New Ballymun Road is a faux album cover I created, and it is one of my most personal projects.

This is a project made in my graphic design class in high school. I go into detail about this class and the teacher on the “Old Guitarist” page. The prompt for this project was to create an album cover for an album that does not exist.

I use my synesthesia to meld art and music together; this project was the catalyst for me to think deeply about the connection between the two. I created a list of songs, all my favorites from my childhood. My dad played guitar and often sang these songs. I heard him singing them so much that the originals sounded wrong.

I was born and raised in Ireland. When I was 11, my family moved to LA. When we moved, we lived on a street called Old Ballymun Road (which was, surprisingly, not in Ballymun.) The project name is a homage to the last house I lived in in Ireland. But it’s also my way of trying to move on and create a new road. However, it took more than a few years to genuinely move on.

In this house, my dad had a toy called “Nunzilla,” a wind-up toy that was a nun who spat fire out of her mouth. I loved this visual, and I wanted to make it more abstract. Depicting a beautiful young woman smiling, she seems to be unaware that there’s fire shooting out of her mouth. In addition to it being a compelling visual, I think that it matches the songs. To me, all the songs sound nostalgic. They are beautiful songs, the songs sung to send me to sleep. But they also have a real grit to them, a fire. My dad sang me beautiful songs, but there was a fire to him, too.

The smoking match on the back of the poster ties in well with the fire imagery but also has a story to it. My dad smoked when I was younger, but the first time I noticed was when he used a match to light his cigarette. I remember going outside to see his matchbox left outside. And because this is what he used to smoke, I connected the two as being one and the same in my head. I lit a match on the side of the box and watched until it burned my fingers; I hid the match and went back inside. I didn’t tell anyone because I genuinely believed that what I had done was as bad as smoking.

When I showed this project to my dad, he had little to no reaction. He laughed about how I misused côté un and côté deux. The words translate to side one and side two, but I think “sides” in this case refer to side dishes at a restaurant, not sides to an album cover. This artwork is the first and last love letter I made for my dad.