Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh’s exhibition Sruth — the Irish for “flow” or “stream” — presents a body of work that continues her sustained engagement with the language of painting itself. Innately concerned with the material qualities of paint and the physical act of painting, Ní Mhaonaigh resists the confinements of allegory, instead approaching painting as an autonomous and expressive form. Her process is one of exploration and suggestion rather than representation, embracing the ambiguity and rhythm that arise through the movement of paint across the surface.
Much like a poet, Ní Mhaonaigh finds meaning in the spaces between gesture and form, in the interplay of visibility and concealment. Over the past two decades, she has titled her solo exhibitions with single Irish words, Struchtúr, Cnuasach, Imlíne, Eatramh, Imeall, Ardán, each describing an aspect of the lived environment: structure, cluster, contour, interval, margin, platform. This evolving lexicon points to her enduring preoccupation with the articulation of bounded space — the ways in which paint can define, dissolve, and reimagine edges, boundaries, and thresholds.
In Sruth, this concern finds renewed vitality. The works seem to flow between abstraction and form, suggesting landscapes or architectures that remain just beyond recognition. The paintings open up a space where language, ancestry, and perception converge, where the act of looking becomes akin to following the current of a stream: shifting, continuous, and alive to the moment.
Ní Mhaonaigh’s Sruth invites viewers to dwell within this flow, to experience painting not as depiction, but as a living, evolving field of thought and sensation.
The exhibition runs from 11 October – 20 December.
