hello!

I’m Aoife, I am a shape-system lover and am interested in the relationship between the codes we use to communicate, and the internal—surface vs. structure. I’m originally from Dublin, Ireland, and have made my circuitous route to land in Ohio, USA where the great Cuyahoga Valley National Park helps me feel at home.

My practice seeks to materialize and highlight our interconnectedness with each other, and with other living and non-living earth-bound and earth- constituting critters. In particular, I am interested in how the threads of meaning embedded in a text, can be translated. Through materialization and the varying processes of digital and manual interpolation and translation, I seek to foreground the work of the writer and reader of a text as a kind of symbiotic relationship, in keeping with the relationships we have with the natural world, creating landscapes of meaning, both literal and metaphorical. I’m interested in the edges of legibility and meaning-making, and how we make sense of sensory inputs both individually and collectively. My creative work, both commercial and academic, is oriented to the expressive, identity-laden nature of text, and investigates visual poetics and rhetoric alongside craft and technology.

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Aoife Mooney is an Irish textile artist, typo/graphic designer, and an Associate Professor in the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University in Ohio, USA. She holds an MFA in Studio Art (Textiles) from the School of Art at Kent State University, as well as a Masters in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, and a Bachelors in Visual Communication from Dublin Institute of Technology. Before joining the faculty at Kent State in 2014, she worked as a typeface designer at the Hoefler & Frere-Jones (now part of Monotype) type foundry in New York.

Alongside her teaching, she maintains practices as textile artist, typeface designer and typographer. She is a member of the International Society of Typographic Designers and one of the regional coordinators of the ISTD North America Annual Student Assessment Scheme. She regularly presents on her research at conferences nationally and internationally.