BA Fashion (with Applied Textiles)

This project stems from a poem I wrote this summer called “The Black Sheep,” which reflects the experience of growing up in Ireland while never feeling fully accepted within it. The work investigates the tension between pride and estrangement, exploring how identity is shaped by cultural belonging, family expectation and personal alienation. Through my specialisations in knitting, screen printing and pleating, I explore how textile processes can communicate both emotional and cultural narratives, allowing material and surface to become extensions of memory, identity and resistance.
The pleats in my work have become a central visual metaphor, embodying the emotional turbulence of being labelled the “black sheep.” Their sharp folds echo the rhythm of a storm — restless, unsettled and charged with resistance. In contrast, the materials I work with, Irish wool and linen, carry the quiet weight of cultural memory. Wool, once essential in Irish life for warmth, survival and domestic craft, and linen, with its legacy of labour and refinement, root the work physically and historically within Ireland. By setting these heritage materials against the disruptive energy of the pleats, alongside the layered textures created through knitting and screen printing, I juxtapose the old with the new, the inherited with the personal.

Work Placement- Julia Heuer- Paris, Paradoxe- Paris, And Colin Horgan- Ireland