Curated by Brenda McParland

Solstice Arts Centre is delighted to present a solo exhibition of ambitious new works for Solstice Café Wall space by local artist Hazel O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan is a mixed media visual artist from Dunshaughlin, County Meath who is currently based in London.  Hazel completed a master’s in fine art at Chelsea College of Arts and has participated in artist residencies at PADA Studios in Lisbon, and Hypha Studios in London. In 2022 Hazel was awarded the Solstice Visual Arts Award, and she is currently participating on a summer artist residency at Good Eye Projects in London.

From bakelite clock-radios, space-age ovens, kitchen units and Irish fabrics, Hazel takes inspiration from an anachronistic collection of household situations to form liminal space as a reflection upon questions regarding identity. By evoking a sense of longing for a bygone era, the work encourages the viewer to think more deeply about the emotional resonance of the things we surround ourselves with, and the ways in which nostalgia can shape or distort our relationship with our own identity. By transforming the familiar into something uncanny and surreal, Hazel challenges the viewer’s assumptions about what is real and what is imagined.

Harvest Gold  

Hazel O’Sullivan machines horizons.

From green fields to city centres, from Portugal to Berlin, Dublin, to London and back again before turning up somewhere else this is an artist on the move, swiftly transiting between systems her work takes wing.

She can turn time into space. This is an artist who can animate the old even the dead. Patterns are put to work. Eccentric, funny and matter-of-fact dia­gram worlds are indicated rather than universally given. As we fall we read our place in their surprising stillness. Partial and on the move: This is an artist who knows her own time is out of time.

Shop window as screen is a kind of turnaround, the ideal kitchen slips out of grasp and out of fashion, wryly everything touched is a project to bring everything back again: all at once. Superficiality and heavy metallic polish grind and it isn’t so much that the perfection projected collapses as she is able to fix its disappearance and put it to work anew with a smile.

Her work plays with time, sometime ultra-thin memorial, sometimes beat group avatar, oftentimes elusive and mysterious. Always nostalgia is put in motion and turned around. Nothing is real and yet a thin veneer sideswipes us into lost depths, spinning us reaching for the safety of something like a kitch­en counter or a brand new gravestone, or that tempting pub nook playlist.

In painterly terms light and shadow are engineered, there’s an engaging dark­ness at odds with the clarity of her mock sculptural syntax. Her work has the ability to stand in, to stand for, there is an optimistic enough drama to it, a poise that puts us, viewers, audience, lookers and readers, into whole other dimensions.

All at once.

Text by Phil King, Turps Magazine, Executive Editor