Ciara Roche

Ciara Roche is a painter who lives very close to Cow House Studios. She makes very small and sometimes large paintings. Her representational paintings are made in the wet-on-wet technique and no brush mark is wasted – paint is mopped around wet and thick, ridges of paint delineating lines and forms – somehow creating a three-dimensional world through the texture of the applied paint. Through use of colour and its application, light becomes an almost tangible thing – daubs of bright paint are flicked around to create an eerie, too shiny world. Her paintings are of perfectly staged environments, in the past, places of retail and more recently nowhere places like hotel bedrooms, pubic bathrooms and car parks, places that could be anywhere and nowhere. Then she makes paintings of uneasy domestic scenes, at first they appear real but they are not real – often based on film stills or found imagery, visual clues provided through use of staged lighting, intensity of colour and that off kilter feeling that something is not quite right.

Selected exhibitions include in - Purdy Hicks Gallery (UK), Greystone Industries (UK) Glucksman (IRL), VISUAL (IRL), Rathfarnham Castle (IRL), Selasar Sunaryo (IDN) and solo shows in Ireland in Royal Hibernian Academy, mother’s tankstation gallery, The Lab Gallery, Lismore Castle Arts and upcoming in Butler Gallery.

ciararoche.com