Eileen O’Sullivan
she/her
Handiwork: Something that is made or done
Eileen O’Sullivan’s practice investigates the politics of making, mending, and visibility through an expanded approach to painting that incorporates sculptural elements, archival references, and participatory methodologies.
Drawing from spaces such as hardware shops, haberdasheries, and galleries, her work explores the intersections of domestic labour, care, and material culture. Manuals like The Home Mechanic and second-hand repair guides serve as both conceptual and visual anchors, forming anachronistic dialogues between past and present acts of fixing.
Employing materials such as oil paint, Velcro, linseed putty, found furniture, and child-adjacent craft materials, O’Sullivan embraces deskilling to question hierarchies in materials and in distinctions between skilled and unskilled labour. She values slippages, memory, and process to highlight the attainable, but often privileged, benefits of repair: satisfaction, economy, and joy, while acknowledging that such acts require time, space, and skill.
Oil paint, netting and pinboard
Detail of carpet construction, anti-slip mat and patterns visible, with ironed craft bead trim
Car manuals, oil on paper, displayed with books from second-hand shops on studio floor with wood and staple gun
Hinges, velcro strips from the Lidl middle isle, glitter, mahogany sawdust, oil paint, PVA wood glue, plaster, Gesso, second hand furniture from auctions, plywood from skip at NCAD, embroidery thread, felt, canvas stretcher, Mála
Navigation, wooden panel, canvas, paper, instruction manual, watercolour, netting, stretcher, oil paint, play dough, car mat, emulsion, 100 x 70cm
A Carrickmacross lace collar pattern, copied with marker on tracing paper, play-dough, displayed on table with clipping from car manuals
Studio view
Shapes of Making, wallpaper window, oil paint, paper, acrylic paint, linseed putty, polycarbonate, canvas, displayed in studio at NCAD, 80 x 80cm