Gillian Lawler

Lawler’s work is about landscape and memory and within this she explores the tension between the real and imagined. She explores her own unreliable recollections of human habitats, empty wilderness, abandoned settlements and uses an accumulation of references comprised of an imagined real as opposed to an actual real.

She uses abandoned places as backdrops, empty and laid bare, and these create a vista which allows her to imagine an alternative timeline or dimension. These places are like systems in flux, uncertain, with many of the elements simplified and create a perspective of nature reconstructed as a series of indefinite structures and conceptual visions of space, time and existence.

Current work draws on these previous themes while extrapolating ideas based on boundaries, edges, transitions and transformations. In recent paintings the canvas was split into two territories with a defined boundary line where forms crossed over, were transformed, dissolved, dispersed or absorbed. In many ways these territories became meditative spaces, allowing these changes to occur.

Of particular impact for her during this time was the grief she experienced upon the death of her mother in late 2017. Ideas on transformation and transition particularly resonated with her mother’s passing and the transformation of her body. Once again platforms and scaffolds appeared in her work and embodied that moment when her mother moved from this world to the next, representing her body in transition.

These accumulated experiences have haunted Lawler’s work and have led to an exploration of a place where the veil between this world and the next becomes thin and exposed. It captures an ephemeral quality, a fleeting moment which bears witness to a momentary leap of faith, and is suggestive of an inner world situated between the conscious and the unconscious.

Recent solo and group exhibitions include:The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words, solo 2020. 190/191st Annual Exhibitions at the RHA Gallery, Dublin 2020/2021. The Weber and Weber Gallery,This Entropic Order, curated by Valeria Ceregini, solo 2018. Difference Engine, Altern_nator, HDLU Centre for the Association of Artists, Zagreb, 2018. House Taken Over curated by Hickey + Hickey, The Sonorities Festival, Belfast 2018. Resort Revelations, Lynders Mobile Home Park, Portrane, Dublin 2018.

Lawler received the Graphic Studio Dublin Print Award 2019 where she was also invited to complete a residency at the Graphic Studio Dublin in 2019. She will hold another solo exhibition at The Weber and Weber Gallery, curated by Valeria Ceregini in January 2022.

Gillian Lawler is an Irish artist based in Dublin. She received a BA in Fine Art Painting from NCAD, Dublin in 2000. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and abroad including America, UK, Croatia, Poland, Spain, Holland and Italy.

Awards include the Graphic Studio Dublin Print Award 2019, the Open Selection Award at the Eigse Arts Festival 2009, the Hennessy Craig Award, RHA Gallery Annual exhibition 2007, the Whytes Award, RHA Gallagher Gallery 2007. She received Visual Arts Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2009 and 2020. She was shortlisted for the Beers Lambert Contemporary, Thames and Hudson publication, 100 Painters of Tomorrow in 2013. She was recently included in the Arts Council of Ireland Collection 2020.

She is co-founder/member of the group Difference Engine, an evolving serial exhibition, and a model of autonomous artist curation, by artists Mark Cullen, Jessica Foley, Wendy Judge, Gillian Lawler and featuring Gordon Cheung.