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

Statement

Present work

Cantos is a text-based artwork that uses visual art notebooks collected over 30 years as found text reframed in the style of The Cantos of Ezra Pound as an epic, non-rhyming, stream-of-consciousness, prose poem, which explores the thought processes of creating, where the mind wanders in and out and around its subject-matter through times of inspiration, self-doubt and trauma. Cantos-Thinking Vessels traces the development of ideas about process and reality which led to the Vessels paintings, here the text is presented as a conceptual writing artwork.

Recent Work

Vessels 2019-22 is a series of paintings developed through the pandemic, conceived as a visual thought experiment that uses Venn Diagrams to establish a self-directed internal logic as a systematic approach to making paintings. It explores the history of vessels and how their shapes change through time revealing specific cultural identities. Reducing them to silhouettes, seven basic shapes were chosen from Turkey, Iran, North America, Sudan, Thailand, Pakistan and Syria superimposing them on top of each other to suggest Venn Diagrams creating the illusion of layers through colour juxtaposition. The vessels have been chosen because of their multi-time, multi-national and geo-political implications.

 
This work has been done in a post-representational thought process using diagrams that interact with the world rather than represent it as source material, opening the possibility of a different kind of engagement with the world. The colour has been selected to represent colour separations. The framework holding the colour, and the layered silhouettes of the vessels, resemble Venn diagrams which use a self-directed approach to making images that "generates the thing to be done". (Catherine Harty 2021)

“It is clear that the interplay between these vessels which represent such a broad expanse of geography, politics and time is, itself an examination of multi-culturalism; 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)

Build Your Own Horizon public participation artwork, 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 2022 and exhibited with Re:Group at 'Fragments in Constellation' at the O'Driscoll building for Skibbereen Arts Festival 2022. This project involved a drawing workshop where participants made drawings of the horizons through the windows at Uillinn. 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 constantly shifting and ephemeral, depending on the perspective or situation of the viewer. A situationless situatedness! The drawings were turned into 1000 cardboard cut-out horizons and installed at the O'Driscoll Building in Skibbereen.

Past work
Solipsism Series was exhibited at Macroom Town Hall, Co. Cork 2013 as part of the ‘World View of an Oyster’ exhibition curated for Cork County Council. 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 as part of 'Worlds End' at The Guesthouse, Cork 2011 consisting of a multimedia installation using photography, video, text, lights and smoke. Landscape Unions explores the positioning of power in relation to nature, and how this is influenced by historical colonial perspectives reflected in painting. Here nature attempts to fight back, acquire agency and rights by forming landscape unions.

The Hunting Box Party 2005-2021 was shown at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork in 2005, the Knoll Gallery, Vienna, Austria 2010, the Knoll Gallery, Budapest, Hungary 2011, The Armory Gallery, Sydney Olympic Stadium, Australia 2011 and the Emmanuel Walderdorff Gallery, in 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 in relation to nature and non-human spheres.

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

In the exhibition I thought I dreamed of you at the West Cork Arts Centre 2009-10 faked documentation of a nonexistent painted mural in the exhibition space took the form of a drawing on a photograph of the exhibition space. This was exhibited alongside an existing similar mural in the same space creating a 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.

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 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 made drawings of 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 Finish artist Matilda Rotkirch, the exhibition was held in two adjoining rooms to 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.

Early work
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.

"The conceptualisation of my practice towards the end of the '90s changed how I approached my central concern 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." (Sarah Iremonger 2014)

Developing a multimedia approach in 2002 to explore the way site affects meaning and 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.

Sarah Iremonger 2024