I am 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 was a shape language, a visual key for how a person leaves a mark on a space just by passing through it.

For twenty-five years, I have been sending those shapes, my wayfarers, through luminous space on canvas. The painted environments are in oil, copper leaf, enamel, and interference pigment.

When we opened BoxHeart in 2001, Nicole was running a gallery and without knowing it, she was running an ongoing perceptual study. She watched what people did in the gallery. Where they slowed. What they walked right past. She had no formal methodology for it.

Naming it is what her current research is about. Twenty-five years of informal observation like visitor behavior, 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. She is testing it now, against BoxHeart’s longitudinal data, building an evidence base for something she’s understood intuitively for years.

Wayfarers at the Edge of the World is an evolving project exploring how landscapes, artworks, and human attention continuously shape one another. The project asks what people notice when they are inside an environment and how artistic intervention changes the experience of being there.

Wayfarers at the Edge combines environmental immersion, painting, participatory perception studies, and observational documentation across environments where landscape, atmosphere, instability, and human systems visibly interact.

What does it take for a person to really see where they are?

The project operates from the belief that landscapes are not experienced neutrally, and environments are not encountered equally. Attention is shaped by atmosphere, movement, scale, memory, environmental conditions, cultural systems, and the structures through which people learn what matters inside a space.

Locations are selected for perceptual distinctiveness.

Paintings are created within direct relationship to environmental conditions.

Environmental instability is considered part of the work itself.

The project incorporates public-facing perception studies examining how artistic encounter alters environmental awareness.

Participants are asked:

• What do you see here?

• How do you feel here?

Responses gathered before and after engagement with artworks are compared to examine perceptual shifts.

Documentation methods may include:

• field journals

• visitor responses

• weather observations

• movement studies

• installation photography