Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) is delighted to launch a new exhibition entitled Sore Spot, by artists Helen and Eva O’Leary. This exhibition features works that, when combined, aim to find moments of clarity and connection between different media – paint and photography. Together, through works considering fragmentation and cohesion, they offer a meditation on care, resistance, and the stubborn hope that emerges from making sense of a broken world.
Sore Spot notes the distance between both artists as mother and daughter — geographic and generational. A map of crossings, this combined work thinks about what the hands can make when words fail and explores how materials might offer a kind of reconciliation — or at least a pause in the noise, to find logic in chaos.
Eva's body of work in the exhibition, Spitting Image, includes photographs of American girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen reacting to their own image through a two-way mirror. Responding to a generation fluent in selfies, tags on social media, and the act of posing, the works highlight the dissonance between real and reflected identity.
Helen’s works respond to the deep emotional and physical Irish landscapes that form the basis for her practice, engaging with a ‘flipbook of faith, money, possibility, belief, absurdity, disappointment and the ethical collapse of so many systems that never worked for so many’. Representing a kind of ‘history of rupture and the hope of restoration’ and, in keeping with her resistance to fixed definition, her constructions blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture.
In Sore Spot, both artists come together to disassemble monoliths of language, patriarchy, capitalism, and beauty, (while also trying to find cracks large enough for empathy and humour), and, in doing so, rebuild from fracture — in ways personal, political, and formal.
Helen O'Leary (b. 1961) is a Wexford-born artist best known for constructions that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. She holds an MFA and BFA degrees from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Currently based both in New York and Drumshanbo, her work has been widely recognized through awards and residencies including the Rome Prize American Academy in Rome; New Jersey Fellowship for the Arts, the Hennessy Purchase Award, IMMA, Dublin; the Purchase Award American Academy of Arts and Letters; the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; the Pollock-Krasner awards (2); the Joan Mitchell Award for painting and sculpture; the Culturel Irlandaise, France; the Sam and Adele Golden Residency, NY; the Mac Dowell Fellowship, New Hampshire; the Skowhegan program, ME; and the Yaddo Residency, NY. Among multiple and prestigious exhibitions are the American Academy of Arts and Letters, NYC; The American Academy in Rome, Italy and NYC; The MAC Belfast, Ireland; National Gallery of Art, Ireland; Lesley Heller Gallery, NYC; Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, Maine; Muscarele Museum of Art, Williamsburg, Virginia; The Butler Gallery, Ireland. Her work has been featured in various publications and blogs, including Sculpture Magazine, Why I make Art: Contemporary Artist stories of life and Work, Sound and Vision Podcast, Art Forum, Hyperallergic, New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Art News and the Irish Times.
