An Exhibition by Vicki O’Donoghue & Mary Doyle Burke
This wonderful exhibition opened at the The Tea Houses last Saturday.
‘Tairseach: Standing at the Mouth of the World‘, is a new exhibition by Kilkenny-based artists Vicki O’ Donoghue and Mary Doyle Burke.
In the mystical spaces between the visible and invisible, both artists explore profound encounters with the Irish landscape, approaching their local environments with curious hearts and open minds, creating work that meditates on thresholds where the physical world meets something deeper, older and sacred.
O’ Donoghue’s paintings emerge from sustained walking across the mountainside. Her vivid, abstracted imagery draws from cave sites and ancient symbols, beasts and herds that speak to collective consciousness and primal instincts. Through gestural marks and contrasting colours, she explores herd mentality in polarisation with individualism, interrogating contemporary life while reaching back to more primordial forms of being. Her work exposes the tension between conformity and divergence, a dynamic that sits at the heart of our fractured relationship with the environment.
Doyle Burke’s practice is rooted in a shamanistic engagement with Kilkenny’s ancient bogs. Working with bio-materials, handmade dyes and bog matter, she positions the bog as a collaborator, friend and guide. Her sculptural and painting processes are shaped by meditative trances beginning in the bog and taking full form in the studio, tapping into intergenerational memory and the cyclical rhythms that bind human and ecological experience.
Together, both artists dance on the edges of sacred thresholds, sensing portals within the landscape. Their work invites us to perceive wider realities beyond what immediately appears. Caves and bogs hold millennia of geological memory, offering a recalibration of scale and challenging what we think we know. Both artists model ways of being with landscape that are attentive, reverent and transformative, helping us rediscover long-forgotten sacred pathways and knowledge we have barely begun to reclaim.
The exhibition is curated by Shannon Carroll and is kindly supported by Kilkenny County Council and Creative Ireland. It is presented as part of the Kilkenny County Council Arts Office Programme. The exhibition continues until Saturday May 2nd. For further enquiries, please contact: Shannon Carroll[shannonmariacarroll@gmail.com] [0866681100]
