Engage Art Studios are thrilled to announce our exciting new solo exhibition as part of our new Summer Weekly Showcase programme, 2025, Áit Eile, paintings by Stephanie McLaughlin, showcases the artist’s relationship with her environment. It is a show about depicting ‘other places ‘literally and also refers to abstraction being a different form of painting to literal representation. Landscape painting has a history of being bourgeois/ conservative, as opposed to contemporary/ abstract art. Can this work bridge the divide? There is a risk of a painting being neither an interesting landscape nor an interesting abstract painting. Hopefully the gestural elements make for interesting work.

Áit Eile opens at Engage Art studios Salthill on Thursday 4th Sept from 6-8pm and continues on Fri 5th, Sat 6th, and Sun 7th Sept.Times 11am-3pm

About the artist:

Stephanie McLaughlin is a visual artist working in the west of Ireland. Landscape painting is the context in which her expression occurs. Locality consists of spaces in which we are drawn outside ourselves, and in which the erosion of our lives takes place. Impressions of the landscape capture the essence of a space and time, emotional, thoughtful, and personal, and a basis for a visual vocabulary that is more universal, therefore the painting is an experience rather than a view and has its own internal visual logic so it can function as an artwork. Her work is influenced by inner factors, intuitive, related to memories, senses, emotions. Time found in space stilled. To quote Camille Souter ‘Painting has gathered time into its being, almost as if it’s a conversation’.

McLaughlin has had five solo exhibitions in Galway, and has been involved in numerous group shows, including the RHA Annual in 2021, and The Lido Open in Margate, UK in 2024. She was longlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards in 2016. She received the Arts Council Ireland, Agility Award 2021 and Galway City Council individual artist bursary award, 2019.

She holds an MA in Creative Practice (2018) from the Centre for Creative Arts and Media in Galway. She continues to develop her practice, recently completing the Correspondence and in-person course with the RHA school, and the TURPS Correspondence course. McLaughlin’s work has been purchased by Galway City Council, and she has completed numerous private commissions.

https://www.stephaniemclaughlinart.com/

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