Grace O’Malley creates a dialogue between painting and video making. She achieves this by responding to her father’s raw documentary video from his fishing trips in the Arctic Circle, in 2001. She approaches the video footage like a preparatory drawing; as a joint process of enquiry and engagement. Therefore, O’Malley raises questions inherent to the meaning of beauty and the sublime. She addresses complex themes such as what it is to be a protagonist, the history of the landscape and the relationship between painting and video making.

As a consequence, the work can be considered raw or absurd and refuses simplistic positions or analysis. The range of issues explored in the work includes how to facilitate and structure encounters of difference, the written verses the spoken word, the ethics of representation and tensions around notions of comradeship or family.