Kiera O’Toole is transfixed by how humans experience the world, particularly the involuntary fragment that comes before naming or self-identification. Combining fieldwork, material and philosophical research, she makes ephemeral public site-specific drawings, collages, drawing installations and experimental stop-motion animations.
O’Toole considers herself a ‘patheur’; someone who follows their intuitive impulses, and she makes drawings that must be felt rather than cerebrally understood. She explores drawing’s capacity to map, record, materialise and afford the intimate and hidden intertwining relationships between humans and non-humans as experienced atmospherically. In this context, atmospheres refer to ‘emotional vibrations’ rather than being related to meteorology or atmospheric sciences. Drawing on the concepts from new phenomenology and aesthetics, atmospheres are fundamental experiences of our emotional engagement with the world.
In her work ‘Weaved Drawing from reworked drawings’, O’Toole aims to create a ‘holding space’ that enables viewers to encounter their affective involvement through an intuitive and felt embodied experience.
Artist biog
Kiera O’Toole is a Dublin-born visual artist based in Sligo. Combining fieldwork, material and philosophical research she creates ephemeral public site-specific drawings, collages, drawing installations and experimental stop-motion animations. Her drawing outputs include conferences, residencies, publications and exhibitions.
Exhibitions include CCA Derry- Londonderry; University of Newcastle (AUS), Mount-Kuring Regional Gallery, (AUS); Courthouse Arts Centre, Wicklow , National Museum of Australia; ‘Weaved Drawing’ , Onkaf Art Foundation, (IN), Maitland Regional Gallery (AUS); Art Walk Porty (SCO); The Model, Sligo; VISUAL Carlow; Highlanes Gallery; DLR Lexicon, Dublin; Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre.
Residencies include; Leitrim Sculpture Centre; Tinahely Courthouse Arts Centre; Sligo Arts Service.
O’Toole publishes include book chapters; 2021; ‘Drawing Wonder’ in Project Anywhere IV’, 2021 (University of Melbourne and Parsons, School of Art, NY) and ’Drawing from the Non-Place’ in Body, Space, Place in Collective and Collaborative Drawing: Drawing Conversations II, 2020 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
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