Image: Build Your Own Horizon / Kinsale, 2020 prototype cutout, ink on paper, 10 x 29cm

This website represents more than thirty years of Sarah Iremonger's visual art and writing practice; from the first oil paintings in the early 1990s, to the conceptualisation of the work in the late 1990s, a site-specific multi-media approach through the 2000s, a return to painting in 2014, and recent developments in text-based and digital artwork.

Iremonger is a visual artist who makes art and writes to explore the nature of being and consciousness, to feel a sense of belonging and connectedness to the world, the amazing cosmic wonder that is life and the real threat to that life we are facing and how we can turn this around by embracing the unknown and the unknowable.

Based in Kinsale, Co. Cork, Ireland, early work consists of large, abstract paintings that express a presence with epic implications. Later work employed a pan-disciplinary approach to ideas about representation, while recent work serves as a meditation on the post-representational turn towards a re-enchantment of the world.

Recent work

Cantos: Thinking Vessels and Open Horizons are text-based works that use notebooks collected over ten years as found text reframed in the style of 'The Cantos of Ezra Pound', as an epic, non-rhyming, stream-of-consciousness, prose poem, where thought processes are exposed as a kind of self-portrait, exploring ideas about creating, aesthetics, art, painting, expression, being, politics and representation through times of inspiration self-doubt and trauma. Cantos traces the development of ideas that led to the Vessels and Horizons painting projects and includes The Cosmic Handbook, a guide for accidental cosmic transcendentalism. The notebooks were started as a dialogue with poet Derek Mahon and continued after he died in 2020. They are conceived as visual written documents comprising short paragraphs, sentences, lists and quotes. The idea for this work came about after reading  'Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age', by Kenneth Goldsmith. Derek’s copy of Joseph Joubert has kept me company, and Lydia Davis’s Essays have constantly inspired me throughout the process.

Build Your Own Horizon public participation artwork was created as part of the Bealtaine Artist in Residence program for Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Co. Cork, in association with Cork County Council and exhibited with Re:Group at 'Fragments in Constellation', the O'Driscoll building for the Skibbereen Arts Festival 2022. This artwork involved a drawing workshop where participants made drawings of the horizons through the windows at Uillinn, WCAC. Uillinn is situated in the centre of Skibbereen town, a contemporary building rising four floors above the town, providing panoramic views of the town on several levels. The work explored the horizon as a constantly shifting, ephemeral idea dependent on the perspective or situation of the viewer. A situationless situatedness! The drawings were transformed into 1000+ cardboard cut-out horizons, installed and added to throughout the exhibition at the O'Driscoll Building in Skibbereen.

Vessels 2019-22 is a series of paintings developed through the pandemic, conceived as a visual thought experiment using the Venn Diagram to establish a self-directed, systematic approach to making paintings that "generates the thing to be done" (Catherine Harty 2021). Exploring the history of vessels, seven basic shapes were chosen from Turkey, Iran, North America, Sudan, Thailand, Pakistan and Syria, for their simplicity, multi-time, multi-national and geo-political implications. Reducing them to silhouettes and superimposing them on top of each other to create Venn Diagrams and the illusion of layers through colour juxtaposition. This work was conceived through a post-representational thinking process using diagrams that interact with the world rather than representing it, opening the possibility of a different kind of engagement with the world. The colours have been selected to represent colour separations.

“It is clear that the interplay between these vessels, which represent such a broad expanse of geography, politics, and time, is an examination of multiculturalism, how cultures evolve, influence each other or even remain isolated. As the series evolves, the works become increasingly complicated until the artist sets aside her rigid parameters. Individual colours are still visible but as fragments rather than blocks; colours as federalism ceding from nation states, perhaps.” (Oliver Sears 2022)

More work
Solipsism Series was exhibited at Macroom Town Hall, Co. Cork, as part of the ‘World View of An Oyster’ exhibition curated for Cork County Council, 2013. In this series, printed digital artworks based on 19th-century maritime paintings of Cork Harbour by George Mounsey Wheatly Atkinson and Cork landscape by 18th-century artists Nathaniel Grogan and John Butts, were digitally manipulated to remove their subject matter, the ships and the people, changing the focus of attention to their backgrounds creating the possibility for a different reading of the images away from the solipsistic humancentric towards a non-human reading.

Landscape Unions include the Desert, Mountain, and River Unions. Desert Union was exhibited at The Guesthouse, Cork, 2011 as part of 'Worlds End'. It was a multimedia installation using photography, video, text, lights, and smoke. Landscape Unions explore the positioning of power over nature and how this is influenced by historical colonial perspectives reflected in painting. Here, the land acquires agency and asserts its autonomy, attempting to fight back by forming landscape unions.

The Hunting Box Party was shown at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, 2005, the Knoll Gallery, Vienna, Austria 2010, the Knoll Gallery, Budapest, Hungary 2011, The Armoury Gallery, Sydney Olympic Stadium, Australia 2011, and the Emmanuel Walderdorff Gallery, Molsberg, Westerwald, Germany 2021. Using video, painted murals, badges and greeting cards to explore the idea of the artwork as an ephemeral dematerialised object in the form of paraphernalia for a political party for hunting boxes and concerned with the seat of power about nature and non-human spheres.

The Travels of Eugen von Guérard shown at allerArt, Bludenz, Austria, 2011 and Sirius Arts Centre, Co. Cork, 2012, examined how nineteenth-century Austrian/Australian artist Eugen von Guérard exported a specific Eurocentric vision of landscape to Australia. This work explores the ephemeral nature of artwork through temporary installations imbued with meaning and shows how ideas about nature are a construct. It included found objects, photography, text and a painted mural to confound fact and fiction, past and present and the nature of understanding reality.

In the exhibition, I thought I dreamed of you at the West Cork Arts Centre 2009-10, fake documentation of a nonexistent mural in the exhibition space, which took the form of a drawing on a photograph of the exhibition space. This was exhibited alongside a similar mural in the space, creating slippage and dislocation of space and time, fact and fiction, confounding reality. Other work in the exhibition consisted of photography, a photo album, video, neon, drawings, display cases and badges. Can we be sure reality exists? Is it a dream, a series of thoughts? I thought I dreamed of you presented a series of fragmented realities exposing the illusion at the heart of perception through a series of post-modern possibilities. The title of the exhibition explores the idea of ‘I’ as a thinking presence, while ‘dreamed’ questions the nature of reality constantly in flux, ‘you’ is experienced in terms of an existential quandary of the other, questioning how we understand ourselves through others and the world around us.

Past work

Upside-down Mountains is an artwork situated in the foyer of the Northside Civic Centre, Coolock, Dublin, installed in 2003. This work consists of two landscapes, one in blue neon and the other painted on the wall. The landscapes are based on drawings of Connemara by George Petrie (1790-1866); engravings of his work were used to illustrate guidebooks to Ireland published in the 1820s, when tourism first became a feature of Irish life and economy. Some of Petrie's drawings have been turned upside-down, transforming them into reflections and suggestive of valleys, while the blue light of the neon animates the wall painting. This work explores ideas of abstraction and representation, past and present, juxtaposed as symbols of Irish society.

Upside-down Mountains was also part of a collaborative project with Peter Murray and was exhibited as an installation in the Research and Process room at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, for the ‘George Petrie‘ exhibition in 2004. The installation consisted of a wall painting, video, photographs, reproductions of prints, photocopied research documents, and an interactive public participation area. The video and photographs followed a revisiting of the sites in Connemara that the artist had drawn in the nineteenth century.

Lumpy Art History was exhibited at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin, 2001 and the Turku Art Museum, Finland, 2003. In Turku, the exhibition was a response to the work of 19th-century Finnish artist Matilda Rotkirch. The exhibition was held in two adjoining rooms of the exhibition (Studios) and expressed a sense of exaggerated romanticism. Rotkirch’s notebook sketches were transformed into vast, cold landscapes as murals exploring ideas of the sublime and alienation.

White Landscape and White History were shown at EV&A, Limerick City Art Gallery, 2002. These works are a response to the history of painting, post-colonial racism and the role history painting has played in perpetuating the dominance of the white male gaze.

Developing a multimedia approach in 2002 to explore the way the site affects meaning, attempting different kinds of engagement through site-specific installations. The Top Half of the Hero at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork 2002, for example, had images of the gallery space and hidden office spaces reproduced and included as part of the exhibition in the form of drawn murals and photographs. This created a dislocation between space and meaning, creating a heightened awareness of the site.

Early work

The conceptualisation of my practice towards the end of the '90s changed how I approached my central concern. Nothing & the quandary of painting the work became research-based and explored how context shapes meaning. I became fascinated with the idea of representation as subject matter instead of a means to an end.

Early paintings from the 1990s consisted of large oil paintings aimed at capturing an indefinable presence, with epic implications. Depicting representations of space and light on a flat surface in layers of dark oil paint, walls, windows, and doorways created the illusion of space on the picture plane. Later versions dissolved and heightened awareness of the surface through layers of luminous dark oil colours on canvas.

Sarah Iremonger 2025