Esther O'Kelly
Esther O’Kelly is a visual artist based in Belfast. She is a founding member and former vice chair of Vault Artist Studios; an artist community of 106 multi-disciplinary practitioners. Primarily working in paint, she also collaborates across disciplines.
“My painting responds intuitively and spontaneously to the landscape: peeled paint, gorse and thrift, framed by dancing light and brooding sea. My approach to painting is of a living morphing atlas; encoding time, space and experience, drawing on cultural and personal memory. I see the journey as a beautifully non-linear thing, haphazard wanderings are built into the most fundamental stories we tell ourselves about human growth, a hero must leave home and trek through uncharted territory to fulfil their potential. These stories are bound to the personal and collective memory, the need to survive, to rebuild and to defend in these precarious pandemic, post-war pre-Brexit times. My paintings evoke hyper real landscapes referencing the memory of crowds and the experience of being together. Places that are important are emphasised, whilst the distances between them can be shrunken by the elemental experience. Acrylic paint is applied with large brushes on massive canvases, then worked into using wide blades which remove layers – often what is removed becomes the focal point of the work. I also work in the landscape, and at scale, through numerous outdoor commissions.”
