Coloured into Shape – Exhibition, Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin
Photos by Colin Carters
PRESS RELEASE: August 2024
Coloured into Shape is an exhibition of new paintings by visual artist Orla Whelan. The exhibition title is taken from a text by Rana Howell written in response to Whelan’s solo exhibition at Custom House Gallery in Westport, earlier this year. Howell’s poem ‘An Earthshine’ equates the artist’s relationship with reality to the perception of colour in nature, reflecting on nocturnal anxiety and the beguiling affect of moonlight, in which ‘the world is less insistently reformed, coloured into shape, but not as we remember it.’
Whelan’s exploration of colour as material and metaphor has underpinned her painting practice for many years. In particular, the entangled relationship between language, perception and place in the experience of colour. Underlying her approach to painting is a desire to explore how colour connects us consciously or otherwise to our history, society, to nature and to others. Employing the formal language of abstraction, Whelan intuitively experiments with combinations of hue, tone and form, in an attempt to invoke visual connections from the local to the cosmic, and from the material to the metaphysical.
Building on Coloured by Weather at Custom House Gallery, this exhibition presents additional large paintings from the Earthshine series. Coloured into Shape also includes small paintings from the artist’s Moon, Valley, Dew, Death series, and copies of the text ‘An Earthshine’ by Rana Howell.
Prior to the opening at 5.30pm, Orla will be in conversation with Mark O’Kelly, artist and Head of the Painting Department, School of Fine Art, at the National College of Art and Design. All welcome.