Mairead O’Eocha’s latest series of oil paintings explore the time-honoured genre of flower painting, writes Donal Maguire.
Painting as learning‚’, Mairead O’Eocha asserts; a wonderfully succinct simile expressing her methodology and conceptual approach to making art. For O’Eocha, painting is a process through which information can be filtered, synthesized and clarified in the course of forming a better understanding of a subject or an idea. In her latest series of work, recently exhibited at Mother’s Tankstation, the subject of her focus and study is flowers. This is not in a botanical sense but rather in the pictorial visualization of flowers, and the social and cultural connotations of flower painting in the history of western art.
Mark Ewart visits the studio of Allihies-based artist Rachel Parry who transforms natural matter into mesmerizing art.
Kim Haughton’s portraits, on view now at the National Museum Collins Barracks, reflect on Ireland’s multi-layered society at the end of the first century of this nation state, writes Stephanie McBride
