Catherine Keogh
Mixed Media Artist - B.A. Hons (Fine And Applied Art)
I was born in Armagh City in Northern Ireland in 1970. It was a tumultuous time in Irish history and, although art was the only subject I enjoyed, it was not a time when working class girls routinely went on to become artists.
Instead I left home at 18 and moved to London and seldom thought of art again until I moved to Sydney for a year at the turn of the century. Whilst there, I took a couple of art classes and my long dormant passion for art was reawakened.
In 2002 my husband and I moved to Northern Ireland and I quickly found an art course locally and, within two years, I went on to study a degree in fine and applied art in Belfast. I both honed my painting skills and began experimenting with alternative materials such as gypsum and wax. Indeed, my 2007 end of degree show contained only these two materials.
But real world concerns such as paying bills and raising children meant that my art again took a back seat. In an attempt to force my way back into art, I opened an art cafe between 2014 and 2017 but spent much more time making coffee than making art.
But, in 2018, I was given the opportunity to put on my first solo exhibition at the Marketplace Arts Centre and Theatre in my home city of Armagh. Faced with the dilemma of what to paint, I bought gallery style canvasses and acrylics and got to work in my studio. But nothing I did really satisfied me until I had the epiphany of using gypsum in my work.
My solo exhibition, which was called ‘Emergence’, charted my decades-long struggle to become an artist. It started with a one winged butterfly that portrayed the other wing as still being in its cocoon.
Even from that point my art journey has been far from straightforward.
Although, in 2019, group exhibitions followed in Italy and Dublin, my husband had a car accident whilst I was preparing for a group exhibition in London’s South Bank.
With Covid-19 following hot on the heels of the accident, art again became of secondary concern.
However, in 2022, I got another opportunity to take my art to the South Bank and returned again to the Parallax Art Fair in London later that same year.
In 2023 I decided to open the Uplift Gallery – a pop up – in my local village of Belleek, Co Fermanagh as the struggle for my artistic identity continues unabated.
