Aisling
Burke
Sensing Soul Sit Spots
The theme of my project focuses on the availability of sit spots by the Irish Coast, which create ‘a place in space’ where we can connect to our senses. In my practice, I work across painting, photography, and printmaking to examine landscape and atmosphere, drawing on embodied observation to consider how we experience place. Through layered, translucent, and luminous surfaces, I investigate the interplay of material and emotional qualities as fluid and responsive, shaped through process. The work invites slow looking, creating space for reflection on perception, presence, and our relationship with the natural world. Many of the works begin with observing concrete structures along the Irish coastline as sit spots, where attention is anchored through stillness and sustained looking. Photography often serves as an initial point of reference, capturing moments of light, shadow, and form, while painting and printmaking allow the work to shift toward material and atmospheric responses, translating these encounters into surface, texture, and mark. Through this, memory is held and reworked. Translucence, layering, and light operate as a means of engaging these encounters, where material and atmosphere converge to register a sustained engagement with place, constructing the experience of looking from and being within these sit spots across the landscape.