ceara margaret hennessey <3

I am a primarily browser-based artist and writer working across digital landscapes. My practice is rooted in an ongoing fascination with the internet as a place of memory: a space that has shaped how I communicate, perform, remember, and understand myself. I often draw from the visual language of the early internet, using gifs, cluttered interfaces, blinking text, bright colors, and mismatched fonts to capture that early intimacy of encountering oneself through a screen. I’m interested in the emotional qualities of these spaces as much as their aesthetics, and in the way the internet of the past continues to exist underneath the systems we use today.

My work explores the ways technology has become entangled with how we construct and present ourselves. I’m interested in the tension between wanting to be seen and wanting to remain private, and in the ways digital platforms encourage us to turn our experiences, identities, and relationships into things that can be shared, categorized, archived, and consumed. But beyond that, I am interested specifically in systems themselves: how the browser, as a system, allows me to capture, switch, break, and satirize other systems.

I return to the early internet because I’m interested in what its remnants can reveal about the present. There is something particularly compelling to me about the gap between the internet we imagined and the internet we inhabit now. It's true that a space that once felt personal, strange, and open-ended and has become deeply embedded in nearly every part of daily life. At the same time, my work rejects nostalgia by questioning the idea that the internet was ever a simpler or more authentic space, instead looking at what its earlier forms reveal about the systems we live in now. To me, there is a direct throughline between the old internet and the current, and that throughline creates a tension that beckons us to romanticize the web of our past, while ignoring how it has affected our present. I want to inhabit this space between the internet we remember and the one we live in now, using the browser to ask what these systems have made of us, and what we might still make of them.