During the summer of 2024, I began making underwater images of jellyfish off the Sligo coast. That experience shifted my photography practice. I realised I wanted to focus my work on telling vital stories about the ocean, particularly in this era of warming seas.
The sea has always been a constant presence. I grew up beside the Atlantic in Sligo, where my parents were keen scuba divers. Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World instilled a sense of wonder that never left me. In my 20s I spent three months in Madagascar on a marine research project using scuba to collect scientific data. My wider photographic practice has long explored how landscapes hold intangible stories; now that inquiry has gone under water.
Through a commission from Belfast Photo Festival, I began working with Dr Ewan Hunter, a behavioural ecologist at the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute. Our conversations explored how science and art might meet. Scientists and artists both act as witnesses to the world, translating observation into different forms of understanding.
Ewan introduced me to otoliths, tiny ear stones in fish, that record their lives in layers. Like tree rings, they carry a chronology of migrations, feeding and environmental change. Salmon scales reveal similar invisible cartographies.
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These ideas became the foundation of The Ocean Within, a photographic project exploring fish as living archives of the sea. The work is currently on view at Photo Museum Ireland as part of Groundswell, a European photography project engaging artists with climate action. In a time of ecological uncertainty, the project asks how we might learn to listen below the waterline, to remember the ocean within.
