Biography

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Dervla O'Flaherty is an Irish artist working with paint and wood. Her work generally explores ideas of space and place in relation to memory, darkness and the unknown.

 

​Dervla graduated from the National College of Art & Design, Dublin (NCAD) in 2012 with a BA (hons) in Fine Art Painting & Art History. She completed postgraduate studies in Fine Art at Cyprus College of Art, Paphos (CCA) in 2014. Dervla has undertaken projects and exhibitions as an artist-in-resident in Ireland, India, Iceland, Cyprus and Hungary.

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Artist Statement

The work itself is mixed media painting on paper or wood - layered, lurid, multi levelled, process-driven paintings, forming ongoing overlapping series of artworks. The research behind my work delves into myth, memory, the unknown, and the exploration of significant places, using these concepts as the lens to bring forward ideas into images.

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My work is extremely process led. Layering plays a pivotal role, physically through techniques like glazing, cutting, carving, and overlapping materials. Also conceptually, with layers of meaning and unseen worlds interwoven and overlayed. My painting is a deliberate reordering of known elements into wild new spaces. Unknown places where it’s possible to find new things, new worlds to be discovered. Anything could happen, said the poet C.D. Wright, in the strange cities of the mind.

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