Image: Entangled Horizon 2 after 'View of Powerscourt Waterfall' by G. Barret 1760 as a Virtual 3-D Landscape, blender rendered JPEG with Net Artist Daniel Murray, 2023

In 1997, I was walking back to college in Barcelona after dropping my son off at school. I was waiting to cross the road, thinking about art, as you do, when everything became very bright, and I realised there was no separation between my body and the world around me. I remember looking around, wondering if anyone else was aware of this change, then crossing the street and staring at my feet intently, trying to understand that they were the same as the zebra crossing I was walking across. It was very exciting, then faded away. Perception is subjective and interactive; we are touched by what we see, creating the world as it creates us.

Based in Kinsale, Co. Cork, Ireland, early work consisted of large, abstract paintings that expressed a presence with epic implications, the conceptualisation of my work in the 1990s was based on ideas of representation, a site-specific approach through the 2000s explored cultural perceptions, a return to painting in the 2010s looked at fragmentation and recent developments since 2020 include written, textile and digital artwork engaging a pan-disciplinary approach to making artwork exploring an increasingly post-representational technological reality.

Recent work

Cantos: Thinking Vessels and Open Horizons 2014-24 are text-based works documenting the collaboration process between poet Derek Mahon (1941-2020) and I were engaged in during our time together. Starting as a conversation, the notebooks list and document the thought processes and development of the work. The notebooks are treated as found text reframed in the style of 'The Cantos of Ezra Pound', as an epic, non-rhyming, stream-of-consciousness, prose poem, and amount to a kind of self-portrait of thought diary, exploring creativity, aesthetics, art, painting, expression, being, politics and representation through times of inspiration, self-doubt and trauma, and includes The Cosmic Handbook, a guide for accidental cosmic transcendentalism. They comprise short paragraphs, sentences, lists and quotes. (The idea for this work came about after reading  'Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age', by Kenneth Goldsmith. 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 was a 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 and exhibited with Re:Group at 'Fragments in Constellation', the O'Driscoll building for the Skibbereen Arts Festival 2022. This artwork involved a drawing workshop where participants made drawings of the horizons through the windows at Uillinn, WCAC. 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 a constantly shifting, ephemeral idea dependent on the perspective or situation of the viewer. A  situated situationless! The drawings were transformed into 1000+ cardboard cut-out horizons, installed and added to throughout the exhibition at the O'Driscoll Building in Skibbereen.

Vessels 2019-22 is a series of paintings developed through the pandemic, a visual thought experiment using the Venn Diagram to establish a self-directed, systematic approach to making paintings that "generates the thing to be done" (Catherine Harty 2021). Exploring the history of vessels, seven basic shapes were chosen from Turkey 1547 AD, Iran 1190 AD, North America 1000AD, Sudan 3500BC, Thailand 250BC, Pakistan 2500BC and Syria 1287AD, for their simplicity of form, multi-time, multi-national and geo-political implications. Reducing them to silhouettes and superimposing them on top of each other to create abstract patterns and the illusion of layers through colour juxtaposition. The use of diagrams that interact with the world rather than representing it opens the possibility of a different kind of engagement with painting. The colours have been selected to represent colour separations.

“It is clear that the interplay between these vessels, which represent such a broad expanse of geography, politics, and time, is an examination of multiculturalism, 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, as part of the ‘World View of An Oyster’ exhibition curated for Cork County Council, 2013. In this series, printed digital artworks based on photographs of 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, weather is very evident for example, the solipsistic hermetically sealed world of the original painting has been transformed into an experiance of ever expanding surroundings.

The Landscape Unions include the Desert, Mountain, and River Unions. Desert Union was exhibited at The Guesthouse, Cork, 2011 as part of 'Worlds End'. A multimedia installation using photography, video, text, lights, and smoke. The Landscape Unions explored the positioning of power in respect 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 unions.

The Hunting Box Party was shown at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, 2005, the Knoll Gallery, Vienna, Austria 2010, the Knoll Gallery, Budapest, Hungary 2011, The Armoury Gallery, Sydney Olympic Stadium, Australia 2011, and the Emmanuel Walderdorff Gallery, 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 of hunting boxes. This work explores the depraved relationship we have with nature.

The Travels of Eugen von Guérard was shown at allerArt, Bludenz, Austria, 2011 and Sirius Arts Centre, Co. Cork, 2012. The installation examined how nineteenth-century Austrian/Australian artist Eugen von Guérard exported a specific Eurocentric vision of culture to Australia, evidenced by his painting and the founding of art institutions. The ephemeral nature of the artwork included in this installation stands in contrast to the colonial nation-building production of nineteenth-century art. It included found objects, photography, text and a mural, which questioned the nature of historical realities.

In the exhibition, I thought I dreamed of you at the West Cork Arts Centre, 2009-10. 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. 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. Fake documentation of a nonexistent mural in the exhibition space (which took the form of a drawing on a photograph) was exhibited alongside a similar mural in the same space, creating slippage and dislocation of space and time, fact and fiction, confounding reality. Other works in the exhibition included photography, a photo album, video, neon, drawings, display cases, and badges. 

Past work

Upside-down Mountains is an artwork situated in the foyer of the Northside Civic Centre, Coolock, Dublin, installed in 2003. Consisting 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 abstraction and representation, past and present, questioning the development of tourism industries in Ireland.

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 had drawn 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 Finnish artist Matilda Rotkirch. The exhibition was held in two adjoining rooms of the exhibition (Studios) and expressed a sense of exaggerated romanticism. Rotkirch’s notebook sketches were transformed into vast, cold landscapes as temporary murals exploring ideas of the sublime and alienation as fleeting but profound experiences.

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 the site affects meaning. The Top Half of the Hero at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, 2002, had images of the gallery space and the 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, questioning the processes embedded in the gallery space as part of the cultural industry.

Early work

The conceptualisation of my practice towards the end of the '90s changed how I approached my central concern, painting. Nothing & the Quandary of Painting included a visual notebook exploring the nature of thinking about painting. My work became more research-based and explored how context shapes meaning. I became fascinated with the idea of representation as subject matter in itself, instead of as 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 2026