// of sorts

Sorcha McNamara works as a painter; or more accurately as a maker of things.

But even ‘maker’ isn’t really the right word. It’s too organic, too suggestive of the handmade, or the nobility of a craft. Instead, she is more of a composer, a conductor – the person in front of the orchestra waving their arms about, whose function and purpose you may question, but you know are important for the stability of the whole piece.

Her approach to making things is simultaneously meditative and improvised; at once thoughtful and thoughtless. Her eye attends to the overlooked, unnoticed or disregarded aspects of the everyday, focusing her attention towards material, objects and fragments that are often discarded, salvaged, reclaimed holding traces of a previous existence, or entirely ambiguous in their origin.

With this stuff, she constructs and orchestrates work that sits in a threshold between painting, sculpture and image-making, questioning the relationship between the shape or presence of a ‘thing’ and the meanings associated or placed within it.

She has no urge to add anything more to the world, only to take from what is left and make new shapes with it.