Visual Art: Stars and Mud an online exhibition by Róisín Ní Neachtain

Róisín Ní Neachtain is an emerging artist whose work demonstrates versatility and includes mainly printmaking and landscape-inspired abstract paintings. Each work is a response to a different landscape and/or emotional state.

Given the climate crisis, the work’s reflection of the environment is of urgent importance to the artist.

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the artist’s paintings have become increasingly expressive. Her work has quickly evolved to a merging of different series and to her use of more energetic mark-making and bolder colours.

The exhibition consists of paintings on a variety of surfaces such as hessian, tarpaulin and cardboard and of smaller works on paper. It marks a departure from her previous work of minimalist paintings, digital art and photography.

While most of the work was painted during the lockdown, it does include some paintings finished in the weeks immediately preceding the outbreak. In including these works, the artist seeks to demonstrate the impact of the pandemic on her work.

The title of the exhibition was taken from the artist’s social media handle. It refers to a poem she wrote last year for Ireland’s National Day of Commemoration (“Words Like Stars”) and to a quote from Hughie O’Donoghue who, when speaking of Van Gogh in an interview with Elephant magazine, said that he was “a touchstone, a real painter, with a sense of the material, the mud that is paint”.

Click here to see the exhibition