Olivia Henchy is a visual mixed media artist from Co. Clare. Her work is at the intersection between landscape and abstraction and she takes inspiration from the the coastal landscape around where she lives.
Having graduated from LSAD in 1998 with BA hons degree in graphic design, her early career and her training in composition, colour and proportion is still very much evident in her work today as a fine art painter. Working as a graphic designer for over a decade and then raising a family, Olivia converted her tourist accommodation business during the pandemic, into an art studio when she decided to return to painting full time.
Her paintings are abstracted deconstructed landscapes. They suggest an interplay between fragility and resilience, the precarious relationship between man and the landscape, past and present. Delicate lines meet resilient geometric forms, soft veils of colour sweep over flat pigment structures built up from many layers of acrylic, pastel, collage, and oil to create a sense of atmosphere.
Her work explores the persistent circle of life amongst a resilient yet fragile landscape and looks at our relationship with nature, past and present. Spending much of her time by the coast throughout the year provides Olivia with a visual stimulation that always seems to make its way back to her studio.
She starts on a blank canvas with mark making and collage, gradually introducing brushstrokes taking inspiration from the physicality of the process itself, the burying and unearthing, the building up and scraping back, revealing what lies beneath. The process somewhat mirrors what nature itself does to the landscape. Eroded surfaces reveal themselves through a history of layers intending to draw the viewer into a sense of place within our landscape.
Selected for group exhibitions in The Courthouse Gallery Clare, Outset Gallery Galway, Narrow Space Tipperary and the Art Riddler exhibition Studio 10 Dublin, Olivia continues to exhibit in galleries widely throughout the country.