Mairead O’hEocha; Extra Alphabets
Sat. 5 Jul. – Sat. 20 Sep. 2025

Curated by Michael Hill

Mairead O’hEocha’s paintings pose questions about the historical and contemporary lexicon of image making: how to interpret the natural world and our relationship with it, sensory encounters and the distorting realms of the digital universe. Extra Alphabets is the largest gathering of O’hEocha’s work in an exhibition to date. New large-scale oil paintings depict tabletop arrangements including birds invading a garden lunch, an octopus coiling its tentacles in a trophy room, and a blizzard observed from the comfort of a home workspace. The table becomes a focal point on and around which drama is constructed. The items on display, in concert with their evocative backdrops, convey real-world values and imagined stories from a range of complex settings such as Dublin’s Henrietta Street tenement museum, the palace of marvels in Bologna’s Palazzo Poggi, and the Baroque Villa Concordia in Bamberg.

The exhibition includes paintings of animals behind glass in artificially composed museum arrangements, as well as series of claustrophobically close-up still lifes of glass objects painted during lockdown isolation. These works illuminate ideas of containment and timelessness that are tied to the history of painting and its forms of visual and spatial display. In addition to those previously unseen works, the exhibition includes painted and graphic interventions that charge the gallery’s walls, bringing O’hEocha’s paintings into close conversation with The Model's unique architecture. The elements play with the perimeters of the exhibition space, so the cabinets, windows, animals, glass ornaments, tables, and their horizon lines – O’hEocha's abundant register of motifs – expand, accentuate and reflect her approach to painting, and exhibition making.

Extra Alphabets consolidates these ideas from several bodies of work, made over a handful of years in different locations, concerning an array of distinct but related themes. Painting reaches outside boundaries of written and verbal language to articulate a version of the world, real or imagined, through studied process and intuition. Using gestures, visual prompts and images including figures from nature, allegories, motifs of human fabrication, and direct representation, O’hEocha dances between this situation of control and improvisation where intention and realisation often stray from one another. Instead of setting out to accurately repeat a scene from life or transcribe subjects in mechanical or descriptive terms, O’hEocha’s paintings utilise dynamic colour, movement, enigmatic shapes and patterning, and the formal constraints of a frame to create prismatic scenes of tonal resonance, atmospheric mystery and a surprising realisation of the familiar.