About

Orla O’Byrne is a Cork-based visual artist and 2019 graduate of The Crawford College of Art and Design. In 2020 she was granted a four-year studio licence at Backwater Artists Group and in 2022 she became a member of the Board of Directors there. Her previous awards include The Lavit Gallery Student of the Year and the CIT Registrar’s Prize. Recent arts-funded projects include a research trip to the marble-quarrying region of Northern Italy and a desk residency at The Crawford Art Gallery. In December 2022, Orla completed an MA in Art & Process at MTU CCAD with a first class honours.

“Orla O’Byrne’s practice…departs from the quantified logic of the institutional archive. The interrogation of the museum space functioning as a critique of legibility, and how the ledger of recorded history contains within it excesses irreducible to any totalistic system of presentation. The rendition of the fragmented view of a cloud (it cannot be contained by one view) becoming symbolic of those unbounded material potentialities.”

Laurence Counihan, from ‘Fluid Dynamics’, MA:AP Catalogue Essay, 2022

Artist Statement

Through a variety of techniques and media, I make tangible things in response to the abstract narratives that surround us. My work is rooted in the overlooked histories of specific sites or artefacts. I am curious about what’s concealed within the vastness of the institutional archive. Working from stories as well as from physical traces, I unearth and amplify the incidental to uncover new ways of engaging with a subject.

I work from a place of deep affinity with my materials. Drawings are made in charcoal dust and chalk. I take imprints, cast glass and plaster objects and work with analogue photographic processes. This visual vocabulary is in keeping with my fascinations: trace, erasure and the passing of time. I push ideas through various material permutations as a way of revealing layered and more nuanced versions of our given histories.