∴Irene Sweeney∴Artist∴
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  • ∴Portfolio∴
  • Contact ∴ Exhibitions ∴ C.V.
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  • 2021
  • 2020
  • 2019
  • 2018
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Visual artist from Donegal.
Irene Sweeney specialises in realist painting with a contemporary flare, but also has a talent and passion for writing, as well as photographing all her own source images for her paintings. 

The paintings that she creates attempt to contextualise personal trauma by engaging with memories through paint. She does so in a slow and contemplative manner with images of personally potent, significant moments in time, which often document encounters with a primary subject, initially captured by lens.

Of late her work has developed a strong interest in fungi which was an intuitive encounter for her while spending time in forests and woodlands.
"I'm humbled by the sense of peace and healing that I feel in these spaces and hope to convey some of that magic through sharing my own spiritual encounters within it through painting."


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Encountering Trauma's hypnotic hold
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Studying personal psychological experience which gives insight into collective trauma is one of the raison d'être of my paintings and text-based artworks. I create these artworks to shed a light on traumatic memory, how it effects the brain-body connection as well as phenomenological experience.

It is integral for me that I capture something which feels untainted, sincere to its core. This has simply been the psychological result of years of hidden truth. I have become someone who is soothed by control; my creative process reflects this trait. A symbiotic relationship is created through this; between myself, and the act of painting. The activity adopts a cathartic role as the painting slowly comes to life, each carefully image extracted hue constructs something which communicates the internalised evocative fear that cannot be communicated by words alone.
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The materiality of trauma is something which intrigues me. How does the object retain the experiential? Perhaps the moment captured through the subconscious inclinations of the mind, which directs and frames the image, is the binding catalyst for the immemorial or hazed traumatic memory, and the object. In the symbiotic process, there is a visceral translation of paint to surface during which an ebb and flow of rigid and palpatative tensions held in the body come across onto surface, through each stroke of the brush. “Sensation is what is being painted…what is being painted on the canvas is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar as it is experienced at sustaining this sensation.” (Giles Deleuze). An abridgement of my area of enquiry is the belief that: you perceive what you have felt, when encountering an artwork. Feeling, seeing, and hearing become one in the same to the traumatised mind, as traumatic memory intercepts separations between the senses. Through capturing objects and feelings of personal fascination, deterrence, fear, or connection I conceptualise my own cognitive processing of trauma into that which can transform itself into something cathartic and therapeutic for both myself and the viewer.
 


 

 

© 2024 Irene Sweeney