EMMA STROUDE OUTLINES THE TRAJECTORY AND ONGOING CONCERNS OF HER FIGURATIVE PAINTING PRACTICE.

In 1991, with a foundation course under my belt, I made my way from the North of England to London, where I later graduated with a BA in Painting from Chelsea College of Arts and a Postgraduate Higher Diploma from The Slade School of Fine Art. My third-level education was guided by extraordinary artists. Clyde Hopkins, Mali Morris, Freya Perdue, Brian Dawn Chalkley, and Noel Forster were among my tutors at Chelsea, while Tess Jaray, Ian McKeever, Lucy Jones, and Jock McFadyen tutored at The Slade. I wasn’t taught to ‘draw’ or to ‘paint’ through theory or demonstration; learning came from conversations with tutors and peers, who guided me on where to look and who to read. They challenged me to try harder, dig deeper, and fail better. I learned the necessity of committing to the work – something that proved a serious challenge in following years.

Once in Dublin, the need to make ends meet, and a sincere interest in young people, led me to teaching. While rearing a young family, I worked for Youthreach for 12 years before my body refused to continue. Vicarious trauma. Compassion fatigue. Burnout. I realised I had denied myself my own identity as an artist and this was the price. In 2012, I committed myself fully to my art practice. Some may see such a hiatus as a negative thing, but I don’t – the years in between shaped me.

Life drawing re-engaged me with my practice and, although it took a while to surface in my painting, curiosity of the human body emerged as my central focus: how we experience it, how we communicate, and our responses to the bodies of others. Being awarded the Irish Arts Review/Ireland-U.S. Council Portraiture Prize at the RHA in 2021 led to commissions in King’s Inns (Ireland’s oldest school of law) and the Seanad, honouring women in Irish history. 

Collaboration with performing artists became key to my process. Together with acrobats and actors, I have explored bodily expression of themes of uncertainty, taking up space, potential, reframing shame, vulnerability, and power. Source materials developed in sessions are starting points for investigations in charcoal and paint. Researching links (suggested by pose and theme) to archetypes, narratives embedded in our cultural DNA, or other artists’ work, leads to further learning, enriching each piece. The resulting work explores embodiment of emotions, describing the challenges of women who face the restrictions of a patriarchal society. 

Lively conversations with my mentor, Dr Tamsin Cavaliero (Department of Social Sciences, ATU Sligo) and her guidance towards a deeper understanding of my themes have become integral to my practice. My recent solo exhibition at Claremorris Gallery, ‘Slow Heat’ (27 September – 25 October 2025), took its title from Virginia Woolf’s use of heat as metaphor for the energy necessary for transformation. I painted the performed experiences of three female bodies, exploring questions of women’s potentiality, their ability to endure, acknowledgement of their innate capabilities, and the need to move beyond preconceptions. In the work, young women undergo transformation, while protecting each other and themselves. They experience love, loss, and hope without shame, and they invite the viewer to do the same.

With thanks to Custom House Studios + Gallery and Sligo Arts Service, I am currently on residency at AIR Niederösterreich in Austria, where I have collaborated with a dancer from Vienna to produce a new series of drawings, titled ‘Room to Become’. These works are included in the group exhibition, ‘Kulturpreise des Landes Niederösterreich’, which continues at NÖDOK, St. Pölten, until 11 January. 

Three decades their senior, my own experience is poured into the youthful bodies of my subjects. My understanding of the challenges that may await them informs the content of each piece. The figures experience the necessity of enduring discomfort, uncertainty, fear, the lure of the void, collapse, and loss. Emotions are expressed unashamedly and without apology. A purposefully unfinished aesthetic suggests their potential to develop and evolve further, offering hope and room to become.

Emma Stroude is a visual artist based in County Sligo. 

emmastroude.com

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CRISTÍN LEACH REFLECTS ON THE BRIGID’S WELL PAINTINGS OF MARY FAHY.

At Liscannor near the cliffs of Moher on the west coast of Ireland there is a holy well. Around 1829, the antiquarian George Petrie painted Pilgrims at Saint Brigid’s Well, Liscannor, County Clare, a delicate watercolour later bequeathed to the National Gallery of Ireland. Quaint now to our eyes, and probably even then, it shows women in shawls with children and babies kneeling and crossing from the lower to the upper bank of an abundant, meandering stream. It’s a painting that offers a documentarian’s pseudo-romantic vision of one of Ireland’s ancient curiosities, a place filled with mysterious earthy wisdoms; still, a precious place. People have made pilgrimage here for centuries. In 2025, on a wall outside the now much-altered well, a message for visitors reads: “All that is tangled will be unravelled.”

‘Unravelled’ is a weighty word, double-edged. It means untangled and also undone; made neat but also pulled apart. 

The well was determined not to let me find it on the day I visited. At her home-studio, the artist Mary Fahy had just been showing me her paintings of the objects visitors have amassed at this place. Afterwards, she set me on the road with, “You know where you’re going?” “Yes,” I said. I put the coordinates into the maps app, attached my phone to the dash, and left. Three times I put the coordinates in, and three times I was brought to different locations where the well was not. 

Finally, via a single-car backroad over stonewall-bound fields, I arrived to find the well clearly marked and visibly present at a junction on the main road. Dabhach Bhríde or Brigid’s Bath is not hard to find, but the first three times I drove by, it simply was not there. There’s no explanation for this. The digital map led me to a narrow dead end, to a triangular turning place, and to a kind of nowhere before depositing me at the well. At first, I thought the well did not wish to be visited that day. Once there, it felt more likely that the place simply wanted this visitor to have to work hard to find it, to really want to get there. 

Inside, too many faces line the walls. I walk in and walk straight back out.

Mary Fahy first started painting at Liscannor’s Brigid’s Well in 2019. Today, its pooling water is contained at the end of a stone-built corridor filled to the roof with objects that pilgrims and tourists have left: toys, mass cards, rosary beads, medical paraphernalia, personal memorabilia, and many, many photographs of lost loved ones. Sitting and painting there for hours at first, the artist was filled with a strong sense of what she calls ‘object memory’: “All of these are private moments that people have had. Everything that’s left there is charged with that emotion, in that place.” Around 2022, the paintings began to form a distinct body of work.

In these paintings, layers of beads choke statues of the artist’s namesake, the Virgin Mary. Broken statues are laden with notes and trinkets. There are items peeling, damaged and mouldering. The sound of constant water trickling into the well is at once calming and at odds with what looks on arrival like a mass of human-made detritus. 

Raised Catholic, Fahy’s earliest experience of art was of the statues and imagery she saw at mass. She studied icon painting in Greece as part of her fine art degree. She feels conflicted about religion now, but when she speaks of her connection with and attraction to the well and this work, she talks of memories enmeshed with traditions, some long gone: going door to door as a child looking for money for Bridget on Brídeóg Eve; the island women of Inisheer who would come to this well on the Feast of the Assumption to keen and pray; pattern day traditions which continue now; and spiritual affinities even more ancient than all of that. 

The Virgin is meant to have the gift of foresight. In Seer (2023), Fahy has painted her almost blinded by blue plastic rosary beads, the blurred faces of two children in images wedged into the cowl of layered offerings around her neck. She is draped and adorned in the weight of the gifts of others seeking her spiritual intercession, acknowledgement, mercy, help. In Pleas (2022), Mary appears gagged by the mounting layers of beads and medals draped over her shoulders. Her mouth is covered by the most recently placed item, her lips pressed to it. Her hands wide in welcome and love, the openness of her stance is drowned and muffled in the weight of the supplications of visitors. She is burdened with their need and want, and yet she stands, eyes lowered in vacant looking sorrow.

For Fahy, these works have become a conduit for thinking about human nature, humanity, death, illness, faith, and the world beyond the well. Watch (2022) was painted on 27 March 2022, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine while the world watched on TV. Recent work addresses Israel’s war on Gaza. In Peek-a-boo (2023), the Child of Prague offers a one-eyed stare, his crown replaced by a hole in the top of his infant head. The incongruity of children’s toys next to medical devices at the well, the juxtaposition of religious iconography with human stuff, and reminders of the daily thresholds between life and death are everywhere in this work. 

Fahy is interested in ritual, rites and the significance of leaving objects as much as in the objects themselves. “What they’ve left is their feeling and their intention,” she says, “that’s what’s left.” Artistic influences include Christian Boltanski, Kathy Prendergast, Louise Bourgeois. Some of the paintings are assembled still-life works made beyond the well. A vase that belonged to her aunt Evelyn and a statue given to her by her aunt Patricia, both of whom were nuns, appear in Peace Lily and Child of Prague with Severed Hand (2025). The artist is just visible in a blurred reflection in Self-Portrait with Jesus, Donald and the Claw (2023).

Ceangal (Tie) – Child of Prague (2023),with its almost absurd garlanding and slightly manic look in the statue’s eyes, points to the visual overwhelm of it all. Quieter works, including Ag Fanacht (Waiting) (2023) and Lean (2024) offer tender moments painted in more muted tones. As the weathered Virgin cradles her infant god-son, there is a feeling of the two travelling together, companions in interdependent unison. Where a statue of Mary has fallen against the back of another, entangled in beads and threads and tethered to this place and to each other, they emerge like a pair of weary beacons in the darkness of the cave-like route to the well. And the work keeps getting better. Miraculous Medal – Sending Prayers (2025) has a painterly rigour and gestural and compositional directness that Fahy has been refining since this project began.

At the well, objects jostle and crowd almost as a distraction from the spiritual heart of the place. It’s hard to look and hard to really see. The layers of detritus contain endless strata of human stories. What Fahy is doing is trying to really look, to really see, and to connect with the place and the spirit of what’s going on here. What can paintings of broken and worn religious statues weighed down with the pleas of human hurt tell us about ourselves? That we are bad at letting go, and we are good at it. That we know individual loneliness and seek community. That ritual is part of grief and pain, and certain places hold presence and memory, and draw people to them. That hope, solace and connection are profound human needs, and although the world might keep changing, that much does not. 

Cristín Leach is a writer and critic based in Cork.

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LARA QUINN REFLECTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF HER EMERGING PRACTICE.

I remember the exact moment I decided to transfer from studying the History of Art to Fine Art. I was attending a class at UCC and sitting on a hard, pew-like bench in the West Wing lecture theatre. Above us, an artwork flashed on the screen, submerging the room in red light. My professor paced the floor, back and forth like a pendulum. “Red Room”, she said, “by Louise Bourgeois.” 

Cloistered within a sculptural cell of dark, wooden doors were the contents of Bourgeois’s most intimate childhood memories, designed for our voyeuristic consumption. My hands, clammy with sweat, felt heavy upon my lap, and my chest was hard as a rock. My body was reacting faster than my mind could rationalise and for the first time in my life, I experienced the capacity of art to induce a subconscious, physiological reaction. I felt sick with dread. I thought the lecture would never end and when it did, I barely felt the nerve to stand. I left that class not yet realising I had decided to leave UCC for good. 

Frustrated at the thought of responding to something so visceral with pen to paper, rather than paint on canvas, I had the realisation that I wanted to make art, not just study it. Having never attended an art class before I enrolled at Cork College of FET. It was there that I received the reinforcement I needed to pursue a degree in art. Last year, I graduated with a First-Class Honours Degree from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, receiving several accolades, including the Cork Arts Society Student of the Year Award, Best Thesis Prize, as well as being longlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards 2024. 

Inspired by the work of Bourgeois, amongst many other artists, my current practice spans painting, performance and film. Informed by art movements such as Body Art and Magic Realism, my work addresses themes of identity and womanhood through an autobiographical lens, portraying myself as the character, Lilith, within the reimagined landscape of a mythological Ireland. By reprising myths in the context of my twenty-first-century experience, I hope to reconceptualise these archetypal female figures, while confronting my own sense of identity in the process. 

These themes were most recently explored in my first solo exhibition, titled ‘Lady Lazarus’, which was presented in Lavit Gallery, Cork, from 3 April to 3 May. ‘Lady Lazarus’ emerged in response to the unique exhibition space of the Lavit Gallery’s vaults, a slightly subterranean recess within the main gallery interior. Imagining the vaults as a tomb or lair, I linked the space with another subterranean site of major significance within Irish folklore, namely the Cave of Crúachain in County Roscommon. Based on extensive research of caves and their symbolism, the uterus-shaped entrance of Crúachain Cave, for me, represents the opening of an ancient womb, connecting the heritage of pre-Christian Ireland with the present day. I filmed my first performance on site, where I physically assumed the role of Lilith in an embodied demonstration of rebirth, ritualising a moment of transformation in the cutting of my hair. New figurative paintings have also emerged from this project to accompany the filmed performance. 

I am hoping to develop my practice as an emerging artist in Ireland before enrolling in an MFA programme abroad in the future. Later this year, I look forward to exhibiting further development of my current work in a solo exhibition at the Laneway Gallery in Cork City.

Lara Quinn is a Cork-based artist and a studio holder at Backwater Artists.

laraquinn.ie

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TOM CLIMENT OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF HIS PAINTING PRACTICE AND HIS RECENT EXHIBITION AT CCI PARIS.

After I left secondary school in 1987, I studied engineering for a few years. At the same time, I was doing night classes in painting at Crawford College of Art and Design with the late Jo Allen, who encouraged me greatly. I later studied at Crawford full-time and qualified with a Fine Art degree in 1995. I’ve been working as an artist since then, later returning to college and completing a Masters by Research in 2011. 

Ten years ago, Solomon Fine Art in Dublin took me on as one of their artists. I’ve since had regular solo exhibitions, the most recent being ‘Pilgrim’ in May 2024. Exhibiting with Solomon has been a huge support to my practice, which has given me the sense of a commercial outlet for my work. As an artist, I probably started out making work for myself, but it’s important that it also goes out into the world and reaches people.

My recent exhibition at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, called ‘Wilding/État Sauvage’ (1 February – 13 April), presented a selection of paintings made over the last few years. A new book, published by Gandon Editions, was launched at the exhibition opening, with subsequent launches in Solomon Fine Art and Lavit Gallery, Cork. The 120-page hardback monograph documents my work over the last decade or so. It contains 128 illustrations and an essay by Cristín Leach, with additional texts by Mark Ewart, Carissa Farrell, Mary McCarthy, and Michael Waldron (gandoneditions.com).

For me, painting is trying to find a balance between being unselfconscious, allowing the work to be formed, and also making critical judgements. It’s a process of making the work and then reflecting on why I feel certain paintings are more successful than others. These paintings then become almost like signposts in the road ahead – reference points for the work as it progresses.

I tend to work in isolation; I don’t share a studio space, and, over the years, the work has become quite internal in nature. When I start on a new series, it’s quite a natural undertaking, and it comes to an end quite naturally too, when I feel I shouldn’t make any more of them. I don’t draw or sketch. I start each piece with a rough, almost hazy, image in my head. I want the work to reveal itself to me; through painting, things become clearer. Over time, the work takes on a life of its own and moves forward under its own weight.

What has always fascinated me about painting is the ability to make a flat, two-dimensional surface seem three-dimensional. This idea of creating space has been the cornerstone of my practice. From the early gestural paintings to my more structured work of the present, creating space that the viewer can enter is an enduring interest. The abstract structures and shapes in the paintings are mechanisms that invite the viewer to a threshold. The paintings merge references to architecture and landscape to generate contemplations on shelter, ritual and hopefulness. 

The surfaces of the paintings are also quite important to the experience of the work. When I start a piece, I first paint the whole surface one colour; as in music, this becomes the keynote of the painting. I use plaster and sand, building up the surfaces. I try to allow the history of the painting to be visible in the finished works; I want it to tell a story.

With my work over the last ten years or so, I’ve been using abstract geometric shapes and structures, almost like grids, to provide a foundation for the paint. I then start to shape them into something more recognisable; I don’t think the work I do is wholly abstract. I want there to be some way into them – some element or narrative that the viewer can relate to. I think all the work I’ve done has existed on this border between abstraction and representation. 

My most recent work, which was exhibited in CCI Paris, has more natural forms in reaction to the more hard-edged geometric shapes I had previously been using. Flowers, plants and trees are all suggested in this new series. Some are quite recognisable, while others are imbued within landscape to become abstracted shapes and natural forms. 

I’m currently developing a new series of paintings for my next exhibition at Solomon Fine Art in 2026. I don’t plan or think too much at this stage; I just allow the work to be made. As the exhibition gets closer, I’ll see what I have in the studio and start selecting work that has some overall connection and narrative.

Tom Climent is a painter based in Cork City. 

tomcliment.com

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JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS DAPHNE WRIGHT AHEAD OF HER SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM.

Joanne Laws: We both studied in Sligo RTC (now Atlantic Technological University). I studied Fine Art in the late-90s, during an inspiring period for female Irish sculptors. Was there a sense of optimism at this time, or did momentum happen against the odds?

Daphne Wright: Well, everybody left in the 80s – the recession was brutal. I left Ireland in 1989. In the 90s, I just remember going from fellowship to fellowship and residency to residency, in order to sustain my practice. I was a fellow in Cheltenham, a Henry Moore fellow in Manchester, and spent a year in the British School at Rome. During my education in Sligo in the early 80s, really strong women sculptors were constantly being pointed out to us; I was learning all the time through talking and conversation. The teaching staff in Sligo at the time included Seán Larkin, Seán McSweeney, Fred Conlon, Con Lynch, Nuala Maloney, Ruairí Ó Cuív, Seán O’Reilly, and John O’Leary. There was also Robert Stewart and Peter Charney – he was Australian and came with a completely different viewpoint. I studied sculpture and ceramics, but we were such a small year group that we were all friendly with each other. 

JL: Now that you’re back in Dublin, do you have a studio?

DW: I’ve made two rooms of my house into one space, and that’s where I normally work. I’m very grateful for that because renting a studio is just so expensive. That’s how I’ve had to do it, ever since I had children; it has become a particular kind of process, and I love the routine. When I’m fabricating a large sculpture, I temporarily rent the workshop of a cabinet maker in the northwest of Ireland. 

JL: What does your day-to-day studio routine look like?

DW: I would spend a lot of time testing, exploring, and making things. I’m not just testing the materials; I also read, research, and feed my brain at the same time. Once I start to understand what I’m doing, then I make – which is often the nicest part. On occasion, I would work up to a really large piece, which is not just about making, but also about raising the money to fund it.

JL: The life-size figures of your two sons have previously featured in your work. Were they made through casting processes?

DW: When the boys were smaller, I made Kitchen Table (2014) in hand-painted Jesmonite, which involved casting each of them separately in smaller pieces. This was while they were just emerging from being children and going into adolescence. Over ten years later, I’ve gotten consensus to cast them again, now that they are on the cusp of manhood, for a new work called Sons and Couch (2025) which will be exhibited for the first time this summer. 

The figures are complete casts and are hollow. They were fabricated using the old-fashioned life cast skill, and that’s really important. It’s not computer-generated or 3D printed; it’s a very labour intensive, traditional process. It’s also quite an undertaking for the person being cast, because the body is completely encased, albeit at different times. You use the plaster to take a mould of the body, as if trapping a moment in time. 

When the casts are assembled as a complete sculpture, everything is then painted in a subdued kind of colour – one that has the essence of memory. It isn’t real colour but how one might remember colour. The figures are then assembled into an installation or sculptural scene. That’s what I’m grappling with at the moment, because I sometimes have more elements than I need. It can be a painful process, editing down to just what is necessary and what functions. 

JL: The domestic seems to be a reoccurring subject matter within your sculptural arrangements, which includes figures, personal items, plants, and household appliances. Why is that?

DW: Well, there are a couple of things that make this kind of complicated. Firstly, you go to museums and discover that there are very few women artists represented in collections. There’s something really interesting about the casts and the trapping of time that monumentalise the domestic, while placing motherhood and the feminine at the heart of the museum. In addition, I often wonder why there are certain objects within our museums that are mute or silent. They become stagnant, I suppose, and their sense of being an artwork actually disappears. For me, that’s a central concern. When an artwork has a presence and a soul of its own, then the other things just become props.  

Aside from Sons and Couch, there will be other objects in the show, including Fridge Still Life (2021) – an open refrigerator made from unfired clay, containing the usual things on the shelves, such as a chicken, ready for the oven. On top of the fridge, there’s a large vase of tulips in the process of decay. So, in many ways, it’s a contemporary still life, evoking questions at the centre of domestic life: who fills the fridge, who empties the fridge, and who are we cooking for? 

JL: A solo exhibition of your work will be presented at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford this summer. It will feature new work, developed in response to sculptures in the Ashmolean Cast Gallery. What can you tell us about this show?

DW: The exhibition title, ‘Deep Rooted Things’, is taken from a line in the Yeats poem, The Municipal Gallery Revisited (1939): “My children may find here Deep-rooted things.” The Ashmolean Cast Gallery is quite amazing. It contains ancient Greek and Roman casts that are almost complete. There’s a fascinating collection of athletes that really do still hold the qualities of young men. I took the children to the Ashmolean a lot when they were small, so in a way, it forms part of their upbringing and their learning. One’s fascination, as a mother and as an artist, looking at objects, imbues them, in turn, with fascination. 

The exhibition also responds to the Hugh Lane Gallery Collection, looking specifically at the still life painting tradition. The collection contains flower paintings by some of the very first Irish women to have gone to university or art college, many of them studying in the UK or France. Their flower paintings are quite beautiful and quietly radical. There are also some very poignant portraits, including a beautiful one of W.B. Yeats as a boy reading a book, painted by his father, John Butler Yeats, in c.1886. 

These artworks will be reproduced in an accompanying publication, alongside  writing by Emily LaBarge and from Ashmolean Museum Director, Alexander Sturgis, and Hugh Lane Gallery Director, Barbara Dawson. The show is about combining those institutions and looking at the differences in their collection: one is a world class collection of antiquity; while the other is a more modern national collection containing contemporary works. They employ different languages, but for me, it’s all museology, permeated by the domestic.  

JL: There seems to be the recurring theme of young men, portrayed throughout the ages? 

DW: That’s true – young men at a pivotal point in their lives, whether the young athletes in the Ashmolean collection, or my own sons on the cusp of adulthood. Arguably, there were similar pressures for young men in both the classical and contemporary eras. A lot of this subtext is not verbal; however, we know it instinctively. I think that is largely where my work exists – at these kind of thresholds that are universally understood.

‘Ashmolean Now, Daphne Wright: Deep-Rooted Things’ will be presented at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 13 June 2025 to 8 February 2026. The making of new works for this exhibition has been supported by a Visual Art Project Award from The Arts Council of Ireland.

ashmolean.org

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KATHRYN MAGUIRE OUTLINES HER LATEST RESIDENCY AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS WITHIN HER PRACTICE.

I am a visual artist and educator whose practice incorporates socially engaged projects, environmental awareness projects, and public art projects. I create sculptural installations and interventions to explore ideas with communities and within the gallery space. A recurrent theme in my work focuses on voices of the silenced and the non-human, exploring how they might have agency in memory and history.

Exploring geology, the history of materials, and the circular economy, my current work concentrates on lithics, minerals, and mining. I examine rocks and minerals from various international locations, through a situated, land-based practice. Increasingly, my work engages processes of making, informed by my earlier training as a jewellery-maker and sculptor. I create artworks that convey the complexities of deep time, visible in materials. 

I want to reveal fundamental and invisible forces and energies, explored by scientists and experts alike; these concepts are central to my practice. Works such as Microns 1 & 2 (2024) have used scientific technology to reveal the geomythologies we inhabit and host. Taking the form of large, printed banners, these works feature electron micrographs of river clay samples, depicting metal pollution. Geologist Dr Tim Newman sourced clay samples and other geological strata for me, from the site of the River Thames Tideway project, where the Super Sewer construction is situated. I then took these samples to Innes Clatworthy, Electron Microscopist in the Imaging and Analysis Core Research Laboratories in The Natural History Museum in London, and we used an electron microscope to create the Electron Micrographs, with the spherules of iron oxide silicates pushing out of the clay. The banners were exhibited in ‘When We Cease to Understand the World’, curated by Marysia Więckiewicz-Carroll at Interface in Connemara (14 – 28 July 2024). 

Another work exploring scientific analysis was Mountain Mapping (2024), exhibited in my solo show ‘To the Mountain’ at Leitrim Sculpture Centre (30 August – 21 September 2024). Three local mountains (Benbo, Slieve League, and Iron) were 3D-printed from digital contour maps and mounted on surveyor’s tripods, painted gold for tuning and communing with the earth’s magnetism. The work incorporates geological specimens from each of the mountains: Iron Nodule, Paragneiss and Quartzite. The suspended rocks demonstrate a simple geological experiment to determine ‘specific gravity’. 

‘To the Mountain’ exhibition was the outcome of my three-month residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, exploring the mapping of mountains. The mapping of Ireland was developed by the early Ordnance Survey (OS) in 1824 to facilitate taxation and the ‘underground potential’ of geological and material value. The mapping was done by creating a series of primary triangles; sightings were taken between stations using theodolites on top of selected mountains. This, and my question, ‘Do Mountains commune with us?’ inspired the fabrication of artworks in the show. Many of these works were informed by my research into magnetism, Earth Sciences and measurement, geological phenomena, and experiments in the field. The exhibition asked: How can we shift away from over-mining and endless extraction of the Earth’s minerals towards a circular economy?

The work, Mount Ida (2024), conjures the magical and mythical, whilst attempting to comprehend the mystery of magnetism and its name-origin. A pair of traditional Greek shoes, known as tsarouchi, are cast in iron and attached to a strong welding magnet. This work was inspired by the myth of Magnes, associated with a shepherd, reputedly the first to notice magnetism, when his shoes got stuck to lodestone/ magnetite on the ground at Mount Ida. It was also informed by time spent exploring the magnetic cores of Iceland. I visited a geological drill core archive in East Iceland and documented the magnetic power of the cores with very strong magnets (neodymium).

I am intrigued by alchemical changes in metals, minerals, and spirituality. Materials and matter have an ancient importance as Prima Materia. Using metal and stone supports these interests, because the materials are always changing and breathing. This is important to my understanding of deep time. Cast in Jesmonite with black stone-shungite pigments, my snake sculpture, The Keeper (2021), holds the secrets of stones and guards the thresholds. It was exhibited in ‘Hivernal’, curated by Eamonn Maxwell at Roscommon Arts Centre (1 November – 21 December 2024). 

Cast in pigmented Jesmonite with gold, shungite and iron oxide, the work Mineral Mountain (2024) was an attempt to commune with the sacred elements within mountains and rocks. The mountain sculptures are inspired by geodata forms of the Iron Mountain in Leitrim. Rocks, metals and plants are ground up to become homoeopathic and offer healing: shungite (for protection), gold (representing the sun, and a vital element in balancing energies) and dragon blood powder (to neutralise negative energies). 

My solo exhibition ‘To the Mountain’ at Leitrim Sculpture Centre (30 August – 21 September 2024) considered how we commune with the Earth, its divinity, scientific knowledge, and colonial histories to explore alchemical traits and forms. I was subsequently awarded a six-month Artist Studios Residency (from August 2025 to January 2026) at The Model in Sligo. My forthcoming show, ‘Material Acts’, will run from 11 to 27 September at Pallas Projects/Studios, as part of the Artist-Initiated Projects programme for 2025. ‘Material Acts’ will present a sculptural investigation relating to geology, alchemical changes, and environmental colonialism.

Kathryn Maguire is an artist based in Sligo.

kathrynmaguire.net

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ELLA DE BÚRCA INTERVIEWS ELIZABETH COPE ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF HER PAINTING PRACTICE. 

Ella de Búrca: Could you open up on your early influences and what led you towards painting?

Elizabeth Cope: As children, my father used to take us around to all the different monuments. We had some of our family buried in Killín Cormac in County Kildare. I remember seeing Ogham stones in the graveyard (that were later stolen) and you’d have to translate them into Latin. These kinds of things were inspiring to me.

When I was nine, my sister Phil came home from Paris with a box of oil paints; it was the smell of those oil paints that seduced me into being a painter. She also gave me a slim version of the Bible in pictures, and I remember distinctly seeing a picture of Rembrandt’s Christ on the Cross (1631). My aunt was also a big inspiration; she used to play Chopin to me. 

EdB: Does music play a role in your paintings?

EC: Music is more important than painting for me, because it’s the rhythm of life. I love the human voice. I find singing so inspiring. I’ve sung in my local choir, in Saint James’ choir in Dublin, and at the Cork Choral Festival. I like all kinds of music, but I have to say, I always go back to the old favourites – opera and ballet. I saw Rudolf Nureyev dancing with Margot Fonteyn when I was 19. He was 36 and she was 53. I went to the Wexford Opera Festival this year and I loved Donizetti’s Le Convenienze Ed Inconvenienze Teatrali (1827). The quality of singing was excellent throughout. I think the GPO should be turned into the National Opera House.

EdB: Do you have thematic currents in your painting practice or subjects you like to focus on?

EC: I don’t do themes. Life throws its themes at you. I paint every subject under the sun, so themes are everything. Even the most abstract thing, like the corner of a table, can become a very beautiful image to me. The shape and the physiology are of equal importance. People, animals, plants, minerals – they’re all an excuse for me to put down paint. The subject is the paint itself. Everything is difficult and everything is easy. I don’t believe in the word ‘only’ and I don’t believe in the word ‘can’t’. It’s all possible. 

EdB: What is the role of drawing in your work?

EC: Drawing is the bones of painting. Drawing is essential. Without drawing, you’re nothing. Take children, for example. I’m not saying every child can draw perfectly, but until around nine years old, children have this freedom, an intuition to draw, and then what happens? They push it away. They think “this drawing thing is childish.” 

I learned one really good lesson, when I went to London aged 19. I worked for a Ms Holland in an advertising agency, and she painted in her spare time. She had the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen. She used her left hand. When she was younger, she used to write with her right hand, but during the war, her hand would get so tired that she trained herself to use her left hand, and she ended up using it for the rest of her life. What I say to you or anybody who wants to draw: use the opposite hand because there’s no vanity in it. You get used to the same old story with the one hand you use. 

It’s better to write or to make marks of what you see, than what you think you see. We all have an idea of the shape of something in our heads, which then means we’re not observing the subject. We have to observe. It’s hand-eye coordination. People want perfection – but perfection doesn’t exist. You draw while people are moving. I love people talking to me when I’m painting them. Animals moving, children playing – that’s really important. You try to capture it as quickly as you can. 

EdB: Can you talk further about the act of live drawing?

EC: On my first day at the Sir John Cass School of Art in London, there was a woman modelling – she was in her mid-70s, I imagine. There she sat, naked, surrounded exclusively by men, except for me. I spoke to her during the break, and it transpired that she was a model for Welsh painter, Augustus John (1878-1961). I mean, what a great link back to the past. If you want to be good at life drawing, you have to sit yourself, to understand how difficult it is. I’ve been at drawing classes where a lot of people have no sensitivity to the model. The model is in charge when you are drawing and painting. For a start, you have to make sure they’re comfortable. Not everyone makes a good model but the people you least expect will be good models.

EdB: I found this quote on your website: “The act of painting is like doing a post-mortem.” Could you expand on this?

EC: First of all, in making a work, the subconscious has to be there and at the same time, you have to get the painting to work, like a surgeon repairing a broken leg. You have to fix things. It’s like having a dual personality. You work on two levels: the conscious level and the subconscious level. 

We’re all artists, in one shape or another. The most important thing about all art forms in my opinion, is humour and fun. Why are you doing it? The Irish author Brian Keenan was incarcerated in Beirut for four and a half years after being kidnapped by Islamic Jihad. Another prisoner, John McCarthy, said it was Brian’s wit that kept them going. He was great to be able to have that concentrated, humorous way of looking at the world. One day, as Keenan sat in his container, he was asked by his captors “What would you like?” to which he replied: “Oh, a grand piano.” 

Ella de Búrca is an artist and Assistant Lecturer at NCAD. 

elladeburca.com

Elizabeth Cope is an artist based in Kilkenny. A major solo exhibition of her work, ‘The Palpable Bump on the Bridge of the Nose’, was presented at VISUAL (23 September 2022 – 8 Jan 2023), while ‘Elisabeth Cope – From the Eye to the Heart’ was shown at Maison Depoivre Art Gallery in Ontario, Canada (31 August – 29 September 2024). 

elizabethcope.com

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JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS EILIS O’CONNELL ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF HER PRACTICE OVER FIVE DECADES.

Joanne Laws: Perhaps you could start by outlining the environment and appetite for sculptural practice in Ireland in the late 70s, as you graduated from Crawford School of Art and Design?

Eilis O’Connell: There was a passion and intensity for sculpture in those days. I remember a show called ‘OASIS’ (Open Air Show of Irish Sculpture) and annual exhibitions like Living Art and Independent Artists. I first exhibited my work as part of The Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1972. Can you believe that I was so brazen, to put my work into a national show when I was only in second year of art college? We were encouraged by John Burke to submit work and that experience was brilliant; it gave me confidence. There were a lot of talented people around but sadly many of them emigrated. There was nothing to stay for; it was very tough. I know artists complain nowadays about having no space, but it was absolutely dreadful in the 70s and 80s. You just accepted that you had to work in some old, freezing, derelict building. Property had no value so it wasn’t maintained, but on the plus side, you could rent places fairly cheaply. Lots of people emigrated during the recession and didn’t come back. I eventually emigrated in the late 80s. 

JL: You were a cofounder of the National Sculpture Factory in Cork. How did this come about?

EC: I worked with Vivienne Roche, Maud Cotter, and Danny McCarthy on securing a studio for sculptors in Cork city in the mid to late 80s. I was a member of the Arts Council for two years previously and made them aware of the lack of studio space in the city, that was written into policy and funding was allocated. So, it was just a matter of finding a building. The old tram depot on Albert Road in the city centre was ideal, but it took a long time to get the project off the ground. Maud, Vivienne and Danny did most of the work, as by that time I was based in London.

Around this time, there was a public backlash to one of my public artworks, The Great Wall of Kinsale (1988), which was just a nightmare, so I decided to leave Ireland. I moved to London by myself with basically nothing. Then I got the PS1 residency, so I went to New York, where I met a woman from Delfina Studios, who was asking if anybody wanted a free studio in London. I applied and got a free studio for two years which was a stroke of luck. Delfina was brilliant and really supportive; during the two years, I had four open studios, which was a great way of meeting people. 

I then began to apply for public art commissions in the UK. Strangely enough, the Kinsale piece ended up being my saving grace and opened doors for me; the opportunities just flowed. I won a competition for Cardiff Bay Arts Trust, Secret Station (1992), a sculpture in patinated bronze and galvanized steel. I did another one in Milton Keynes, The Space Between (1992), in bronze and fibre optics, and another for the London Docklands Development Corporation. I was on a roll of winning competitions and thought it would never end. After a while, public art competitions became a big thing in England, with huge budgets, and people like Anthony Gormley going for them. Those were really exciting times. 

JL: Speaking of Gormley, his Sculpture for Derry Walls (1987) had a very strong public reaction too. I think it was covered in graffiti and even had moulten plastic poured over it at one stage?

EC: Yes, one of the figures had burning tyres placed around its neck. Gormley had a great line about that; he said that the sculpture was “catharsis for the city” – something for people to vent all their anger on the piece. It’s made of cast iron, so it could take the abuse. In a way, it’s a perfect piece for that time and space.

JL: Your practice involves dual strands: public artworks that are often vast in size; and the sculptural objects you make on a more domestic scale. How do you approach this tension?

EC: I make everything small, even in preparation for something bigger, so I can solve all the problems on a small scale first. If you make a small version of something, it’s only a matter of scaling it up and engineering, which I do quite instinctively. I would prefer to just be working on big things all the time, but the only way to fund that is through commissions. The context of where and how a sculpture is placed is so important; it has to be allowed to create its own atmosphere.

JL: Dramatic variations in scale were also seen in your survey exhibition at VISUAL Carlow, which included a vast new commission for the Main Gallery. At over 21-metres in length, it’s possibly the largest sculpture I have ever encountered in a gallery in Ireland. What can you tell us about this work? 

EC: I had a completely different plan for that show, but Benjamin Stafford (Visual Arts Curator at VISUAL) saw a piece in my garden, Capsule for Destinies Unknown, which I had made for a contemporary sculpture exhibition in England called ‘ARK’ in 2017. I thought of the ark as a symbol of refuge at a time when so many refugees were crossing the Mediterranean Sea and tragically drowning. The original piece is asymmetrical and is bolted into concrete outside, so I came up with an idea to make a second version that would be symmetrical, in order to balance. Capsule for Destinies Unknown – series two (2024), comes apart in three pieces. It held the main space in VISUAL perfectly; the width of the space is great, so it was interesting to deal with it diagonally. The viewer had to walk around the piece and were forced to really look at it. 

JL: How do you sell your work? 

EC: I show with a gallery in London and with Solomon Fine Art in Dublin, so they kind of keep me going. And then I have my sculpture garden – an acre of land surrounding my studio at The Creamery in Cork. It was a concrete jungle when I first got it, and I’ve spent a lot of time re-landscaping, planting trees, and levelling out areas. It is all hills and I have learnt so much from placing the sculptures, moving them around, seeing how one piece affects the others, and so on. People make appointments to visit, and I have open studio days, and that is how I sell the big pieces.

JL: That sounds very DIY.

EC: Oh, it’s pure DIY. The only way to survive as a sculptor is by doing things myself. Nobody’s going to come and do it for you; it’s a lot of work, maintaining the sculptures and keeping them looking pristine. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by my studio with literally 50 years of work stored in there. I keep things that I value, but I do have clear-outs from time to time. I still have a 40ft container full of stuff from my Douglas Hyde show in the 80s. They’re pieces I spent months making, and it’s really hard to know what to do with them.

JL: What are you working on at the moment? 

EC: I’m doing a piece for Wilton Park in Dublin which is an homage to the pioneering Irish writer, Mary Lavin, who wrote for The New Yorker and other publications. In a world of male writers, she was really ahead of her time. I decided to cast a biomorphic piece in mirror polished stainless steel, which is a really difficult process. Few artists use this medium, so I just wanted to see if I could do it. We’ve done a test piece and so far, it’s brilliant. I’m making it in Spain and Greece. I used to do a lot of my commissioned work in Britain with good fabrication companies and foundries but with Brexit, this is now impossible.

JL: What do you think are the challenges for Irish sculptors?  

EC: In a word, space. There’s a lack of space to show contemporary art on a large scale.  Access to affordable studios and housing are massive issues for artists in Ireland right now, but perhaps housing more so. Looking on the bright side, the digital world has made it possible to be creative with no studio but for a sculptor it is imperative to have a dedicated space for simply messing around, learning how to use tools, and develop skills. That haptic element is crucial; there is something very satisfying about making something by hand from scratch. 

JL: To conclude, what can you tell us about your materials and values as a maker?

EC: Well fundamentally, I just love making things. I’ve always got about 20 things on the go. In an ideal world, I’d be in my studio making things all day long, but that’s not realistic. I have to deal with emails and collaborations, which can take away from one’s personal creative time. I like the social aspect of collaborating – it keeps my mind open to new possibilities and processes.

I used to make everything myself in steel but to be honest, I’m beyond that now. I don’t want to spend every day grinding metal; it’s a really hard way to make things. I still use steel occasionally for armatures and things, but now I use Jesmonite; it is a very versatile medium that you can pour or use like clay. I’m very curious about new materials. I worked with resin for ages and eventually decided that I hate it; resin looks beautiful but it’s toxic as hell. The thing about sculpture is that no matter what materials you use – wood, stone, concrete, plaster – the dust is hazardous. I switch materials because I like learning new things. The last thing that I want to do is repeat myself. 

I’m fascinated by the structure and longevity of materials. Good materials are sustainable and the great thing about metal is that it has value, so it is recycled. Some of my small pieces get translated into stone and that has been another learning curve. Things that I make in metal cannot be made in stone simply because stone has no tensile strength, so it is hard to defy gravity. I have learnt to respect its weight while trying to remove as much material as possible from the block. Stone and bronze are so resilient. When buried for 3000 years, bronze will come up even more beautiful, with a patina that’s slightly etched. I love the fact that a metal or stone sculpture will outlive me. 

Eilis O’Connell is an artist based between Cork and Kerry. ‘In the Roundness of Being’ was presented at VISUAL Carlow from 17 February to 12 May 2024.

eilisoconnell.com

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MARGARET FITZGIBBON OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF HER PRACTICE. 

I completed a BA in Sculpture at Crawford College of Art and Design in the 1980s. Soon afterwards, I joined the recently formed Cork Artist Collective (est. 1985) and became a director, serving until 2006. Not only did CAC provide me with a studio, but also the fellowship of other emerging artists. 

During the 90s, I completed a range of public art works. For example, in 1997, I was commissioned to create a site-specific commission for University College Cork, Ten Foolish and Wise Virgins, comprising ten bronze and stone sculptures, sited in the foyer of the O’Rahilly Building. In 2008, I completed an MFA in Sculpture at NCAD, followed by a practice-based PhD in 2013. My doctoral thesis was titled ‘Loss and Return: Exploring collective memory in an Irish family archive 1950-1966 through installation art practice’.

I work across a wide range of media, including sculpture, textiles, sound, drawing, moving image, and collage, and my choice of materials is often intuitively led. I like my processes to be technically exact, however the final results often look spontaneous, even awkward, suggesting a sense of fragility. In the last few years, I’ve turned to early Surrealism, drawn to its recurring principle of ‘the strange beauty in the unexpected’. Different media have their own cultural and historical charge, which informs and resonates with me and, in turn, the viewer. 

Art-making is how I process memories, experiences and observations. By fusing narrative modes, including poetry, text, image, and collage, I recalibrate the tensions between reality and fantasy. I often work in series and return to the same themes, which includes the natural world, the boundaries of the body, autobiography, memory, hidden histories, and feminism.

This summer I had two concurrent solo exhibitions. ‘You Begin’, at Mermaid Arts Centre (20 May – 1 July) presented new artworks employing a broad range of materials, such as ceramics, collage, and textiles. Making art through the global pandemic and affected by isolation, fear, and a new connectedness, I drew on the sensuality of plants and research on early female Surrealist artists. This exhibition was accompanied by a publication with an essay by Ingrid Lyons. For ‘Do you see us – Do you hear us?’ at Godsbanen Cultural Centre in Aarhus, Denmark (26 June – 21 August) I exhibited a series of large-scale collage works. These figurative works explore ancient mythologies and holistic forms of crafting, belonging and surviving in harmony with nature, conveyed through the repeated motif of female hands as symbols of both oppression and comfort that yearn to connect. 

My plan for the next couple of years is simple enough – to continue making art. I’m currently in discussions with Godsbanen and Pamela Gomberbach (Project Manager, AaBKC International) to develop an artist residency in Aarhus next year; researching at HEX! Museum of Witch Hunt, located in Riba, the oldest town in Denmark. I would like to find an Irish venue to exhibit the Aarhus collages. I’m also at the early stages of a short, experimental animation, for which I received an Arts Council of Ireland award.

Margaret Fitzgibbon lives in Dublin and has a studio in Glencree, County Wicklow.

margaretfitzgibbon.net

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Brenda Moore-McCann: I am struck by the dynamism and ambition of your painting practice in dealing with difficult content that condenses contemporary political events through multiple perspectives. How and when did you decide to address issues of war and conflict in your work?

Claire Halpin: Around 2008, I made the shift from using family photographs as source material in my paintings to newspaper photographs, particularly sites of conflict. I was drawn to media images that echoed the composition of biblical, Renaissance, and Byzantine painting. In 2010 I did a residency in Georgia where my training as an icon painter solidified this new direction in my work. I was visiting sites of the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, which I had painted from newspaper images, and was now visiting in reality – a very real and present history. I had been concerned about personal memory; what is remembered or recorded in family photographs. However, this new work expanded to consider collective memory and history, including the ‘unknown knowns’ and asking: What is true or false? What has been left out? 

As the world becomes smaller with globalised media, surveillance, and efforts to control the narratives surrounding events, these concerns become ever more urgent. I have been preoccupied with major international conflicts, the wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and now Ukraine, and the impact they have had, not only on their own populations but on ours too, and how this plays out in global politics. As an artist, I see it as my responsibility to bear witness to what is happening in our own time and to question why it occurs. 

BMMcC: Your work seems to concern the inherent instability of history and how this is presented, with regard to community, citizens, and human beings. Would you agree? 

CH: Yes, but I am conscious that I am also following a line of enquiry. The media and images I am reading inform the content and form of my paintings. As an artist, I am consciously questioning the history, the narrative, through the crucial act of painting and image making.

BMMcC: The great historian E.H. Carr once observed: “There is no such thing as history, only historians.” What sources do you look to in your research?

CH: I look at news media, documentaries (Adam Curtis, Noam Chomsky…), podcasts on current political thinking, old National Geographics, historical maps, bible stories, and ways of relooking at history (real, imagined, or myth). Sometimes it can be a singular event or image within a conflict, or a controversary that gives me a starting point for a painting. 

BMMcC: In your recent solo exhibition, ‘Augmented Auguries’ at Olivier Cornet Gallery (8 September – 9 October), you are dealing with issues closer to home, like the pandemic and the conflict in Northern Ireland. Is it your first time to do that?

CH: The Towers That Be are two key paintings in this exhibition. I am really struck by the tower building for the annual 12 July celebrations across Northern Ireland – the biblical scale, monumentality, theatrics, pageantry, and effigies. Within the context of falling statues and cultural wars, we consider the futility of building a tower only to burn it down. These paintings reference Bruegel’s Tower of Babel (c. 1563) in which, according to the origin myth, a united human race speaking a single language migrated eastward to Babylon, where they built a towering city with its top in the sky. God, observing the settlement, confounds their language so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world. So yes, these paintings bring us right up to date. 

BMMcC: It’s interesting that you are drawn primarily to the Early Renaissance, adapting both the diptych format and predella panels in your work. Perhaps these formal devices extend the narrative beyond the immediate present to convey historical, political, and cultural complexities rather than singular points of view?

CH: I find Early Renaissance paintings interesting from a compositional perspective; how narrative elements from different times and spaces can converge within the same picture plane. In some ways, it echoes our current means of consuming media or news feeds across multiple screens. Within the modular format of the diptychs, there is the potential to rearrange, reconfigure, or change the dominant narrative.

BMMcC: Has the rigour and discipline of your training been deployed in your own painting? Can you discuss the shift in technique for this exhibition?

CH: My training as an icon painter definitely made me a better painter of fine detail. I found that slowing down the process, and the practice of building up image and surface through fine brushwork using tiny sable brushes, helped a lot. With the recent paintings, I have attempted to respond in a more immediate way through a loosening of the handling of the paint, allowing a movement and blurring on the gessoed surface – a slight shift from the heavily worked and complex compositions of my previous ‘Jigmap’ series. The ever-evolving process of painting, applying brush to surface…mark-making.

This is an abbreviated version of conversations recorded at Talbot Studios, Dublin, in summer 2022. ‘Augmented Auguries’ ran at Olivier Cornet Gallery from 8 September to 9 October.

oliviercornetgallery.com

Claire Halpin is a visual artist, curator and arts educator based in Dublin.

clairehalpin2011.wordpress.com

@clairehalpinartist

Dr Brenda Moore-McCann is an art historian, author and art critic, based between Dublin and Tuscany.

@brendamooremcann

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