D8 Artist Spotlight - Beatrice O’Connell

I have always been interested in drawing, painting, sculpture, and the physical materiality of paint, clay, and other substances. My mother was an artist, and she used to bring me to galleries all the time. I was fortunate to attend a creative, liberal primary school where painting and drawing were part of everyday life. Reading, singing, acting, and observing nature were all encouraged, and imagination and freedom of expression were central to my early years.

That sense of freedom was disrupted by a series of abrupt changes: my parents’ separation, my mother’s sudden death when I was ten, a new family, and a new school. Alongside this came an increasing awareness of the unspoken rules imposed on me as a young woman, not to talk about yourself, not to seek attention, to be compliant, and not to express anger. These contradictions shaped how I understood expression and selfhood.

Before committing fully to visual art, I wanted to be an actress. I loved improvisation and the idea of losing myself in another world. At school I was labelled a dreamer and often given out to for staring out the window. Although I didn’t pursue acting, that improvisational approach stayed with me and is now central to my practice.

I went on to study at DIT (now TU Dublin) at a time when the college was still finding its feet, housed across different sites including an old Magdalene laundry. The environment was chaotic and lacked clear boundaries, and it did not feel like a safe place to be as a woman. I was initially drawn to sculpture and the materiality of clay, and I made a small metal sculpture of a bath as I've always loved making miniature things.

However, my stay at the sculpture department became untenable due to the abusive and inappropriate behaviour of the head of department. I was seventeen and straight out of school, and I moved instead towards painting, while also developing an interest in psychology.

The atmosphere at college was deeply misogynistic, and emotional expression, particularly by women, was often dismissed. One tutor told me I had “no life experience,” unaware of the significant personal experiences I had already lived through. It was only after graduating that I felt safe enough to explore my own ideas fully and begin to find my artistic “tribe.”

My practice developed through a desire to properly learn how to paint and draw, beginning with the figure and portraiture, and extending into animals, insects, and plants, subjects I have been drawn to since childhood.

While painting remains central, I approach it as an open, exploratory process, allowing work to unfold intuitively rather than aiming for a fixed outcome. I’m also drawn to working across disciplines, and the crossover between different forms and ways of making continues to fascinate me.

Your work is often described as engaging with ecological storytelling and cultural memory. What first drew you to thinking about the natural world through art?

I have always been drawn to the natural world. From a young age I was a keen observer of nature and knew a great deal about insects and birds early on. That attentiveness to small creatures and subtle changes in the environment laid the foundation for how I think through art.A turning point came during a year spent in Australia between September 2001 and 2002.

Being immersed in a radically different landscape shifted my priorities back towards my original interests: observing nature, noticing environmental change, and understanding the impact of colonialism on the land.

My awareness of ecological crisis became far more immediate. The extractivist culture, biodiversity loss, roadkill, and wildfires burning behind our campsite made these issues visceral rather than abstract. This experience later fed directly into my Silent Spring series.Since then, my work has consistently explored nature alongside figuration, using ecological storytelling to reflect lived experience and cultural memory.

Early exhibitions at the Hunt Museum in 2004 and the Talbot Gallery between 2006 and 2009 featured loose landscapes and figures. During this period I was also pregnant and working through themes of poetry, nature, and motherhood. A decade without residencies followed while my children were young.

During that time, gallery representation fell away, but my engagement with ecological narratives continued to develop.In The Flood and Other Stories at Moxie in 2011, I focused more explicitly on human relationships with nature, drawing on myths encountered during a trip to Madagascar in 2008. In the area we visited, crocodiles are understood as ancestral beings, transformed through stories of generosity and refusal.

That experience sparked a deeper interest in ecological stories from different cultures, and in voices and narratives that dominant Northern European and American frameworks often overlook.

Residencies later became crucial to my practice. My first residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in 2016 provided concentrated time and freedom from domestic responsibilities. It allowed me to focus on questions such as how to represent tiny creatures through paint, and how to contrast hard surfaces with the vulnerability of soft bodies.

A masterclass with Gwen Hardie at the RHA, where she urged me to “get the oil film going”, was particularly influential.From 2017 to 2019, exhibiting regularly at the RHA Annual Exhibition, RUA, and Rua Red helped consolidate this direction.

Throughout, my work has remained rooted in close observation, ecological awareness, and a desire to tell stories that connect human experience, the natural world, and cultural memory.

You have a long painting practice, but in recent years your work has expanded into film, installation, and assemblage. What prompted that shift, and what has it allowed you to explore?

Although painting has been central to my practice for many years, I began to feel a growing need to expand how I worked and thought through ideas. That impulse led me to return to study and undertake an MFA in Expanded Practice at NCAD in 2022.

Since then, my practice has developed along two overlapping and complementary strands: painting, and experimental film, installation, and assemblage. While I will always think through painting and drawing, it felt important to keep learning, researching, and meeting other people in order to work through these ideas more fully.

What prompted this shift was a fascination with artists’ processes and motivations, and with how ideas are formed through acts of making. Artists such as Ana Mendieta and Phyllida Barlow were particularly influential, especially in their engagement with materiality, salvaged materials, and the tension between the natural and the manufactured.

Barlow’s thinking around “acts of making” and work as maquette opened up new ways of understanding objects as active participants rather than simply supports for meaning.Alongside this, I became increasingly interested in storytelling as a mode of communication, particularly ecological storytelling and narratives from a female perspective.

My research drew on literature concerned with social and environmental change, including writers such as Barbara Kingsolver, as well as feminist artists’ practices, including Aideen Barry and Rachel Fallon.A key experience during this period was taking part in the Thinking in Cardboard mentorship programme, led by Sabine Theunissen and presented by The Centre for the Less Good Idea, founded by William Kentridge.

The programme took place during Covid and brought together artists in Johannesburg and internationally to develop short filmed works using cardboard models. The process was generous, cross-disciplinary, and rooted in theatre, performance, and making, an approach that strongly resonated with my background.

The six-day intensive culminated in a series of one-minute films and an exhibition in Johannesburg, and it shifted how I thought about collaboration, embodiment, and performance.This expanded approach directly informed Department of Ecological Angst, begun during the MFA in 2022.

This body of work combines film, sound, sculpture, and installation, and uses a black-and-white, pseudo-Victorian aesthetic to reference early cinema and the Industrial Revolution. Through this, I draw connections between technological progress, environmental damage, and contemporary climate anxiety.

The work references the story of the peppered moth, its rapid adaptation to industrial pollution and its eventual return to its original form, which I see as a hopeful demonstration of humanity’s capacity to change patterns of behaviour. Elements such as the kinetic sculpture Mutterfly, made from wire and salvaged materials, emphasizse movement, fragility, and agency.Collaboration has also become an important part of this expanded practice.

A collaborative iteration of Department of Ecological Angst at the Pearse Museum in the summer of 2022 included the audio-visual work Bodies of Water, made with Lisa Dowling Scott in response to her soundscape. More recently, working with Rayleen Clancy on an ecofeminist film and installation allowed for an intuitive, process-led collaboration shaped by shared concerns around motherhood, care, and the environment.

Overall, moving beyond painting has allowed me to think through making in new ways, using film, sound, and objects to explore ecological crisis, social change, and the motivations that drive us to create, while remaining grounded in painting and drawing.

You work from La Catedral Studios in the Liberties. Does working in Dublin 8, a place layered with history, labour, and community, influence your thinking or your day-to-day practice?

Working from La Catedral Studios in the Liberties has a strong influence on both my thinking and my day-to-day practice. I have been based there on and off for around twenty years. When the studio was first set up, I was upstairs and pregnant with my first child, painting dramatic images of dancers. I have always been drawn to performance, often attending shows, collecting stills, and working from them.

The studio itself is a vibrant, shared environment, with artists ranging in age from their early twenties to their eighties, working across tattooing, textiles, painting, photography, and other practices.

That diversity creates a constant exchange of ideas, and some of the most meaningful conversations happen informally, often over lunch. This shared studio culture is an important support for my practice, both socially and practically, helping me stay connected to a wider artistic and cultural network through the exchange of information about exhibitions, open calls, and events.

Being based in Dublin 8 has also heightened my awareness of place and history. During my MFA at NCAD, I became increasingly interested in the layered histories beneath our feet, which led to a collaborative, absurdist performance with Cathal Luddy titled Dig Where You Stand.

We were thinking about the NCAD site, its ownership by Guinness, and the fact that the road it sits on has been a main route in and out of the west of Ireland for centuries. We asked what might be uncovered if we literally dug where we stand, and what it means when that act becomes futile.

The work reflected on the multiple histories embedded in the area, from Viking settlement to the ancient road to the west, and on how patterns of labour, power, and conflict repeat over time. There was a strong sense that if we don’t understand those histories, we risk repeating the same mistakes.

I was also thinking about the many women who worked in sewing factories in the area, and how those histories are often unheard. Even when digging yields very little, fragments remain, and from those fragments we create stories. Dublin 8 is rich with this kind of material, from Tailor’s Hall and St Audoen’s to the National Museum and Archives. You could make an entire exhibition about this area alone.

Working daily in the Liberties continues to ground my practice in place, memory, and collective experience. Dublin is just deadly.

Alongside your studio work, you’ve spent many years working in academic libraries and archives. How has being surrounded by research, classification, and collections shaped the way you make and think about art?

Working for many years in academic libraries and archives, particularly part-time at NIVAL, the National Irish Visual Arts Library, has had a significant influence on how I think and work as an artist. Being surrounded by research, classification systems, and collections made me acutely aware of how knowledge is organised, preserved, and framed, and how those structures shape what is valued, remembered, or overlooked.The material at NIVAL is rich and absorbing, especially in relation to ecology and artists engaging with environmental themes.

That sustained access continually nourished my interests and encouraged a research-led practice that moves fluidly between reading, collecting, and making. Through this work, I also became more aware of decolonial thinking and the archive, particularly through Alessia Cargnelli’s book Archiving Plurality.

Books are incredibly important to my practice, particularly in relation to painting. I draw from everything in life that fascinates me, including small, everyday observations. When I was a child in Donegal, you could turn on a light at night and moths would gather in huge numbers. If you do that now, many of those moths no longer appear.

They have been decimated by habitat loss and climate change. Those quiet, lived changes feed directly into my ecological storytelling and reinforce why archives, research, and memory matter so much.

Storytelling, myth, and speculative thinking appear across your work. Why do you think these approaches are useful ways of responding to ecological crisis?

Storytelling, myth, and speculative thinking have become essential tools in my practice, particularly as ways of responding to ecological crisis. Without that urgency, I do not think I would have been drawn to writers such as Octavia Butler, especially her Lilith’s Brood series, or to Donna Haraway’s Camille Stories.

Both use speculative narratives to imagine alternative ways of coexisting beyond extractive, human-centred systems, allowing space for complexity, ambiguity, and possibility rather than offering simple or didactic solutions.

I am also influenced by artists who draw on theatricality, ritual, and mythic structures to create immersive or symbolic worlds, including Ulla von Brandenburg, Monster Chetwynd, and Ana Mendieta. Ideas such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory of fiction”, along with Cecilia Vicuña’s precarious, have shaped how I think about fragility, care, and non-heroic forms of storytelling.

More recently, through the NCAD course ‘Artistic research’ lecture with Jye O’Sullivan, my research has extended to Indigenous thinkers and artists from Brazil, including Lygia Clark, whose work focuses on embodied experience. Brazil feels particularly significant as it sits on the front line of ecological crisis.

My sister is an ecologist and has attended COP forums, and it has reinforced for me that the people who should be listened to most are those living in close, interconnected relationships with the environment. These speculative frameworks support a way of working that resists linear narratives and instead embraces interconnected human and non-human stories that feel vital when responding to ecological uncertainty.

You have a new exhibition opening next week titled Daphne’s Theatre. Can you tell us where the idea for this exhibition came from, and what themes or questions you’re exploring in it?

Daphne’s Theatre draws on both Samuel Beckett’s existentialism and the myth of Daphne, who transforms into a tree to escape Apollo’s pursuit. Together, these references speak to nature’s persistence, resistance, and our entanglement with it. The works imagine abandoned theatres and damaged spaces where human control and meaning have faded, while vegetation quietly takes over. Themes of endurance, transformation, and the persistence of life amid collapse run throughout the exhibition.

The body of work was initially sparked by seeing Beckett’s Endgame at the Gate Theatre. The set was stark and desolate, as though coated in concrete dust after an apocalyptic event. In my previous exhibition, a painting titled Moon Food explored a similar atmosphere. That work was based on a poem by Caitriona O’Reilly, which referenced pre-scientific ecological myths, such as the belief that migrating birds might travel to the moon. In the absence of scientific knowledge, people created stories to make sense of the world, and those stories are often more evocative than facts alone.

I began to think about theatre as a metaphor, the idea that all the world is a stage, and what happens when the audience leaves. In Daphne’s Theatre, weeds and vegetation become the protagonists, drawing attention to the fact that we are not separate from nature, but part of it. Many of the paintings stem from a research visit to an abandoned theatre. Titles such as Ghost Theatre and Awaiting Audience reflect spaces where human presence has been replaced by plant life.

The work also reflects my despair at the loss of so many important artistic spaces in the city, such as The Complex, which are increasingly replaced by generic hotels and office blocks. Cities need both housing and creative spaces to remain alive. Across images of bomb-damaged institutions, abandoned theatres, scaffolding overtaken by vegetation, and wildlife entangled in human debris, I reflect on the fragility of empire, environment, and systems designed to endure. Rooted in research at the National Irish Visual Arts Library and informed by theatre and Beckett’s writing, the paintings inhabit a space between ruin and regeneration.

Even as structures collapse, I hold onto hope. In Daphne’s Theatre, weeds become symbols of fragile endurance.

Collaboration has become an important part of your recent projects, including MUTUALISM. What does working with others make possible for you that working alone doesn’t?

For much of my career I worked alone, and while solitude remains important to me, collaboration has opened up entirely new ways of thinking and making. Working with others allows ideas to be tested, challenged, and expanded in real time. It creates space for dialogue, risk-taking, and a shared energy that is not possible when working in isolation.

MUTUALISM marked a particularly meaningful shift. Collaborating with Rayleen Clancy was exciting and generative. We trusted each other and allowed the project to evolve intuitively. We began with a loose storyboard, but quickly deviated from it, and that openness became part of the work.Living at opposite ends of the country meant that much of our collaboration took place remotely, through long conversations and shared digital folders.

Using tools like Google Drive became part of the process itself. Collaboration has allowed me to let go of complete control and to embrace uncertainty, responsiveness, and shared authorship. It mirrors the ecofeminist ideas at the heart of MUTUALISM, interdependence, reciprocity, and care, and has expanded both the scope of my work and my understanding of what artistic practice can be.

Looking ahead, what ideas, questions, or directions are you most interested in exploring next?

Looking ahead, I am increasingly interested in working through questions of decolonisation, particularly in relation to theatre, visual culture, and knowledge systems from the Global South. I am drawn to practices that challenge dominant Western narratives and linear histories, and that instead prioritise improvisation, collective making, and process-led approaches.In this context, I am keen to engage more deeply with The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, whose cross-disciplinary, open-ended methodology aligns closely with how I want to work.

I am hoping to visit in person at the end of this year to make something improvisational, without the pressure of a predetermined outcome.Residencies remain important to me, including returning to places like the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and spending time in Paris at the CCI (Centre Culturel Irlandais) Irish Cultural Center, to further research Samuel Beckett and existentialism. I am interested in bringing together ideas from Beckett’s writing and knowledge systems from the Global South, allowing them to inform one another.

I see practice-based research as a space where not knowing what the work will become is part of the method, allowing intuition, material experimentation, and collaboration to guide the process and keep the work open and alive.

Quickfire Round:

A book, writer, or thinker that has been important to your work recently?
Octavia Butler, and Barbara Kingsolver.

Favourite Dublin 8 haunt or place?
NCAD of course, and some of the restaurants on Meath Street. I love the Korean place there - Space Jaru, and Coke Lane Pizza at Lucky’s that does amazing gluten-free pizzas.

One word you would use to describe your practice right now?
Eclectic. A mix of influences from books, theatre, ecological stories, Brazil, Ireland, and everything in between.

Where to find Beatrice O’Connell work:Works - Beatrice O'Connell | Taylor Galleries

Beatrice O’Connell
Daphne’s Theatre
30th January - 21st February 2026
At Taylor Galleries