Susan Montgomery

Susan is from Co. Wicklow and living in the South West of Cork, Ireland. She graduated from IADT in 1997.

She lives rurally on a small holding in the woods by the sea on coast, close to a Megalithic stone circle which she visits regularly.

Her painting practice is informed by the everyday rituals of the daily humdrum. The physicality of repetition and interruption as well as her experience in the landscape and domestic space that she occupies accumulate in the material viscosities of paint. Her work is rooted in a dialogue with the physical body. This takes form by way of gestures and processes, which act like extensions of bodily expression.

What are noted are, moments in time.

Grief, domestic failings, personal manifestos, memories, arrangements, all experienced and observed. The physicality of experience finding its expression in paint.Susan is interested in the process of painting being one of divination as opposed to representation where paint is a conduit for healing. A tangible method for deciphering inexplicable concepts of loss and absence.

Arising from processes of bricolage as well as ongoing experiments with malleable household/ to hand materials like bakers clay or Playdoh of whose bodily and gravitational qualities give rise to results that become a kind of corporeal understudy which inform both the passive and active procedures with paint in the studio. Where lies the sweet spot is in a tension between procedure and gesture, allowing the material to act with its own plan, celebrating happenstance.

Susan attempts to decipher a dialogue between large and small works. Themes of birth and death, transformation and decay find their place with the small and deeply personal and profoundly large experiences of grief loss. What interests her in current thoughts of exhibition making is the potential of this dialogue between large and small and what happens within the slipping between the boundaries of these.

She a member of a small local biodynamic gardening/ art collective called The Glitter Heap which is small knowledge exchange and process led group. The collective is an interdisciplinary ‘meitheal’ where permaculture and biodynamic growing processes strive to inform a sustainable art practice, accommodating tropes of seasonality, care, growth and decay.

This supports the work in its greater context echoing these rhythms and a belonging in a greater celestial oeuvre.

Susan has been awarded a Visual Artist Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2022. Other funding and awards include Wicklow County Council, Cork County Council, the Royal Hibernian Academy Micro Grant, Mothership Satellite Residency, Ballinglen Arts Foundation Residency.

Selected group exhibitions include RuaRed Winter OPEN 2019, ‘Everything is in everything’ Sirius Arts Centre, 'Time and the Other' 2019, 'Site' 2018, and other selected group exhibitions at Doswell Gallery, Rosscarbery, Skibbereen Arts Festival 2018, Engage Arts Festival, Bandon (2011, 2013), Octagon, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre 2013, Eigse Carlow (2008, 2009), The Joinery, Dublin 2012. Solo exhibitions include Mermaid County Wicklow Arts Centre 2020, ‘the decisions we didn’t make” Talbot Gallery 2009, Signal Arts Centre 2008, Talbot Gallery 2009, Greyfriars Municipal Gallery, Waterford 2010. Recent residencies includes The Mothership Project Satellite Residency at Cow House Studios 2018. Beep Painting Bienalle, Swansea 2020, WE CAN DANCE, West Cork 2021, Do Not Swallow, Safehouse London 2023, Mud for you, Fitzrovia Gallery, London 2023, Matters of the table, Periphery Space Gorey, 2023

Her most recent solo exhibition at the Mermaid County Wicklow Arts Centre in 2020 was accompanied by a written text by author Sara Baume, Along with other artists she hosted a major painting show WE CAN DANCE on her home building site in 2021. which had an accompanying text by Sara O’Rourke (see press/writing section)

Susan completed Turps Banana correspondence course 22/23

Upcoming she is selected for two exhibitions curated by Kevin Kavanagh and Alannah Murray in April, Roisin Foley in Cork in July and will be showing along with fellow Turps alumni at LICK at the Safehouse, London in April.

Her work is included in some major public and private collections such as the Office of Public Works, Cork County Council, Waterford Municipal Collection, Trinity College Dublin, The Ice Hotel, The Dean Hotel Galway, Dubin Consulting (the Innocence Project) NYC.