Reverie

‘’She recalls vividly the natural surroundings, spaces she stood in and observed, but it is also the emotional and spiritual realities of such places.   They are reservoirs of memory…Barrett’s extensive levels of physical engagement with making, or ‘sculpting’ the copperplate according to her will, alongside her complete absorption in the process, results in work of transcendent emotional intensity…Ailbhe Barrett’s work is as complex as it is beautiful.  It is delicate and intense, both physically and emotionally.  It does not tell a story but offers the beginnings of one.  It does not shout, but it persuades.‘’
– Dr Angela Griffith, Irish Arts Review, Autumn Issue, 2024  

‘Reverie is a new body of work by painter and printmaker Ailbhe Barrett. These large scale paintings and carborundum prints explore the tensions between the ephemeral and the permanent, the remembered and the revisited. Through landscape, Barrett meditates on the memories held in the land, and human concepts of ownership and boundaries.

Using glazes, dense carborundum, subtle tonal blends and assertive drypoint incisions, Barrett deftly balances form and light. Her engagement with process and materials sees trees, roads and fields estranged from their origins. A roof in silhouette, power lines engulfed by overgrowth, hints of habitation embedded in the landscape. Human and natural entanglement are woven into the essence of Barrett’s practice. New openings and undulations appear, as layers of translucency and texture are applied, worked and re-worked into the surfaces, tracing memories across the works themselves.

The sheer physicality and scale of these new works speaks to the physical engagement and labour of creation. We shape the land, just as the land shapes us. Our presence in the world etches new terrain upon the psyche, mediated topographies, mementos of reverie.’
– Ria Czerniak LeBov


Ailbhe Barret is a self-taught painter and printmaker. She has exhibited nationally and internationally.   As a member of Graphic Studio Dublin, she has utilised one of the largest intaglio printing presses in Ireland to create new original prints in expansive dimensions for this exhibition.  In terms of scale, Barrett’s new work is her most ambitious to date, with large format work in diptych, triptych and polyptych form included. 

Reverie
New Work by Ailbhe Barrett
14th September —19th October