Sorcha McNamara

Sorcha McNamara lives and works in Mayo. She completed a BA in Fine Art (Painting) at Limerick School of Art & Design in 2019, and received an MA in Art + Research Collaboration from IADT, Dublin in 2024. Her work uses painting and its expanded physicality to explore the relationship between the felt, embodied materiality of things alongside more calculated, methodical systems of thought.

Situated somewhere between the anti-intellectual and intensely cerebral, her practice engages with deconstructive methods of painting, language and image-making, often using forms of site-responsive intervention and a sense of material resourcefulness in the process. She approaches making things through the lens of the offcut, the outlier, or the fragment – piecing segments of found or repurposed material together in order to form a whole painterly object. Her materials – reclaimed and recycled from a variety of sources including the domestic, the industrial and the manufactured – become a lyrical, fragmented gathering of observations, abstracted visual constructions of a space, place or moment in time. Recent work extends beyond the framework of the object and engages more directly with architectural, infrastructural nuances of space. She is interested in structuring new expressions in the language of painting, asking questions of how it – as a form, a discipline, an emotional pursuit – can reach networks outside of itself.

Sorcha McNamara applied for a Golden Fleece Award to support the development of a new body of work for an upcoming solo exhibition at Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar, Co. Mayo in 2025. Funding would contribute to collaboration with an architect, as well as the purchase of new photographic equipment.