A Deeper Well
- Róisín O'Sullivan
- Sep 5
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 18
Exhibition Response by Artist and Writer John Graham
The skittish blackbird greeting my arrival at the first floor gallery space of Studio 12 looks perfectly at home there. Hopping from the stone window ledge to the wooden floor and back again, the bird, with all of its mysteries and hidden forces, might have sprung directly from one of Róisín O’Sullivan’s carefully placed works. Though this is fanciful – the bird was more intent on escaping the small room than fulfilling a symbolic role – his animated spirit chimed with the latent energies contained within O’Sullivan’s intricately carved and painted panels.
The artist’s paintings are medium sized or small. Some are tiny. They are sometimes on paper or canvas, but most often, as all the works here, they are on wood. Wood is an ancient support, dating back to at least medieval times, when miraculous icons found a prosaic backing there. Unlike stretched canvas, there is no painterly pushback on wood, no discursive bounce. The resistance of wood is more stoic; ‘paint all you like’, it seems to say, ‘cut me and carve me but don’t expect me to give a damn!’. Perhaps unnerved by this, or taunted, O’Sullivan gouges, carves and burns the implacable material, tagging it with a minor key violence.
A preponderance of eyes solicits the history of portraiture, but O’Sullivan’s windows to the soul are opaque, more like material totems than vessels of inward scrutiny. She owes a debt to surrealism, to the logic of dreams, and to the eye as fleshy object as well as an emblem of sight. One of her larger paintings, Moonwatchers (all works are 2025 unless otherwise stated) is crowded with almond-shaped eyes carved into the plywood surface. These might be the burls of a tree-trunk come alive, though their shapes seem closer to human. Hovering over a reflecting pool, the disc of a spinning moon strews light like confetti.
A small work called Orrin also depicts an eye, or maybe it’s the centre of a whirlpool, its concentric circles of black oil paint cut short by the edges of the support. A spill of cobalt blue appears along the sides of the panel, as though squeezed out by the olive-green ground and the dark lines radiating outwards. On the same wall, to the left as we face it, a larger painting called Sunfall rests near the ground on flat discs of cut wood. These slices of time feel collegiate with their smaller neighbour, with their growth rings, their expanding circles, plainly visible. The painting itself (if distinguishable from its wooden feet), is a complex affair, and colourful too, with yellow ochres and red earths forming a cubist landscape or a world on fire. Eyeballs erupt within feathery flames, while, tilted to one side, Picasso’s lightbulb (Guernica’s evil aperture) hovers like a flying saucer, a visitor to exotic lands, or Armageddon.
Painterly influence draws from the deep well (to borrow from the artist’s own metaphor) of the medium’s history and tradition. O’Sullivan’s time spent in Tony O’Malley’s old studio in Callan has evidently rubbed off, and so too have more esoteric painters like Forrest Bess and Hilma af Klint. O’Malley’s allegiance to the natural world included a sensitivity to boundaries, of fields and other physical demarcations, but also to the unseen forces his titles like Summer Inscape (1981) and Spectral Garden (1987) allude to. O’Sullivan’s choice of cast-off supports and homemade frames show the influence of Forrest Bess, as does her faith in the potency of symbols to carry both personal and collective meaning. On a deeper level, Bess was dedicated to the dissolution of boundaries, and this dichotomy, between the naturally bounded nature of painting and its investment in the world around it, enlivens O’Sullivan’s work too. With an illuminated eye at the centre of a tree-tunnel vision, the looping lines and radiating dashes of Starfell feel stylistically indebted to Hilma af Klint. The Swedish artist’s harnessing of the natural and spirit worlds, of nature, symbolism and abstraction, are echoed in O’Sullivan’s complex composition, a large panel invested with a micro physicality (a rainfall of tiny carvings) and spell-like enchantment.
One wall of the single-roomed gallery is a golden yellow. The colour stands in for the natural element shining through the opposite windows, sunlight as painted material. Ashgaze is the size of a large paperback, its palette of browns, whites, blues and blacks luminous against the coloured wall. A carved-out rectangle appears as a window within the window of the painting itself. Through this opening, a bright sphere is surrounded by nocturnal plants and silhouetted birds. Conflating what’s inside and out, the painting, through a frame of day, is looking into night.
Ashgaze, Sunfall, Starfell – one of the pleasures of writing about O’Sullivan’s work is the sounding of these compound words. Her single word titles are beautiful too: Velora, Orrin, Lunith. The only work dated earlier than 2025, Lunith (2024) is also one of the most naked. Another small panel, another eye (perhaps more than one), the sanded surface is free of paint in favour of drawing, with fine lines burned (as though cauterised) directly into the plywood skin. The curving shapes and cryptic circles are like hieroglyphs or an ancient map, or the figure of a storybook friend.
To make a painting is to make something visible, the paint itself, but also ideas, their combination discernible. If ideas become visible in this way, then the opposite must also be true, that material recedes as concepts come forward, and this ontological push and pull is at the heart of painting. Like the bird-guide briefly trapped inside the sunlit gallery, O’Sullivan’s paintings, which are modest but insistent, ambiguous, but ambitious in their search for meaning, appear lively in this exchange.
John Graham
July 2025
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