Erin O'Malley - Chasing after light
Exhibition Wednesday 4th - Saturday 21st March.
Opening event Saturday 7th 11am.
A statement
in not so many words
A painted exploration - a gestural abstracted journey
of hidden meanings.
There is momentum - moving forward
in paint
towards joy.
Light
to be weight less
to hold things of little importance
to throw off
walk away
from
the house in shadow.
VIEW WORKS
My abstract practice explores the emotional and psychological structures that shape everyday life. Rather than representing specific places or narratives, I am interested in the atmospheres that gather around the spaces that shape our lives — the subtle, often unspoken tensions that exist within it.
This series of small-scale paintings considers the idea of “weight”: the accumulation of worries, fears, and private thoughts that we carry back into the home. On my daily walks, I am repeatedly drawn to houses at moments of transition — dawn and dusk — when interior lights glow through curtained windows. Soft sounds can be heard from within, showers running, soft laughter, sometimes doors slamming and footsteps.
From the outside, these houses appear calm, warm, and self-contained. They suggest safety and intimacy. Yet this impression is partial. The home, while often imagined as a place of refuge, is also where emotional realities become most visible, once the performance of the public self falls away, we let down our guard.
In these works, the house becomes a recurring, simplified motif, loosely based on the archetypal playhouse form. Solid in colour yet occasionally unsettled in stance, it becomes both symbol and structure — suggesting protection while hinting at vulnerability. Thread-like lines, suggestive of entanglement, traverse the pictorial space. Sometimes suspended above it, sometimes embedded beneath the surface. These entangled marks act as metaphors for thought patterns, anxieties, and inherited emotional narratives. They press, hover, or sink, echoing the way certain feelings persist within the spaces we consider safe.
Through repetition, reduction, and scale, the paintings position the home not simply as shelter, but as a complex emotional terrain — shaped as much by what is unseen as by what is visible. - Erin O'Malley
Maria Owens - works on paper
Exhibition Wednesday 4th - Saturday 21st March.
Opening event Saturday 7th 11am.
