Esther O'Kelly

'Off Grid'

Esther O’Kelly BDES, BA, graduated from The National College of Art and Design in Dublin with an honours degree in Visual Communication. O'Kelly is currently Vice Chair at Vault Artist Studio Belfast. Her paintings are remembered journey’s through the landscape, drawing narratives from personal and cultural memory. An experimental and intuitive approach is at the core of O'Kelly's work. Paintings are produced in a spontaneous manner and draw upon the unconscious as source material. O'Kelly's paintings are an active engagement with the idea of landscape, a journey with no departure or arrival point. She is inspired by how humans form an understanding of their surroundings, how the chaos of the real world can turn into an abstract expression where personal experience overflows. In O'Kelly's work, memory is skewed by whatever is meaningful, remaining a living morphing atlas, encoding time, space and experience. Places that are important are emphasised and distances between them can be shrunken by the elemental experience.