Evelyn O’Connell is a Cork based artist whose work combines aspects of figuration and abstraction and is created using predominately oil and acrylic paint. She aims to explore ideas around image perception and deconstruction.

Through the use of Photoshop, O’Connell alters images that she has gathered from her family archive in order to create vivid, highly saturated references. Her paint application is thinned using Liquin and odourless spirits which allows her to paint in transparent layers when working with oil paint. In doing this, she is able to replicate the digital noise in her reference and create an also pixilated image.

Within her practice, it is integral that these images are then translated into paintings. The physicality intrinsic to painting contrasts the immediacy of the digital editing process. Through this combination, she is able to further deconstruct the image.

She is also deeply interested in the relationship between the viewer, the image and herself. As the references for her paintings are from her family archive, it is inherent that the work is somewhat rooted in lineage and family. However, by disrupting the colour palette of the original image, or cropping the figure out of the painting entirely, she is working to detach the image from its original context and find new meaning as a result of this process. In doing so, these historical images are brought into the contemporary.