Renowned artist to hold first large-scale museum exhibition in Kilkenny

Wexford-born artist Ciara Roche will hold her first large-scale museum exhibition in Ireland at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny later this month.

This suite of paintings on canvas and paper refer to domestic scenes and public places with source imagery derived from the artist’s own photography, film stills and found imagery. Roche continues to explore representational image-making using wet and quickly applied oil paint to create a sense of luminosity and movement on the surface. The paintings explore places and themes that range from exclusive anonymous hotels to empty 24-hour cafés.

A new language

For this exhibition, Roche has embraced new challenges and created her largest paintings to date. The process, she says, was akin to learning a new language. The paintings were realised by translating her smaller sketchbook sized works onto a substantially larger framework. Figuring out materials and brushes that worked well for this new format took a while to master but the resultant paintings have been achieved with great skill and an acute awareness on how far to push things.

The Late Lounge, Roche’s largest painting to date, is both an interior and a window out to a city scape. We are invited to step into a high end restaurant, or perhaps it is a bar, complete with grand piano, and insulated against what might be happening in a corporate blue city beyond. Glass Table, like many of the paintings on view, presents more questions than answers: who sits here and what schemes are conjured up around this glass table? People are purposely missing from these paintings; the viewer is encouraged to insert themselves into the scene and create their own narrative.

There is frequently an unease in Roche’s paintings, a sort of critique of this hugely capitalistic world we live in.

She is often struck by the dark side of scenarios and says that her solution is ‘to paint those fears, acknowledging the things that might happen, like exploring different versions of my life’.

Light and shadow

Viewing the works in this exhibition is like entering an uncanny world of suspense made up of light and shadow. These lushly rendered paintings, either small or large, capture timeless moments for the viewer to ponder. The rewards are wonderful.

Ciara Roche received her MA Art Research and Collaboration (2019) and a BA in Visual Arts Practice (2015) from the Institute of Art Design and Technology/IADT. Roche is a recipient of the 2022 Next Generation Award, numerous Arts Council & ArtLinks Bursaries and won the Éigse Graduate Prize for outstanding work in VISUAL with Carlow Arts Festival in 2020.

She has had solo exhibitions at the Ashford Gallery, RHA (2022); mother’s tankstation, Dublin (2021); The LAB, Dublin (2019); and St Carthage Hall, Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford (2016).

The exhibition runs at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny from October 12 to December 1.

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