Summer Exhibition 2023 | Meet the artists

I think it looks incredible, it's very light and optimistic. So much colour and love and joy. Very inspiring, lots of beautiful works. I have to take it all in, you know. I really love the summer exhibition because it's everything. It's art, architecture, design. It's also intergenerational. So everything is here, it's the whole voice. After I handed in that piece, I saw everybody else's work that was coming in and I just thought there's no way my work's going to get in. So it's just fantastic to be here. This piece is called The Moonlight Towers. It was submitted to the RA to try and celebrate summer and bring that festivity, that idea of festivity for people who are visiting. It's not actually what it looks like. It's actually a trompe l'oeil sculpture. It's a bronze cast and then it's painted. You know, the question about judging a book by its cover, questioning like how we look at art, how we see our preconceptions before we see what's behind them. So my painting is Young Carer Chip Date and it was painted to represent a time that I spend with a young carer that I support. We would meet once a month. Regardless of how much I pushed her, I could never get her to eat properly. So we used to share a plate of chips and two globs of ketchup and then a bottle of Fanta each and that was our Young Carer Chip Date. So ladies and gentlemen, art is your human right. Let's say it, art is your human right. This is called The Red Migrant and it's basically a self-portrait. It was done on a cardboard box because when you think of cardboard, you think of migration because you put things in a cardboard box and you ship it to different parts of the world. So I saw myself as a cardboard box coming to London. This piece is called It Takes a Village to Raise a Child. Basically, I'm inviting people, I guess, to look at the wider village and how we treat the children within it. And considering we've got millions of kids living in poverty, I guess that says quite a lot about our community as a whole and this communal choice we've made for one of the wealthiest countries in the world. This shows my connection with my family and the people I love. And during the lockdown and also I'm based in London and I'm not from the UK, so I haven't been back to my home country for four years. This is an etching of Ronnie Scott's, the iconic club in Soho. It's part of an ongoing documentation I'm making of that particular part of the West End, Soho, that's changing and disappearing. And it's like a thank you letter to that part of the West End that's been magic to many of us over many decades. I didn't really think at the start of this year I'd be doing an install like this. So it's quite strange, especially given the other artists that have done this space. So I was very kind of aware of that, very aware of being sort of, I don't know, like a young Irish artist or a young queer artist as well. And like having this interest and encouragement from the Royal Academicians is really important and special. A year ago today, this was a piece of wood that my boyfriend fished out of a skip. He's a landscape gardener. He thought it was funny. I make quite feminist photographs normally. He gave it to me and now here it is in the RA as a bronze. It's not what any of us were expecting, but it's been a brilliant outcome. I've been in the Royal Academy Summer Show, I think it's 24 times over 45 years. I'd say, you know, most of the good things that have happened to me have come through being in the Royal Academy Summer Show. It's a show you'll always find a good piece of work that will interest you here. By an artist you know or one you're about to be introduced to. So it's a great celebration, part of the London calendar and long may it continue. you