual becoming of human and more-than-human relations.
