A return to painting in 2014 led to a collaborative engagement 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 with The Gallery Press.

The Horizons works were created using digitally modified found images, traced and layered multiple times onto paper. This created a map-like web of abstract shapes, where the originals become hidden in a forest of post-representational visual noise. Painted using a colour map theorem, to ensure no two adjacent colours are the same. This systematic approach renders 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 any depth perception and diminishing aesthetic choices to chance encounters.” Images used include drawings based on screensavers, nature camouflage, 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

Sarah Iremonger

Sarah Iremonger