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I used to be a painter. Since becoming a mother, my identity has changed, shifted, grown. I’m not sure who I am or where I fit into: multi-disciplinary? Matured? I struggle to paint because my child put oil paint in their eye. Maybe that’s remorse.

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I’ve adopted disciplines that fit better into a loving, child-filled space. My grand-father was a tailor and my father is a blacksmith.

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I’m interested in the fragility of being female, the loss of lineage, obsessed with surrealistic moments, amused by idiosyncrasy, and most of all, trying to dissimulate. Through humour, through bright colours, through chaotic landscapes, through infantile means.

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I write confrontational nonsense that I cannot conceal within, so I simply don’t share it.  

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To realise my identity, my role, my place in this crowded space: I work, I push, I try, I fail, I bake cookies, I learn, I paint, I do, I sew, I ignite, I read, I break, I smile, I write, I share, I speak, I love.

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Ciara Aherne is a multidisciplinary artist from Carlow, Ireland. She is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin, and her work is held in both public and private collections.

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Her work is grounded in surreal symbolism and idiosyncratic introspection, exploring the blurred edges between reality and ideology. Through painting, poetry and textile-based forms she confronts the emotional pressure that arises when the body becomes both a site of expectation and a container of memory.

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She believes she has an innate sense of humour, which has resulted in a tragicomic pursuit of purpose within her own constructed landscape of absurdity. Bright, often chaotic, bodies of work invite the viewer into uncomfortable and intimate territories, where identity is both performed and suppressed, particularly in relation to reproduction, domesticity and the female body.  

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As part of her dissimulation of practice, she creates a poetic-narrative that is parallel to her visual practice. Rarely shared publicly, they serve only as a place for her own isolation and vulnerability.

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Since becoming a mother, her work has evolved to reflect on domestic idealism. (It is slower in pace -time to bake cookies and read stories- and more contemplative). She now incorporates textile design, clothing-making, and collaborative painting with her children as a form of control-release and re-imagined authorship.

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