Although she now lives in Cork city, West Cork will always feel like home to painter Oonagh Hurley. This year, she is once again exhibiting in the West Cork Creates ‘Listen to the Land Speak’ exhibition. A graduate of MTU/Crawford College of Art and Design in 2009, Oonagh’s work is mainly figurative, investigating the processes of remembering and forgetting. Her paintings are held in several public and private collections, including MTU, UCC, the OPW and Cork Opera House.
“I was born and raised in Clonakilty. My father was from Clon and my mother from Leap so am well rooted in West Cork,” she says.. “I now live in Cork city but find the pull west very strong. If I haven’t walked Inchydoney Strand in too long I get angsty.”
Oonagh’s path to becoming a professional artist was unconventional. After a 13-year career in physiotherapy, she returned to study art, having always maintained a love of drawing and painting through evening classes and art courses.
“With the ‘cushion’ of leave of absence, I went back to art college and graduated from Crawford College of Art and Design in 2009 and have been painting since.”
Her career has since included solo and group exhibitions across Ireland. She secured a solo exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre in 2011 before beginning to exhibit with Catherine Hammond Gallery in Glengarriff in 2014, followed by a solo exhibition at Hammond Gallery in Skibbereen in 2017. She exhibits regularly with Blue House Gallery in Schull and held a solo exhibition there in 2023. She has also shown with the Lavit Gallery in Cork and has been exhibiting with West Cork Creates since 2023.
Among the highlights of her career was receiving the Percent for Art commission for Cork Opera House in 2020, where her large-scale painting remains on permanent display.
“The Percent for Art award for the Cork Opera House commission was very welcome in 2020 and my large painting can be seen for posterity,” she said.
Her ‘Women Unremembered’ portrait series was exhibited through Cork County Council’s Arts Office programme at County Hall in 2022. The exhibition explored forgotten women’s stories and generated a particularly strong public response.
“The responses of the viewing public were particularly moving, especially comments from local women’s groups like the ICA,” she says.
Her portrait of Ellen Hutchins, Ireland’s first female botanist who lived and worked in Ballylickey, led to an invitation to speak at the West Cork Literary Festival in 2023. The painting was subsequently acquired by UCC for the Ellen Hutchins Building.
Oonagh’s creative practice centres on memory and its elusive nature.
“My work is mainly figurative, investigating the processes of remembering and forgetting,” she explains. “I typically gather images that evoke the notion of memory for me. They are often of mundane, incidental moments from my personal photographs, media images, stills from my father’s old Super 8mm films.”
Her painting process reflects these themes.
“I pour layers of different colours of paint on canvases on the floor, tilting and tipping the surface, encouraging the flow of paint drips in varying directions. I also use tools to smear the paint or wipe it off, leaving variations in density and texture. Once dry I choose how my composition will sit on this underpainting and allow some areas exposed while concealing others, the whole process mirroring how memory behaves, fluid and open-ended.”
In recent years, her work has increasingly explored women’s lives and overlooked histories.
“Over time my interest in forgotten women’s stories and of the unseen and unacknowledged load of women in the domestic sphere, prompted by the 2024 referendum on woman’s place in the home, led to my solo exhibition ‘The Weight of Love’ in Signal Arts Centre, Bray.”
The exhibition, consisting of ink-on-paper works, confronted traditional expectations placed on women.
“‘The Weight of Love’, depicted with humour and despair, confronts outdated narratives of a woman’s place in the home, highlighting the absurdity of the domestic load that women bear.”
She believes her work reflects wider concerns beyond the personal.
“My work intersects with my life on many levels. Through the prism of womanhood, motherhood in such an unstable world, many of the rights women have gained are being chipped at and challenged. Our Earth faces unprecedented threat and our connectedness to the earth needs to be understood.”
Like many artists, sustaining a creative career has not been without obstacles.
“Challenges for artists are invariably financial and of course the early years of parenthood eat into time. Finding studio space has been challenging over the years.”
Alongside her exhibition with West Cork Creates, Oonagh’s work will also feature on the cover of the latest edition of Swerve magazine, the literary and arts publication produced in Skibbereen.
