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

What is it to be here? How do you represent that experience? What are the implications for representation in the face of today's crisis? A world facing climate change and extinction. My work investigated the loss of the world through the loss of the visual world, particularly painting, and the shattering of preconceived ideas about the image.

I make art and write to create a place where I can exist honestly and vulnerably, explore the nature of being and consciousness, dispel feelings of irrelevance and cultural ambiguity, and feel a sense of belonging and connectedness to the world.

Recent work

Cantos: Thinking Vessels 2023 and Open Horizons 2024 are text-based artworks that use notebooks collected between 2014 and 2024 as found text reframed in the style of The Cantos of Ezra Pound as an epic, non-rhyming, stream-of-consciousness, prose poem, where unmediated thought processes are exposed as a kind of self-portrait, exploring ideas about the act of creating, aesthetics, art, painting, expression, being, politics and representation through times of inspiration self-doubt and trauma. Cantos traces the development of ideas about process and reality, which led to the Vessels and Horizons painting projects and includes The Cocmic Handbook, a guide for accidental transcendentalism. The notebooks were started as a dialogue with poet Derek Mahon and continued after he died in 2020. They were conceived as visual, written documents comprising short paragraphs, sentences, lists and quotes. The idea for this work came about after reading Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith, who introduced me to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. 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 2022 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.

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 conceived through a post-representational thinking process using diagrams that interact with the world rather than represent it as a means for realisation, 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 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)

More 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 at The Guesthouse, Cork, in 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 in relation to 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 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, 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.

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, faked 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 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.

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.

Early work

"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."

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