Catriona Leahy

Catriona Leahy is an Irish artist currently based in London. She earned her masters from the Royal College of Art London in 2013, before taking up position as Lecturer in Printmaking at the University of Northampton’s Fine Art department. She now divides her time and focus between part-time teaching and her own practice. She works out of her studio at ACME studios, Copperfield Rd. London and East London Printmakers where she is currently artist in residence. Catriona recently secured Individual Arts Council Funding from Arts Council England. Other awards include A-N Travel Bursary 2016; Culture Ireland Funding 2016, 2011; Santander Research Award 2015; Arts Council Ireland Travel & Training Award 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013. She has been selected for numerous international residencies including WARP Contemporary Art Platform 2013, FLACC Workplace for Visual Artists 2014 and Frans Masereel Centrum 2009, 2014, all in Belgium; and Florence Trust, London 2015/16. She has exhibited internationally at locations including Cmine Culture Centre in Genk, Belgium, and Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Holland. In early 2018 she will participate in “Emotional Landscapes”, an exhibition which seeks to explore the relationship between internal and external landscape, and how the speculative artistic process might lead to a renewed awareness of the tenuous and fragile relationship between human beings and the surrounding environment. This will take place at De Cacaofabriek in Helmond, Holland.

Catriona Leahy is drawn to a sense of, what she terms, “Temporal Dissonance” within declining or redundant sites and landscapes. This manifests in instances where time is displaced and out of joint, where incongruous or anachronistic objects, architecture or landscapes usher the past into focus with the present. Of increasing interest is the effects these declining sites have on the fabric of the surrounding landscape. Working site-responsively, with associated archives, she investigates the supposed historicity of place and image in an attempt to reveal the unseen. While the site is imbued with an aura of its lived past; its relative (archival) image resonates with a constellation of possible associations open to interpretation. Through a process of intervention in the image, she draws attention to latent aspects and layered histories.