The Self Advocating Artist

About

I am a self-taught artist and writer based in Ireland.

For almost a decade, I ran my own limited company, working across consultancy, executive and career coaching, neurodivergence, self-advocacy and workplace health and wellbeing. My work brought me into organisations, communities and individual conversations about work, identity, health, change and what it means to build a life that is actually sustainable.

I have also written and contributed to Irish media and other publications, bringing lived experience and professional perspectives to conversations about neurodivergence, wellbeing, work, grief and change.

Outside work, movement has been part of my life for a long time. I love weight training and, in my forties, competed in natural bodybuilding, picking up a couple of awards along the way. I don't compete anymore. I'm proud of what my body was capable of, but I'm also able to look back at that world with more nuance now. Not everything required to make a body competition-ready is necessarily healthy or sustainable.

At 50, I'm much more interested in strength that can accompany me as I age than in a body that performs a particular aesthetic.

I garden. I make art. I lift weights. I write. I spend time with my dog. I read and think probably far too much. These ordinary things increasingly matter to me.

In 2026, I am somewhere different.

After the death of my beloved 84-year-old dad in January, and as I entered my fifties, I found myself with both the need and the opportunity to reconsider what I wanted the next part of my life to look like.

So, for now, I am allowing it not to have a fixed answer.

I am writing over on Substack. I am thinking. I am making art. I am building a body of work around some of the subjects that increasingly occupy me: grief and loss, ageing, life transitions, neurodivergence, wellbeing, autonomy, identity, the body, and what happens when the forms that once held our lives begin to change.

Being diagnosed autistic in my mid-forties has inevitably shaped that work too. As I get older, I am increasingly interested in what it means to construct a life around one's actual capacities, values and needs rather than continually trying to become more acceptable, productive or marketable.

Creating without manufacturing need

There is another reason I am drawn to art and independent writing at this stage of my life.

I have become increasingly uncomfortable with an economy in which almost everything can be turned into a product — including people's insecurity, fear, vulnerability and desire for a better life.

I don't want to manufacture a problem so that I can sell somebody the solution.

I don't want to persuade someone that something is missing from their life and that I happen to have the thing that will fix it.

What I want to make is much simpler.

I can create a drawing because I want to create it. I can write something because I think it is worth saying. I can share those things because I care about them.

And then you have a choice.

You can look at the art. You can walk through an exhibition. You can read the writing. You can subscribe. You can buy a print if you want to live with one of the pieces.

Or you can simply encounter the work and move on.

Nothing terrible happens if you don't buy anything.

That distinction matters to me.

It is probably one of the reasons autonomy has become such an important thread through both my art and my writing. I am interested in creating things from the head and the heart without turning another person's vulnerability into the sales mechanism.

I recognise, too, that having the time and space to explore this without knowing exactly where it will lead is a privilege.

So I am not particularly interested in pretending I have a five-year plan for it.

At 50, after business ownership, bereavement, significant life transitions and a late understanding of my own neurodivergence, I am interested in seeing what emerges when I stop insisting that everything I create must immediately justify itself commercially.

For now, I am building my art portfolio and my writing portfolio.

Because I can.

And because, at this point in my life, that feels like reason enough.