I didn’t set out to be a painter of landscapes. I set out to be a painter of people, specifically, of the invisible forces that move between them. My foundation is a Semester at Sea journey to fifteen countries during my years at Carlow University: Egypt, Vietnam, Turkey, Morocco, and beyond. What I brought back wasn’t a sketchbook full of places. It was a set of questions about how human beings navigate unfamiliar terrain and how a person leaves a mark on a space just by passing through it. Those questions became shapes. I call them wayfarers.

For twenty-five years, I have been sending those wayfarers through atmospheric, luminous space on canvas, painting environments in oil, copper leaf, enamel, and interference pigment that shift and glimmer as you move around them.

My current series, Higher than the Sun, is the most light-driven work of my career, paintings that seem to hold heat and radiance in their surfaces, shapes moving through space with a new urgency and warmth. The titles tell you something: Phenomena. Sun in My Mouth. Chasing Light Around the World. These are paintings reaching toward elemental things.

Nicole is a social practice artist and experiential systems designer. Her work centers on a single question: what do people actually notice about the spaces they move through?

It didn’t start as a question. It started as observation. When we opened BoxHeart in 2001, she was running a gallery and she was also, without knowing it yet, running an ongoing perceptual study with a fresh cohort every six weeks. She watched what people did, not what they said. Where they slowed. What they walked past without breaking stride. How the pace of a room changed when the scale of the work changed or when the lighting shifted. She had no formal methodology for it. She just kept watching, kept adjusting, and kept noticing that she could predict, within a few days of install, which works would stop people and which ones would be invisible no matter how strong they were. That was the beginning of something she didn’t yet have a name for.

Naming it is what her current research is about. Twenty-five years of informal observation like visitor behavior, gallery pacing, exhibition rhythm, or the gap between what people feel inside a space and what they can articulate on the way out, formalized into a framework for measuring what experiential design does. She is testing it in live conditions now, against BoxHeart’s longitudinal data, building an evidence base for something she’s understood intuitively since the first time she watched someone stop in front of a painting and couldn’t explain why.

For twenty-five years, we have approached the same question from different directions: what does it take for a person to really see where they are?

I approach it through painting. Nicole approaches it through observation, environment, and public interaction. Together, our work sits in the space between image and experience, studying how attention shifts when people move through unfamiliar terrain, changing light, or emotionally charged environments.

The Perception Map emerged from that shared inquiry.

It is an evolving project exploring how landscapes, artworks, movement, atmosphere, memory, and human attention continuously shape one another. Rather than documenting a place objectively, the project asks what people notice when they are inside an environment and how artistic intervention changes the experience of being there.

Some places intensify perception. They alter scale, time, orientation, memory, and bodily awareness. We are interested in what happens when painting, observation, and environmental experience meet inside those conditions.