BOW is a celebration of the individual pursuit of ideas.  The exhibition is interested in how art resonates, soothes, and chimes with our common experience of life and living.

The show includes Limerick native, and award-winning artist Stephanie Deady. Cork based Sarah O’Brien, who works from her studio near Kinsale. Dublin based Richard Proffitt with a studio in Balbriggan, and Fionna Murray who lives and works in Galway City.

BOW follows the threads of places and meaning.  Looking at what we make, find, and collect and how this points to memories and interests.  At the simple daily measures which bring us pleasure such as parks, books, art and dreams.  The works allude to images of deep familiarity, for example, a friend’s rented flat, bathed in harsh overhead lights, a home but not home.  The curve of discarded plywood, weathered and repurposed for art, yet still inhabiting the cities surface.  And ghost references to beloved childhood books.  The exhibition builds its meaning in repair and assemblages, layers, collages, and little vignettes.

The bow is a descriptor of many things. A holder of several meanings; a tie, a bind, a knot, and a restrainer. It is a deferential greeting, a cupid’s lip, an accessory, a beautifier, a package, and a gift. The bow is tensioned strings, an activator, the holder of energy, and an arc of seven colours. The bow is capricious and binding. Simple and urbane, innocent and alluring, it’s ubiquitous and ambiguous.

In the exhibition, we see direct references to Limerick City Gallery of Art park-side location in Fionna Murray’s work.  For example, we see her interests in landscapes designed for pleasure, and the signifiers such as paths, flower beds, and playgrounds.  Sarah O’Brien makes works that are mended or bound with paint.  She layers canvas strips, like gauze, and uses materials of painting beyond the frame itself so they take on a near corporeal vibration.  Richard Proffitt’s works are imbued with recurring themes of memory, time, and transience, coded motifs, and symbolism. And are suggestive of an intermingling universe of esoteric religions, the bedrooms of teenage loners, and the remote dwellings of psychedelic cults.  Stephanie Deady often works from scenes of her studio and domestic life. She chooses familiar environments and charges them with a degree of uncertainty, reflecting the fallibility of memory and the precarity of our lives.

Stephanie Deady’s painting is fresh, interesting, highly skilled and original.  In 2023 she was nominated and awarded The Fergus Ahern Prize, at the Boyle Arts Festival by Sarah Searson.  Her work has a compelling formal austerity, capturing tones of electric lighting which glow within the works calling for close attention and radiating depth and hidden narratives.  Stephanie often works from photographs which are the representations of memories.  Such as scenes of her studio and domestic life.  She chooses familiar environments and charges them with a degree of uncertainty, reflecting the fallibility of memory and the precarity of our lives.

Richard Proffitt’s work in painting, sculpture, video, and sound is characterised by its manipulation and repurposing of found material, recurring themes of memory, time and transience, coded motifs, and symbolism.  Works in different media are frequently combined to create immersive and intimate installations that evoke previously inhabited and later abandoned places of worship and transformation; environments that are often suggestive of an intermingling universe of esoteric religions, the bedrooms of teenage loners, and the remote dwellings of psychedelic cults.

Fionna Murray’s paintings are made up of loosely connected images, creating fragmentary worlds that are often concerned with boundaries and an ordering of forms within and across urban and rural thresholds.  Her recent work references the public park as a constructed and contained landscape made up of paths, flower beds, trees, open grass and playgrounds.  With gates to enter and leave by, the park serves as a space of respite for its human and animal visitors within the wider complexity of the city.  Her paintings serve as parallel arenas, bringing together images and motifs that are shaped by observation and drawn from memories of lived places, in order to make visible shifting experiences of everyday moments.  The arrangement of subject matter within the borders of the painting entails a playful negotiation between what is real and what is fiction; crossing and re-crossing the edge between the park as a place and the park as an idea, whilst embracing the possibility for imaginative speculation and a certain notion of freedom in the material fact of pigment on canvas.

Sarah O’Brien’s paintings are a site of mending/reparation, exploring painting’s kindredness with remedy, alchemy; its rootedness in the ancient and resonance with themes of healing are the core of her current studio research and practice.  Her paintings are densely layered over the course of their production, taking on a sculptural form with glues and papier mâché.   As such embedded in the paintings is the arc of their making.  The paintings are markers of time, time as material.  The scale of the recent paintings offers a grand space to sustain words and collaged elements, (partial, reversed, upside down); to be read as active or incidental communication, decorative elements or inscrutable glyphs.  The painting as a healing practice is physically manifested in the layering of canvas strips, like gauze, then mended or bound with paint.  The paintings take on a near corporeal vibration.  The painting as an energetic imprint of the author, echoing Isabelle Graw’s essay The Value of Liveliness talks of painting ‘..to be experienced in their physicality as a manifestation of the absent author’  Painting beyond Itself The Medium in the Post-medium Condition. Edited by Isabelle Graw and Ewa, Lajer-Burcharth. Sternberg Press p.80.

Since graduating from Limerick School of Art in 2014 Stephanie Deady has received critical acclaim and exhibited in Dublin, Italy, and Kilkenny.  She was awarded the prestigious Tony O’Malley Residency and was awarded the Hennessy Craig Award 2024. Her work is in the OPW State Art Collection and in private collections in Ireland and the UK.  Upcoming exhibitions include ABSTRACT PAINTING Kevin Kavanagh (2025), solo exhibition at Kevin Kavanagh Dublin (2025). Previous group and solo exhibitions include Magic and Loss, Kevin Kavanagh (2025), Measure for Measure, Art House Laois (2024), Hennessy Craig, Ryan Gallery RHA, (2024), ANSEO, Ballinglen First Biennial (2023), Boyle Arts Festival (2023), RHA Annual Exhibition, Dublin (2023), Measure for Measure, Solo Exhibition, Kevin Kavanagh Dublin (2022), The Pleasure Ground, Rathfarham Castle (2022), SILVER, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2019), Hennessy Craig Award, Shortlisted Group Show, RHA Dublin (2019), Make Haste Slowly, Goeth-Institut Ireland, Dublin (2018), Island Life, Kevin Kavanagh Dublin (2018), Primed Vision, Solo Exhibition, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2018), An Act of Hospitality can only be Poetic, Highlanes Gallery Drogheda curated by Linda Shevlin and Aoife Ruane (2018), She was the recipient of the Hennessy Craig 2024. Recipient of the Claremorris Gallery Award, Ballinglen First Biennial (2023).

https://www.instagram.com/stephaniedeadyartist/

https://www.kevinkavanagh.ie/artists/48-stephanie-deady/overview/

Richard Proffitt (born Liverpool, UK, 1985) is an artist based in Dublin, Ireland. He studied Fine Art (MA) at Manchester School of Art, 2007-08, and Visual Arts (BA) at University of Salford, 2004-2007. He is represented by Kevin Kavanagh and his work is part of both public and private collections. He releases music and publishes books via his own Stadt Moers imprint. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and recent exhibitions include From A Cosmic Drift Through Higher Prairie, The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland (Solo) Shadow The Solar Trail, VISUAL, Carlow, 2023, A Memory Circular, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, 2021, EVA International, Limerick City, 2021, May the moon rise and the sun set, UCC/Glucksman, Cork, 2019 & Display, Link & Cure, The Complex, Dublin,2019.

https://www.richardproffitt.net

https://www.kevinkavanagh.ie/artists/45-richard-proffitt/overview/

Fionna Murray studied at Chelsea College of Art, UAL, London and moved to Ireland in 1995 to complete an MFA at University of Ulster, Belfast. She now lives and works in Galway and has exhibited widely throughout Ireland, the UK and Europe. She is a member of Artspace Studios, Galway. Recent exhibitions include: Borders, Rua Red, Dublin 2024; Go Under The Ivy, Away From The Party, 126 Gallery, Galway 2024; Fionna Murray, The Dock, Leitrim 2023; Metropolitan Pastoral, The Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo 2019; Nothing Has Changed, Everything Has Changed, Beep Biennial, Swansea 2022; Night Walking, The Eagle Gallery, London 2019. Her work is held in a number of public and private collections in Ireland and abroad, including: The University of Galway; The Office of Public Works,  Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; University of the Arts, London; Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Mayo.

www.fionnamurrayart.com

https://www.instagram.com/fionnamurray/

Sarah O’Brien, born in Cork, and lives and works in Kinsale.  She hold a BA Painting, Crawford College of Art, an MFA Painting NCAD, Dublin, and PgDip Third Level Learning and Teaching from TUD. Her work is in the collection of The Office of Public Works and has been funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and the RHA.Selected shows include: NEW LIGHT, Lewis Glucksman Gallery (2020), RHA OPEN 2020 (Invited Artist), PERIPHERIES Open 2019, Gorey Art School, Gorey, Everything is in everything, Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Wish Me a Wonder, Waterford (all 2019) and STREAM PROJECT, Limerick (2018).

www.sarahobrien.ie

https://www.instagram.com/sarah_o__brien/

Sarah Searson has extensive experience in curation in venues across Ireland. She has spent her career working in arts, cultural and academic settings.