Ciarraí MacCormac

Ciarraí MacCormac born in County Antrim, N. Ireland, she currently lives and works in Belfast. MacCormac is a Fine Art graduate from Bath School of Art and Design (2014) and she was the inaugural Freelands Studio Fellow for Belfast School of Art (2023-2024). MacCormac has been the recipient of awards; BEEP Painting Biennial (2024) Shortlisted, AIR Open (2024) Shortlisted, British Contemporary Painting Prize (2024) Long-listed. MacCormac has exhibited both Nationally and Internationally, upcoming shows include; the Solo Exhibition CCA Derry/Londonderry autumn 2025. 

Ciarraí MacCormac’s paintings centre on a highly attuned bearing toward the materiality of paint, engaging specifically with what she calls ‘paint skins’. Her works challenge the perceptions of making, function and how painting can exist. The skins of paint have a performative quality, a transitory state and a continuous production of new
images. 

MacCormac leans to objects that behave in ways that they shouldn’t or a sense of failure in what they should do. This broader sensitivity of reconfiguration and chance are at the forefront of making. Installing painting in a new pictorial space, the surroundings become part of the image and the image has become the environment.

Her recent body of work has focused of the longevity of her paintings, taking a pathology approach to resolving their temporary nature. New materials have entered as a means for assemblage and conservation, using the idea of honest interventions that are not foreign to painting. The constant throughout her work is to connote on painting, elements of care and the thematics of death and renewal.