2014 saw a return to painting and the development of collaborative work, Horizons with poet Derek Mahon (1941-2020), a prose piece and poem were published as part of the collections 'Olympia and the Internet' 2017 and 'Against The Clock' 2018 by The Gallery Press.

This work is a response to the death of the image and the post-representational transcendental turn brought about by crisis in a climate-changing world. Haunted by the history and context of painting, I devise a systematic approach based on a colour map theorem where no two adjacent colours are the same; rules are established to organise what colours will be used and where and how they will be painted, undermining any possibility of self-expression and confusing the figure-ground dichotomy creating a non-hierarchical colour distribution - a transcendental mathematics in the borderlands of the digital and craft. The results are reminiscent of AI-generated camouflage designs, where the image is hidden in a forest of visual noise. “I am like a one-eyed ambient robot crawling across the surface of the painting, eradicating any depth perception and diminishing aesthetic choices to chance encounters.” Images used include drawings based on screensavers, nature camouflages, photographs of Cork Harbour, Skellig Michael, Star Wars and the works of painters James Arthur O'Connor 1792-1841, George Barret 1728-1774 and Piet Mondrian 1872-1944.

A development into digital media sees drawings from Horizons transformed into digital 3-D landscapes with the help of Net Artist Daniel Murray, exploring ideas of situationlessness, presented in the paper The Lady of the Lake is Hiding in the Expanded Field at the ‘2nd Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland’, UCC, June 2024.

This work includes a public participation project, Build Your Own Horizon/BYOH developed for Bealtaine Festival and Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, 2022, exhibited at 'Fragments in Constellation' with Re:Group for the Skibbereen Arts Festival, 2022; exhibited at 'Coalescence' The Lavit Gallery Cork, 2024 and ‘Press Play’ Oliver Sears Gallery Dublin, 2019; and was funded through a Cork County Council Arts Grants Scheme Award, 2015.

Also see Texts Cantos-Open Horizons, both 2024

Sarah Iremonger

Sarah Iremonger