Elizabeth Kinsella

“I work across a variety of mediums ranging from painting and bookmaking through to drawing with knitting and patched fabric. Central to how I work is the idea of stretching the edges of what a painting, drawing or a book are. How they are made and what they can be made from. Pattern and rhythm fascinate me, simple forms such as squares, rectangles, circles and particularly grids. The activity within the work leans towards forms that sag or slump and grids that wobble or begin to break under there own tension, disrupting any overall sense of order within structures.
In making work, I usually try to set up a kind of game and follow a loose set of rules. To make a line and add to it or break off at certain times, making no real measurements and following no overall plan. Just the act of attaching one piece to another around gaps, taking a loose idea of a grid, or just cobbling sections of things together to fit around a series of voids. For the last few years I have been trying to make work the way my children play, building a tower out of blocks or a makeshift play house from of boxes, allowing for chance and happy accident into the process of making an artwork.
I moved to Sligo in 1992 shortly after graduating from an MA in the University of Ulster. Since then I have taught Fine Art on the Degree programme in Sligo Institute of Technology. Recent exhibitions include ‘Hybrid’ seven Irish and seven American artists and a studio residency at Redline Art Centre, Denver and Confessions of a Celtic Tiger, at the Brick Lane Gallery, London.”

Elizabeth Kinsella
Administration,
Edition of 10, 2006

“This series of books take the form of original drawings and altered texts from a set of seemingly never opened 1960’s academic journals.

In splicing together text from various articles I wanted to emphasis the monotony of these outdated writings…the ennui of academic life.

The drawings build on repetition, a kind of meeting room doodle, a sense of being trapped in the margins. Little colour blocks of tedium forming strings of cells or maze like structures, ultimately purposeless…but allowing the drawings to interact with the text while each remain locked in their own formal space.

It was also important that all of the drawings be unique, to form a final hands on, coming to terms with these lonely volumes.”

Elizabeth graduated from the University of Ulster with a BA (Hons.) in Fine Art in 1990 and an MA in Fine Art in 1991, where she was awarded the Spectrum Painting Prize and Peter Moores Foundation Scholarship.

Elizabeth’s first solo exhibition was in1995 at the Midlands Arts Resource Centre, Mullingar. She has since shown at the Clotworthy Arts Centre, Antrim, the Sligo Art Gallery, and the Peacock Gallery, Craigavon. Her group Exhibitions include EVA Open, Limerick City Art Gallery, 1998. Map, seven painters at the BBK Gallery, Karlsruhe, Germany, 1996. Five Painters at the Model Arts Centre, Sligo. 1996. Academy without Walls, fifty under forty at the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin 1995 and Ignition at the Slaughter House Gallery, London and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 1991 and most recently Alchemy, the inaugural exhibition of the Solstice Art Centre, Co. Meath.