Engage Art Studios is delighted to announce our new summer weekly showcase exhibition, Am Chlann, a selection of intimate oil paintings preoccupied with motherhood, memory and the passage of time by studio member Vicky Smith.

Smith completed the Turps Correspondence Course for painters with Turps Art School, London in July 2025 during which time her practice developed through her intuitive dialogue with the materials in relation to her personal and inherited history she began to make autobiographical paintings that reveal the complexities of family life from early childhood to motherhood and the cultural and social experiences of being a woman living in contemporary Ireland. Drawing on her own photographic source material, direct surroundings of her domestic space and subconscious memory flow Smith provides a unique window into the everyday lives of her experience as a woman. Blurring the boundary between objectivity and lived experience, the artist highlights universal childhood memories, the experience of motherhood and the psychologically charged spaces they inhabit. She harmonises the paint with the surroundings and aspects in the paintings such as gestures of the body within the domestic settings.

Her process involves taking photographs of everyday life moments in interiors that her husband and daughter live or have spent time in. She draws from the photographs, repaints them using oil bars or egg tempera and make-up pigments, acrylic and oil paint and then draws freely from these studies onto the canvas and wood panels. She works fast to maintain dynamic fresh captured paintings which celebrate reading in bed, her sister with her children in the kitchen, doing homework with her daughter Saoirse in the afternoon, waking up in the morning and playing in the back garden. She adapts the language of the everyday established by artists Matisse, Bonnard, Cassatt, Paula Modershon-Becker amongst others. Using warm colours with a looseness, elasticity, expressive canvas brushstrokes and deliberate colour choices directs the eye and places emphasis while still feeling natural possessing a documentary quality that is loaded with personal meaning. She reenacts and stages photos that allow for a new level of visual depth and specificity with an exploration of the painting medium.

Vicky Smith was born in and works in Galway. She completed her BA in Fine Art and a Higher Diploma for Art and Design Teachers at the Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork in 1999 &1998, her MA in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy at Goldsmiths College, the University of London in 2004, her Diploma in the History of European and Irish Painting at Trinity College, University of Dublin in 2007 and her MA in Visual Culture, Art in Contemporary World, at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2011. Her recent solo exhibitions include Engage Art Gallery, Galway (2022); The Olivier Cornet Gallery, Dublin (2022); Linenhall Arts Centre (2015); PS2 and Paragon Studios, Belfast (2014); Galway Arts Centre (2013). Recent group shows include Cairde Visual (2025); 126 Artist-run Gallery (2025); Clifden Arts Festival (2024); Galway International Arts Festival (2023) & (2022). She completed the Turps Correspondence Course for painters with Turps Art School, London in July 2025 and 2024. In 2025 she was awarded a two week artist residency at Interface Inagh in Connemara by Galway City Council. She is the interim Managing Studio Director and Education Co-ordinator at Engage Art Studios and FET Tutor in Fine Art Drawing Techniques at Galway Technical Institute. Her practice is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Galway City Council. In 2026 she will have a solo exhibition at the Olivier Cornet Gallery in Dublin.

https://www.vickysmith.ie/