'Why don't you paint horizons?' poet Derek Mahon (1941-2020) asked me in 2014 in response to my early abstract paintings. A collaboration began where a poem and text about horizons were written (by Derek and published as part of the collections 'Olympia and The Internet' 2017 and 'Against The Clock' 2018 with The Gallery Press). I started a series of paintings: Horizons 2014-24 are non-horizons, based on the ephemeral idea of non-existent planes. Channelling painting by numbers and colouring books, they were created using digitally modified found images, traced and layered multiple times onto paper, creating a web of abstract shapes. The originals become hidden in a forest of post-representational visual noise, and are painted using a colour map theorem, ensuring that no two adjacent colours are the same. This systematic approach rendered foreground and background indistinguishable, creating a non-hierarchical colour distribution. "Haunted by the history and context of painting, I establish rules beforehand to organise what colours will be used, where and how, to undermine self-expression. I am like a one-eyed ambient robot crawling across the surface of the painting, eradicating depth perception and diminishing aesthetic choices to chance encounters.” (Sarah Iremonger 2024)

Found images used to create this work 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 2023 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, 2024