On this Episode, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Artist Orla Whelan.
Orla Whelan is a visual artist whose practice is rooted in painting. Her approach is to consider the visual language and materials of the medium as tools to reimagine contemporary possibilities for transcendence. She is motivated by an existential anxiety, and a belief that abstraction is a viable means to address metaphysical uncertainties. In addition to oil paint on linen, she uses non-traditional painting materials which refer to the materiality and tropes of painting.
These expanded forms include: wood veneers on panel, painted plywood wedges, modified furniture, colour pencil on paper and site responsive interventions that speak to the history and architecture of particular spaces. Orla frequently explores the role of writing within visual art practice by creating different author identities and experimental texts that challenge ideas of subjectivity, authorship and meaning.
Her current exhibition Coloured into Shapecontinues to12th October 2024 at Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin. Recent solo exhibitions include Coloured by Weather at Custom House Gallery, Westport (2024) Glas, Gorm, Uaine at the Pearse Museum OPW, Dublin (2023), Magnum Chaos at Hillsboro Fine Art (2023), and I Don’t Need Anything From Here (magic-carpet-painting) at the RHA Gallery (2022). In 2021, Orla took part in Dubliners – The 6th Biennial of Painting in Zagreb, Croatia, in association with Pallas Projects.
Her work is held in the collections of The Arts Council of Ireland, The Crawford Art Gallery, The OPW State Art Collection, Trinity College Dublin, The Merrion Hotel, Kelly’s Hotel and private collections worldwide. Orla is founder and director of AtHomeStudios – a collective of visual artists working from studios based in their own homes, and the art publishing project Whale Dust. She lives in and works in Dublin, Ireland.
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