An installation of photographic works and sculpture exploring the boundaries between amateur and professional; image and object; and photography’s role in looking, learning and representing collaborative labour.

The title is drawn from a DIY handbook, I Took a Hammer in My Hand: The Women’s Build It and Fix It Handbook, published by Florence Adams in 1973, which is part of the artists’ collection of DIY manuals. The book, equipped with detailed illustrations, provides tips and guides to aid the amateur DIY-er in repairing and fixing everyday domestic issues. It invites readers to learn through looking, an act that for the artist is deeply linked to the creation of the photographic image and the studies inherent to craftsmanship.

The exhibition includes Maquette (2025-26), a new series of framed photographs of hand-built wooden roof models. The models are made by male and female apprentice carpenters working across Ireland, then staged and photographed by the artist in front of handmade backdrops in the workshops and institutions where they were fabricated. These scaled roof models are the result of a standard learning exercise that encourages the student makers to develop and test a range of complex skills to translate two dimensional plans into three dimensional space. The Maquette series also alludes to a longer tradition of photographers going into sculptors’ studios and design workshops to stage their maquettes and assist in bringing the objects made with care in these interior testing spaces out into the world.

I Took a Hammer in My Hand also features Off Cut (2026), an assemblage of sculptures that reference wooden offcuts and wood shavings gathered from various workshop floors by the artist, and a sculptural partition draped in pigmented drop cloth that choreographs the gallery space. In tandem with Maquette, these works subtly explore the ambiguity of the scaled-up, re-framed object. They invite you to navigate them, and the space and works around them, with your body and engage with their materiality.

I Took a Hammer in My Hand invites us to think about what exists within and outside of the frame and consider that artworks are not made in isolation. Through focusing on the artist’s and fabricators’ acts of building, rebuilding and reframing, the exhibition celebrates overlooked, shared gestures of labour, skill and care that underpin the making process. 

Presented at Butler Gallery, Kilkenny 21st February - 3rd May 2026