She was never singled out as the creative one at school and Fionnuala Ni Chiosain grew up in Blackrock, Co Dublin never thinking she would become an artist. It was a gradual progression, a slow development. Today, she'll tell you that art is a kind of language that she has learned to speak. Perhaps the creative urge comes from her paternal grandmother, Mairead Ni Ghrada, the playwright whose play An Triail is studied by Leaving Certificate students today. And her own father, Seamus O Casain, who died a year ago this month, was a natural teacher and a huge influence, she says.
You're as likely to see Ms Ni Chiosain, a tall, slim girl, dressed in a white doctor's coat, looking down a microscope and taking notes to inform and inspire her work, as you are to see her sketching a detail at a coffee table in Dun Laoghaire. Or she could easily be immersed in a book of poetry. She gathers ideas from disparate sources and builds up a library of images by visiting places such as pathology and biology labs in Dublin.
Earlier this year she wrote to Prof Martin Steer in the Botany Department of UCD for permission to view the slides and use the labs and the microscopes as part of her research. Now she goes out to study her subjects with the commitment and dedication of a zealot. She will use the microscope slides, as well as X-rays and scans, to fuel her imagination and create weird and various impressions and images. She's interested in the way we use technology to document nature.
Figurative and abstract
The pieces in her latest exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, which opened at the beginning of this month, were produced at various stages over the past five years. The earlier pieces consist of a series of black-and-white figurative works, while the more recent works comprise large, colourful abstract images in blues, yellows, lilacs and greens.
Like most galleries, the Kerlin is off the beaten track. It's on Anne's Lane, off South Anne Street in the middle of Dublin city. Behind a big heavy door, the stairs lead up to big, bare, bright rooms under lofty ceilings. Along the white walls, the large untitled paintings hang at intervals - "structured so as to evoke a kind of bilingualism and a flowing conversational or musical rhythm along the walls of the gallery", the release explains. The works are priced from £350 up to £3,500.
Lengthy process
Ms Ni Chiosain is quiet, softspoken, serious and neat. She comes from a family of lecturers and academics. She creates her translucent paintings through an odd process over weeks or months of work. First she pours paint onto stretched paper, lets it sit for a while and then, using a high powered jethose or maybe a jug, rinses the paint off. She will repeat this procedure a number of times to achieve the right elusive effect. Some of the paintings have been worked on in this way up to 30 times, while others have been given only two or three rinses.
Messy business
It's a messy business. Each work in progress has to be put in a very large water tank and the rinsing is done using a whole variety of pouring implements and tools, from small-spouted jugs and squirters to kettles and plungers, to remove the layers of colour. She often makes a piece without ever touching the surface with a brush or a hand.
Some of the paintings are heavily worked, built up in a series of as many as 30 layers or fine films of colour, while others are made in two or three economical gestures or "moves".
"Sometimes there is a lot of something in a piece - a deluge; sometimes barely anything at all," she says, adding that the paintings have come about "through a kind of visual germination and growth."
Ms Ni Chiosain is already well established and widely recognised as one of Ireland's leading artists. Works by her were on show during the L'Imaginaire Irlandais show in Paris in 1996 and included in the group exhibition which toured Japan during 1997 under the title "A Century of Irish Painting". Her first solo exhibition was in Dublin in 1991 in the City Centre Gallery. Then she exhibited in the Trial Balloon in Soho, New York. Her work is on view in places such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, the Waterford Institute of Technology, the Irish Arts Society and in the State Collection in Government Offices.
Today she lives and works in Dublin, being passionate by turns about nature, poetry and music. And when she's having an off day there's always pathology and the techniques of biological and medical research.
Fionnuala Ni Chiosain's exhibition ends next Monday, April 27th.