​Do we only see with our eyes, or the passing of time?  Or with our senses, touching, listening, feeling.  Trusting the earth to hold you in its gravitational force.  The water to lap you.  The state to protect you, the mask to shield you, the family to embrace you.  Cocooning in peace yet aware of the chaos;  Fake News, Femicide, Floyd, political distrust, children and partners trapped in abusive households, tower blocks of cement and no escape, frontline workers exposed and frazzled ...talk of lives lost as collateral damage...and you... witness it all, waiting for some lens of clarity. 

 

Hidden away from others, wrapped in a blanket of your own fashioning, your safe house, fortress from the masses, fashioned by your own making, painting, gardening, baking, walking by the quiet lake...grateful, safe, separate… yet still in witness, not yet knowing what will be the outcome, the end date, or even what it all means!  Oh for twenty: twenty vision, for the clarity that might come in hindsight!

 

Niamh O’Connor is a Dublin born visual artist working from rural Co. Monaghan in non-objective abstraction, she is a painter, printmaker and sometimes sculptor, favoring acrylic, mixed media and encaustic, she has exhibited both nationally and internationally and is privately collected extensively.

 

“TWENTY: TWENTY...vision”, is a series of new works that derive inspiration from lockdown, this entire collection sees O’Connor return to a pure painting practice, acrylic, mixed media on large canvas and paper, from reeds and rushes to revolt and resurgence, she has been inspired by her locked down limited movement, and global news stream, feeding into her subconscious, and expressed by her gestural marks and multi-layered approach.   

 

Delving into experiences of isolation and cocooning, abstracted lake bed walks, and critical social commentary, she expresses the juxtaposition between personal safety and solitude and the extending global unrest during this pandemic through her work, further expanding on her interest in asemic mark-making, stream of consciousness thinking, and the art of creative expressionism itself.