Presence brings together the work of six artists from north Clare and south Galway who primarily focus on painting. Through the language of abstraction and figuration the fetured works address elements of landscape and abstraction alongside the immediacy of contemporary social issues. Each artist has a unique approach to the materiality of paint and an acute engagement with the painting process. In particular, colour forms a unifying framework, building a dialogue between abstraction and figuration.

Embodied in the title of the exhibition, Presence asks us to consider the question of space. The lived space of the Burren and its surrounding environs, the abstract representation of imagined space within painting that invites speculation, and the harsher contemporary reality of space in terms of displacement and forms of sociological control. Paint as a language that remains vital and malleable, caught as it is between freedom and control, binds the plurality of this subject matter. In the hands of each of these artists the power of paint remains fluid and transformative, a dynamic vehicle for building narrative, exploring and questioning the world around us.

Finola Graham is a painter. Born in Limerick in 1945, she now lives and works between Fanore, Co. Clare in Ireland and Paris, France. Her approach to the techniques of painting, drawing and mosaic has been informed by her studies and practice in Paris from the 1960’s through to the 1970’s, alongside the likes of Nicolas Wacker and Ricardo Licata. Having made the Burren in County Clare home for the majority of the last forty five years, it is primarily since the turn of the century that its wildness, its light and above all its sense of space have become fully embedded in her painting. The frequent sea mists and the white light refracted from the limestone have become elemental in her approach to the canvas. This, along with the addition of more fragile materials and processes, has come to define her most recent works. While earlier works were rich in saturated colour and focused to a greater degree on interior spaces, Finola’s emotive line and raw style is recognisable as her own throughout her career. This line has become even more pronounced in her latest bodies of work as colour is stripped back and the line between interior and exterior dissolves.

Whilst often treading the vacillating line between figurative work and abstraction these are paintings born of intense feeling and emotion. An early work, Lemons I, provides a good example of a core aspect of her practice – the barely visible step from one colour to another demanding those attuned to its pitch to look longer and more intensely. This, initially unconscious, expression of a gradual shift of feeling can be seen as having become intrinsic to her work and is at play in the pieces on show in the BCA; pieces that are born of an impulse to break against authority and play against societal secrecies. On a technical level, her work with the canvas, – stretching and preparing with rabbit skin glue, the grinding and blending of pigments through to the last brushstroke – are integral elements in this transition of feeling from painter to viewer. The ongoing conversation is live and should the viewer wish to access it, there is a true vibrancy even in the palest hues, blending the personal with the universal while maintaining fragments of hope. Finola has exhibited widely in Europe and her work is to be found in private collections in Europe, the Americas, Japan and New Zealand.

www.finolagraham.com  

Milk I, (2024-25) 102 x 102cm, oil on linen and dry pastel

Mary Queally is a native of Caherlistrane, Co. Galway and now lives in Craughwell, where she works out of her purpose built studio. She graduated from the Cork College of Art with a Teaching Degree in Art (Hons) in 1974. Mary taught art at Post Primary School level for 35 years while occasionally executing commissions in screen printing and as Art Examiner with the Department of Education and Science. She was a founding member of the Claremorris Open Exhibition. Since retiring from teaching Mary has concentrated on painting and attended many weekend workshops in The Newline Studios, Kinvara and Advanced Abstract Painting courses in The Burren Art College, directed by Rita Wobbe.

Mary would describe her work as organic abstraction: “It is process based and I have no preconceived idea before I begin a painting. I don’t use direct references such as photographs and drawings. My work draws from memory so that the totality of the experience is reflected… the seeing plus the feelings. These pieces could be described as personal inscapes”. Recently Mary has become drawn by the power of colour to express space…. drawing with flat washes of colour and not with line and playfully breaking up the space with a rhythmic, lyrical dance of form. This allows for the spontaneous dialogue of opposites such as form and formless, dark and light, cold and warm. For the most part Mary allows the advance and recession, the push and pull of colours to take her on an excavation, quest/adventure into the possibilities of getting to the essence of space, matter and energy.

Subterranean, (2025), 80 x 80cm, mixed media

Through her teens and young adulthood Diana loved making ceramics, working with her hands and the alchemical process of firing and waiting for the pieces to emerge. While raising her children she lost touch with that form of creativity. Later in life, she rediscovered it through Rita Wobbe’s workshops. Rita introduced Diana to abstract painting, and it helped reignite her creative spark. She loves the freedom to explore form, texture and colour, in ways that are personally meaningful. Her inspiration comes from the beautiful natural landscapes of the Burren, and its surrounding coast.

Diana Rock

Kristy Verenga is an experimental artist who uses painting and sculpture to build the world that she calls home. These abstract and symbolic narratives are an expression of her daily experience. She combines media to explore the question (Who Am I ?) which has been an essential investigation for years. She uses oil paint on a wax ground and sometimes a texture like sand but also lets the drawing remain visible as part of the dynamic whole. She makes her own paper clay for the sculpture, which process emerged as a pandemic palliative.  The images in her work are both playful and expressive of this interior dialogue.  

Nesting (2025), 100 x 76cm, oil on canvas

Rita Wobbe is a German-born artist who has been living in Kinvara for more than 30 years. She studied Fine Art and English at Muenster University and also at Limerick School of Art & Design where she completed her studies with an MA in Fine Art in 2000. Rita is a practicing artist and has exhibited in Ireland, Germany, The Netherlands, and Lanzarote. In her purpose built studio near Kinvara she has been giving workshops in Abstract Painting for many years, linked to the Burren College of Art with Summer Workshops in Abstract Painting. She is known as an abstract painter who was influenced by the work of Tony O’Malley, Gillian Ayres, Patrick Scott, Sean Scully …

Around 2012 her focus changed, and a number of paintings concerned with female issues such as ‘the silent woman’, ‘women beside wallpaper’, ‘the bride’, ‘objects with their eyes wide open’… developed. In her current work she explores different social themes that are publicly discussed at present. Topics like the displacement of people all over the world, the question of immigration and integration into another country, the longing for a better world, women carrying a social stigma in society…

The possibilities for painting and its way of carrying human voice seems endless to her and well worth exploring…

Men in Blue Suits (2025) 100 x 80cm, acrylic on canvas 

Fiona Woods is an artist based in Clare. For much of her career she has worked as a socially engaged artist, and as a cultural producer of public art projects and programmes. She has recently returned to painting.

“My current work examines how the intangible architectures of patriarchy and capitalism enmesh the bodies of children and animals. I draw critically on the history of European painting as an archive of that systemic capture. 

AI technology represents a patriarchal-capitalist apparatus in the extreme. In the first months after the launch of Open AI I conducted experiments using a variety of prompts related to capitalism, climate crisis, financialisation and art history to generate images of children and animals. The resulting digital images possess an uncanny quality, often with sexual, violent and racist undertones.

This set of new works takes a selection of the images from those early experiments and renders them faithfully as oil paintings on gessoed wood panels. The act of material translation decompresses the digital images, which dissolve slightly on close inspection. The exact words used to generate each image are scratched into the surface. 

The works convey an uneasy fascination with the capacities of this technology, its capitalist sublime. They reflect on the condition of art-making in this moment.”

Woods has carried out commissions and research residencies in Australia, Canada, Ecuador, Ireland, Lithuania, Sweden, Turkey, the UK and the US. Her public art project, Walking Silvermines, is part of the Arte Util archive initiated by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera.

Her arts practice-based PhD was completed through the Technological University Dublin. She is a lecturer at Limerick School of Art & Design.

        baroque children capitalism racialised birds (2025), 330 x 330mm, oil on gesso on wood panel