In 2025 I worked on illustrations for Michael Harding’s book, Midwinter. Read the book! In all book shops. This book was nominated for an An Post Book Award 2025 in the Best Published Book category.
These illustrations draw on ideas of separation and yet the paradox of how we are always in a relationship with nature.
You can buy the book in all good bookshops.
These illustrations were created in 2023. I was intrigued by the folk names for the monthly full moons and how the seasons and local biodiversity may have influenced the names. I was and still am curious about the spatial relationship between the surrounding landscape and the female form. How, for some women, the moon influences their monthly cycles. This collection is rooted in place and a journey through the seasons, month by month. The illustrations first featured in my 2024 calendar which was made in a zine or book-like way with my own original writing and musings on each passing month.
I am interested in themes around deep ecology, embodiment, interconnectedness, and animism.
In 2006, I took the photo in this group and exhibited it in the Carlow Arts Festival in 2007. It remains an anchor point for my work.
The first and third drawings in this group is called “Council of All Beings/For Whom the Bell Tolls”. It was exhibited at the Climate and Health exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians, October 2023, curated by James Hanley. The drawing is on Arch’s acid-free, hot-pressed paper with watercolour and pencil. It is based on Joanna Macy’s work where participants wear a mask of a different life form. The humans must listen to each council member as they describe how difficult it is to live in a climate crisis with increasing biodiversity loss.
The second illustration is of Biddy Early, a famous Irish herbalist from the 19th century, a seer and an anti-establishment badass. This illustration was exhibited at a group show with Illustrators Ireland at Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich in 2025. I imagined Biddy as a young woman with her blue bottle. She is rooted in her native County Clare along with the hawthorn and the wild plants, which she might have used in her herbalist practice.
This drawing was created on mount board with graphite and watercolour.
This work started in 2018 at a time when I was particularly interested in the architectural forms of trees in winter. I gave myself a brief to create Christmas cards that could be hung as a piece of art, that the whole product would be 100% eco friendly and that the box set of greeting cards would connect people with the beauty of nature, trees and stars in wintertime. At the time friends had mentioned to me that they felt more depressed in winter. I noticed my own mood change when I spent time in winter and gazing at the patterns of tangles of branches, which we can see more clearly once the leaves fall off. Winter is actually an incredible time of transformation in nature.
Sleeping trees surround us in winter, giants standing still as perfect architectural sculptures, reaching their heavy arms up to the stars. There is something about the solitude of trees in winter as they brace themselves through the harsh weather. They make a simple yet profound transformation every year, a perfect example of the cycle of life both of physically and spiritually. Seen through the lens of a tree we can begin to view our own life in this way as we each navigate our own personal tough winters, periods of growth, times of renewal, work and finally the joy of a perfect summer’s day. Trees make magical transformations, buds appearing from what seemed like death. There is deep trust in the way trees move through the seasons.
I began to work on trees again in 2020 and now trees are an integral part of my work. Many of the trees I draw are trees that I know or pass by on walks.
Reflecting now on this work I don’t think I can draw one single tree because they are so much more than the trunk and branches. A tree is also its roots, the landscape it lives in and all the seen and unseen beings that live in it and under it. A tree is a habitat, a food supply, an oxygen maker, a life force and so much more. It’s difficult to put all of this into a drawing but if I do draw trees again, I hope my work reflects this.
Conor Miley is a singer-songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist from Ireland. In 2022 he approached me about making illustration/drawing work for his new album, Thousand Yard Stare, which would launch in 2023. I created a small drawing per song based on the lyrics. A cover and some other work for his promotional and media campaign.
You can find Conor’s music on all streaming platforms. Vinyl will be released at the end of October. A booklet of the illustrations and lyrics can be purchased separately from Conor.
Find out more about Conor here: Conor's Linktree
A selection of private commissions.
Commercial clients include Hachette Ireland, Dublin 8 Green Bridge Forum, Galway City Council, Digital Hub Dublin, Pocket Forests, See the Light Productions, Dublin InQuirer, Crow Street Collective, Conor Miley Music, Over Leaf Books, and the Newman Family.
Between 2021 and 2025 I worked with the urban foresters, Pocket Forests. The trees are drawn from saplings they planted. The saplings include hawthorn, guelder rose, elder, downy birch, rowan, hazel, spindle, dog rose, crab apple and wild cherry.
Pocket Forests used the illustrations for a booklet they give to communities who plant their trees so they can identify the saplings. They also used the illustrations for signage, such as the one in Galway University.
Please see the Pocket Forests website for more information on the urban biodiversity they do:
This is an ongoing body of work. I am interested in the physicality of paint on wood. Leaving the wood so that it is apparent that wood is always the canvas and part of the finished image. I am interested in the grain itself as being part of the finished piece. Each image incorporates trees and so the wood, which was once a tree is dictating each image.
In early 2022 I found wood in a skip behind my house. It’s very close to a river which runs through the area I live in. The pieces of wood had probably been paneling in someone’s apartment. Which is more than likely beside my house and the river. I decided to take of the lengths, chop them up, sand them and give them a new life. Or create new stories for them. What messages was the wood itself trying to tell me. Where had the wood grown originally? What memories were embedded within the fibers of the wood? Our own relationship to the landscapes we pass though… How a shaft of light appears over a body of water and how, perhaps, our own imagination adds to this.
Because I work as an illustrator I am really interested in stories and visual narrative as a means of expression or altering the way we see something. What was once discarded wood could become mini paintings.
I wanted to incorporate water and birds into the wood scapes. I found the wood behind my house and beside the river. A heron lives there and I see it many times a day. There are many other birds that frequent this area such as crows, rooks and hooded crows, seagulls, ducks, migratory geese, wrens, blackbirds, blue tits and a sparrow hawk. Sometimes I can see swans or migratory geese flying over head. I am curious as to where the wood came from originally and if birds sat in its branches. Did migratory birds that over winter here fly from the branches of the trees that made this wood?
I wanted this series to feel romantic and yet slightly abstract and surreal. There is an element of the dusk and mist clouding what we can see. There are plays of light, moon beams and moments.
These illustrations were created between 2022 (the square shape illustrations) and 2019 ( portrait style). They eventually became Winter greeting cards. Some are available as prints.
I wanted to draw the attention of the viewer to the beauty, silence and magic in nature during winter. But also to it’s fragility, especially in this time we find ourselves in. Each illustration was accompanied by a text which made it’s way on to the back of the greeting card. The text was, in some way, as important as the illustration and the words came before the images.
Themes included low impact fishing communities, Wren Boys which is an ancient Irish tradition that connect rural communities, the connectivity within a woodland, migratory birds and reverence for nature.
This is an ongoing body of work. I am interested in the connection humans have with nature and specifically birds and foxes. These drawings draw on the cyclical process of nature, relationality and the impermanent and precarious world we inhabit.
Clouds, like thoughts, pass over but are not static. The woman wears a rook’s head, a protection, but can take it off so as to connect to her own inner wisdom. The fox stays nearby, watching, observing, and perhaps offering advice.
These drawings are both musings and meditations.
The first image “Thinking of Gaza” is a live fundraiser for Medecins Sans Frontieres to support medical aid in Gaza. Of course, as I write this, not much aid is getting into Gaza. This is live until November 3rd Fundraiser
The second image “LHR/DUB Return Journey” was dawn in 2017 in reaction to the upcoming referendum that was to be held on the 25th of May 2018. It was originally intended to share on social media as a way to get people to think about the debate and how travelling abroad might affect the woman involved. People began to contact me asking for prints. In April 2018 I sold an edition of prints and donated €500 to Together for Yes, an organisation committed to repealing the 8th amendment. It was drawn with pencil and acrylic paint.
The second image “Refugee Border Crossing 2022” was drawn in response to watching the events in Ukraine. Seeing women fleeing their country and home with a few belongs, children and pets left an impression on the world and on me. I sold prints and donated €1,180.00 to Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders.
Please contact me if you are interested in doing a fundraiser. I am particularly interested in working with women’s rights, refugees globally and eco/climate committed NGOs.
This is a snapshot of work created between 2006 and 2010. Most of the work around that time was in pencil. I was interested creating groups of drawings that could form installations.
