Sarah O’Brien – Solo Exhibition

Opening Thursday 13 August, 6-8:30pm

Sarah O’Brien’s upcoming exhibition at Queen Street Studios & Gallery, Belfast, explores painting as a site of repair—psychic or spiritual—and painting practice as a healing exercise. The works bear crude, brutish dents and additions that mark time impressed upon the surface, counterbalanced by a palette that is light and saccharine: skin-like. Building on studio research, these material approaches further examine questions of authorship within painting. Tie-dyeing and marbling operate as acts of disassociation from the maker; intentionality arrives later, through the conscious assembling of the painted grounds. Collage elements attach only tentatively—their energetic possibility of falling away diminishing the painting’s inherent stability.