Sarah Iremonger
Image: Kaleidoscope Vessels / multiple countries and times 2021, watercolour on paper, 38 x 29 cm

This website spans more than thirty years of Sarah Iremonger's visual art practice, from the first paintings in the early 1990s to the conceptual work of the late 1990s, a site-specific multi-media approach in the 2000s and a return to painting in 2014.

Sarah Iremonger's work utilizes photography, murals, painting, drawing, badges, cards, digital media, video and neon.  Based in Kinsale, Co. Cork, Ireland, early work consisted of painting and was embedded in romantic and modernist traditions, with epic implications. Later works attempted to attain a kind of entanglement with the world through site-specific installations. These works explored representation and how as a hangover of the romantic tradition, a scenario of separation from the world around us, and each other has been perpetuated. A recent return to painting focuses on the appropriation and adaptation of found images and a return to core issues around the illusion of perception. These works place subject matter and personal artistic expression in the background so that visual signifiers become hidden in a forest of jewel-like post-representational camouflage.

'My work seems to me, in retrospect, to be an exploration of method. The early work of dark paintings gathered an intention towards capture. The capture of a quality of light and feeling through a particular process of laying down paint. This process revealed itself as a method that could be duplicated for its own sake and ended in a cul-de-sac of single-coloured panels of beautiful and mood-instigating paint that could be replicated endlessly.
 
In an attempt to overcome this ‘dead-end’, I let ideas of representation and politics flood the work and opened it up to new material and nonmaterial possibilities.
 
A recent return to painting has focused on exploring and expanding the possibilities of didactic processes. Processes glimpsed in my early work and through repetition were perceived as a hindrance to linear developmental progress in the creation of awe, it timed out. Now the work consciously follows carefully chosen rules set out by external processes pushing them to extremes and embracing method as the subject matter. This creates a lot of noise in the work, mirroring the digital storm we find ourselves embedded in today.'


To view recent work contact Oliver Sears Gallery www.oliversearsgallery.com
+353 (0)1 6449459 / 33 Fitzwilliam St Upper, Dublin 2, Ireland