Niamh King b.1995 is an Irish visual artist living and practising art from her home studio in county Kildare. Niamh graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2017 with joint honours in Painting and Visual Culture. In the years following She has continually developed her artistic practice whilst pursuing further education.
Niamh’s work comprises of skillfully crafted paintings in acrylic and oil, these works are created through a process of deconstruction, layering and reconstruction. Taking inspiration and reference from visual imagery of gardens, architecture, and classical artworks. She chooses images that speak to the overall themes of her work. The work itself explores the process of remembering and memory. Her works on canvas are not reconstructions of sources, rather the importance is placed on the images created through visual investigation. It is important that the paintings have an energy and logic of their own. The paintings themselves are intuitive constructions of colour and shape. Painting with thick broad strokes of paint in various translucency and textures, Niamh imbues the work with a feeling of shifting ground and vibration. The paintings comprise of a landscape of thought and memory, the marks made interrupting the viewers perceived path into the work allowing for the spaces of the unknown and unseeable.
Niamh describes her interest in exploring painting in this way as a sense of release, the images provide a symbolic reference to personal and universal emotions, feelings of disillusionment and the passing of time. Her own experiences of new and unfamiliar places feed into the work, experiencing places through the physical body, with the boundaries of vision, blind spots, and walls. The ways the mind fantasies to fill the gaps in knowledge of space and how both the physical encounter and the imagined representation of a place get translated to memory.
Painting becomes an archaeological process where introducing marks, colour and shapes allowsfor image and meaning to both be introduced and uncovered, hidden and revealed. This becomes a back-and-forth communication, The semi abstraction with its unclear forms and colour palette allows for multi-faceted interpretation, allowing the viewer to encounter the works as one would and unknown place.
