Design & Illustration

Queer Connections Zine

In conjunction with Conscious Connections, GCN, Dublin Lesbian Line &ESB Community Fund, 2024.

This project involved developing a visual identity for a pull out zine which the client hopes will become a regular feature in a long-running community print newspaper. I worked with the client to develop a style which is reminiscent of handmade queer and feminist zines from the 70s and 80s, while still feeling modern, relevant and fun. Illustrations and images were added to depict themes in the featured creative writing.

Labour Party: Building Better Together

Election campaign, 2024.

Working within Labour’s existing branding guidelines, I developed an election campaign design with illustrations for the party’s chosen slogan, “Building Better Together”. The client wanted the design, illustration and motion graphics to reflect the party’s commitment to solving issues like the housing crisis and creating healthier, happier communities.

World Breastfeeding Trends Initiative

Assessment Report Ireland, 2023 with TU Dublin, IBFAN & BPNI

The client for this project approached me to design and lay out the WBTi Assessment Report Ireland 2023, after seeing my Everyday Breastfeeding Project illustrations. Using the existing illustrations as a jumping-off point, I developed a colourful and engaging design and broke the considerable amount of text into more legible and digestible sections.

Family Integrated Care

with The Rotunda Foundation, Family Integrated Care & the Rotunda Hospital, 2023

This project, commissioned by the Rotunda Hospital, was designed to create awareness of the Family Integrated Care Programme for parents of premature newborns. I liaised with NICU doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, as well as a couple who had engaged with the programme, featuring their personal story to highlight the benefits of Family Integrated Care. An additional information flier gave more information about what the programme entails and tells parents how they can get involved.

Healing Spaces: A Holistic Approach to Cancer Care

Co-designed with Laoise Tarrant for HSE Spark, 2023

In conjunction with HSE Spark Programme, Mater Hospital and TU Dublin, the client required a folded flier that could double as an A2 poster. The flier/poster would be distributed among architecture students to advertise and give information about a competition to redesign the physical spaces in which cancer care is provided. Co-designed with former architect and graphic designer, Laoise Tarrant, this design took inspiration from Japanese Zen Gardens or “healing gardens”, drawing on the Eastern idea of how landscape and nature can physically impact and improve our health.

Care and Creativity: Parenthood and Arts Practice in the EU

The Mothership Project x NCAD, September 2022

Social Democrats

Autumn Campaign, Jennifer Whitmore TD, 2022

For this project, the client - a TD in my constituency - required complex political and social issues to be broken down into engaging, digestible pieces of information. This was to be done in a manner that highlighted current policy failings and the positive changes proposed by the Social Democrats.

The design outcome is visually engaging and full of important information, reflecting the diversity of modern Ireland and the Social Democrats’ values.

The Breakfast Club: The Story of Diabetes in Pregnancy in Ireland

Commissioned by Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland and the Rotunda Hospital, and funded by Health Research Board Mother and Baby Clinical Trials Network Ireland, The Breakfast Club webcomic series explores the stories of people with diabetes in pregnancy in Ireland.

Shortlisted for Patient Lifestyle Education Project of the Year at the Irish Healthcare Awards 2020.

The Everyday Breastfeeding Project

This series of illustrations depicts everyday experiences of breastfeeding – the lovely, chaotic, precious, mundane, lived reality of it. While breastfeeding is the common theme, it is not the central focus of these images; it is simply one component of life as a parent of babies and toddlers.

This series of illustrations was selected for CREATE: The Art of Pregnancy, Birth and Beyond, TCD Science Gallery, July 2018.

Too often, breastfeeding is denigrated by a hostile society and a media that seeks to stir controversy through fabricated “mommy wars”. At the same time, a lot of breastfeeding photography presents it as a divine act performed by women sitting in wheat fields at dusk, wearing flower crowns and billowing chiffon robes, or with full emphasis on the baby and breast – as if it is a dislocated piece of anatomy, separate from the woman and the rest of her life.

The result is that breastfeeding – in a society where so many people have only ever seen babies being bottle-fed – can seem inaccessible and incompatible with modern life. Rarely do we see images of breastfeeding fitting in with work, family, exhaustion, eating, resting, socialising, travelling, sleeping, life.

Reminiscent of nineteenth-century French realism paintings – which depict ordinary women breastfeeding as part of their ordinary lives – these illustrations portray modern women’s relationships to breastfeeding, as part of their modern lives, capturing the ordinary and extraordinary, the mundane and magical. At a time when most western countries are trying to improve their breastfeeding rates, it is crucial that a diverse range of people can see themselves and their lives reflected in images of breastfeeding. It should also be promoted as a feasible, convenient and desirable way to feed after the newborn period, when people's lives begin to return to "normal" – be that returning to work, returning to the responsibilities of caring for other family members, or otherwise existing outside of the domestic sphere.