Clare Arts

Born in Fossa, Killarney, O’Connor studied at NCAD, Dublin and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and the Istituto Statale D’Arte in Urbino, Italy on Irish and Italian government scholarships. She has exhibited extensively in Ireland at the RHA, EVA, Oireachtas and Iontas as well as arts festivals such as Beara and Smaointe na Sceilge and contemporary galleries such as the Lavit Gallery Cork, the Doswell Gallery, the Hunt Museum, Limerick and the Source Arts Centre, Thurles. Her work has also been exhibited and published in Italy. She was the founder and director of a contemporary commercial arts space in the Ballycasey House Gallery from 1984-1989. Since the 1990s O’Connor has collaborated regularly with Waterville poet Paddy Bushe and her work has also featured in many Dedalus Press publications. She now lives and works from her studio in Dovea, Co. Tipperary.

The connection between the body and the earth seems to speak out from these paintings. There is a cross current of stress, not in the negative sense of overwrought, but in the positive sense of a force through which transformation can occur. The kind of stress which holds you up and allows you to grow.

Professor Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Founding Director, Irish World Music Centre, and former Chairman of Culture Ireland

Catriona O’Connor’s paintings of the west coast of Ireland are cold to the bone and are correctly Atlantean in feeling. The greys, browns and blues of her watered-colours evoke an atmosphere only present in Ireland; the meeting of northern and southern worlds through the European Irish eye. This is the world of the primitive, of ancient conquest and discovery and of the true nature of the Irish who have been through history holistic, refusing to reduce experience into separate parts.

Samuel Walsh, Artist and Art Critic