THIS EARTH

Six Artists Respond to the Irish Landscape

AN EXHIBITION OF NEW WORK

By:- Barbara Kenneally, Jacqueline O’Driscoll, Cormac O’Leary, Alison Ospina, Jenny Richardson and Joe Thoma

Curated by Jacqueline O’Driscoll and Claire Bunbury

This six-week summer exhibition at the leading Kenmare Butter Market contemporary art gallery in County Kerry features six artists responding to the theme This Earth.

The work of the six artists varies widely in style and mediums used, but is connected by a strong and shared interest in, and connection to, the natural world.

“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable” – Rainer Maria Rilke

THE ARTISTS

Barbara Kenneally

Barbara Kenneally is a visual artist based in Cork. She has a science background and works in glass and photography. She has a lifelong connection to the Beara peninsula and her glass sculptures are made using moulds from rocks at the abandoned mines in Allihies, County Cork.

Jacqueline O’Driscoll

Jacqueline O’Driscoll’s abstract and semi-abstract work is rooted in the rural landscape of County Kerry. Her textural, many-layered, mixed-media paintings are informed by the colours, forms, weather patterns and history of the earth.

Cormac O’Leary

Cormac O’Leary’s new paintings explore a sense of place, glimpsed and experienced through seasonal change. “I attempt to capture the atmosphere of the landscape I live in and travel through,” he says. “Images are conjured from memory and observation. My paintings are inspired by an emotional as well as visual response to my immediate environment.”

Alison Ospina

Alison Ospina has been designing and making graceful freeform chairs, using locally coppiced hazel, since she moved to West Cork in 1996. Her green-wood forms are led by her materials; “working with the natural shapes and curves of the hazel is a dynamic process – like a conversation between the tree and the chair-maker,” she says.

Jenny Richardson

Jenny Richardson was born in Edinburgh and attended Edinburgh College of Art from 1962 to 1966. She has worked all her life as a painter in Scotland and Ireland, and has made her home on the Beara peninsula of West Cork since 1998. Recently she has been working on a series of watercolours making an inventory of the local flora and fauna.

Joe Thoma

Kenmare-based Joe Thoma is an artist, musician and arts educator. He works mainly in oil and pastels and his vivid, textured paintings reflect his surroundings.