projects & collaborations

connection

Connection is a multi-part, participatory artwork that explores memory, mark-making, and the traces we leave behind. Spanning sculpture, digital print, book form, and installation, the work brings together 169 individual contributions from students and staff across CDETB, captured in engraved acrylic and hand-drawn marks. Exhibited at national venues including the National Botanic Gardens and featured in the Connection book launch at Books Upstairs, Dublin, this project speaks to shared identity, creative process, and collective authorship.

Connection

Digital print on diabond

183cm x 183cm

On permanent display at CDETB,

Dublin, Ireland

With thanks to the 169 students and staff who made their mark for this project.

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Close-up view of Connection sculpture, 60 pieces of acrylic engraved on both sides mounted in an oiled walnut base

left side view of Connection sculpture, 60 pieces of acrylic engraved on both sides mounted in an oiled walnut base

Anthony Carey

Connection Book Launch

at Books Upstairs, Dublin

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Connection Book Cover

Connection book cover,

hand finished.

160mm x 160mm

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Page from Connection book showing mark making in black against a white page

inside page Connection, artist statement

The Viewer’s Image: Participation and Presence

These sculptural works, constructed from sisal and encased in clear acrylic with mirrored bases explore themes of identity, duality, and perception. Positioned within reflective enclosures, each head initiates a dynamic exchange between artwork and viewer.

As the observer approaches, their own reflection is merged with the sculpture. This collapse of boundaries between subject and object transforms the piece into a site of self-confrontation. The mirrored base implicates the viewer, layering the visual field and complicating any stable reading of the self.

Drawing upon Jungian concepts of the persona and the shadow, the work reveals the tension between internal identity and external perception. The viewer becomes simultaneously witness and participant, seen and seeing—caught within a feedback loop of self-awareness.

Exhibited at The Berkeley Gallery at Grennan Mill, Kilkenny, these pieces invite us to consider not only what we see, but how we are seen.

You I Am

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What Next

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Expressly Vacant

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THE LAST LETTER: Memory, Love, and Protected Loss

A sculptural elegy, The Last Letter is both shrine and thicket. A poetic meditation on grief, remembrance, and the objects that hold love long after a body is gone.

At the installation’s heart rests a single bronze high-heeled shoe, cast from the final pair the artist bought for his late wife. Encased in a clear perspex vitrine, it is accompanied by three intimate relics: a memorial card, a lock of hair, and the last letter she wrote, one that arrived only after her death. This sealed archive of personal love, sorrow, and sacred delay becomes a reliquary of enduring connection.

Surrounding the case is a chaotic growth of brambles, branches, and urban detritus—evoking both natural decay and psychological entanglement. The overgrowth serves as a metaphor for grief’s persistence, creeping through time, memory, and material. Yet, despite the encroaching wilderness, the contents remain untouched—preserved, protected.

This is a work about the tension between fragility and permanence. The shoe, cast in bronze, asserts itself as both relic and refusal. It asks: what is left behind when someone is gone? What becomes of love when the body that held it is no longer here?

A perspex case containing a single bronze shoe, surrounded by tangled branches and detritus; a letter, memorial card, and lock of hair rest inside.

Invisible Reflections

Installation (temporary, site-specific) | Documentation in black-and-white photography

Constructed entirely from found materials, discarded clothing, shoes, plastic packaging, toiletries—Invisible Reflections stages quiet interventions in overlooked urban environments. Each object is coated in monochrome grey, a deliberate act of visual flattening that blurs the boundary between presence and disappearance.

Positioned in alleyways, vacant lots, and marginal corners, the installation evokes the absent bodies of those who are often rendered invisible: the unhoused, the displaced, the socially forgotten. The grey paint acts as both camouflage and elegy—conflating object and environment, while denying the spectacle of individual identity.

These images are not portraits, but traces. A jacket hangs as if just taken off. Shoes are placed with care, as if someone might return. A sleeping bag slumps in the shadow of a brick wall. In each case, the body is implied but absent. The work does not dramatize suffering; instead, it asks us to notice and to recognise what we so often overlook.

As a photographic archive of temporary installations, Invisible Reflections calls into question how public space is occupied, neglected, or erased, and by whom. The monochrome palette, paired with the ephemerality of the objects, suggests that what is transient may still carry profound memory and presence.