Paula Kearney studied Fine Art Painting at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and at the College of Marketing and Design. With a practice spanning over thirty years, she has developed a deeply considered and distinctive body of work that continues to evolve.
Following her studies, Paula lectured in life drawing and painting while living in Dubai and Singapore. Throughout her time abroad, she remained committed to her own practice, participating in numerous exhibitions internationally before returning to Ireland.
Back home, Paula has exhibited widely, with her work shown at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), the Hunt Museum, and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation.
Her current body of work centres on landscape as a site of memory, absence, and longing. Paula explores the idea of land that waits silently — emptied of its people, who have been denied the right to return. Barriers occupy the foreground of her compositions, sometimes man-made, sometimes drawn from nature itself, obscuring and withholding the land behind. Within this tension, a bird often hovers — a subtle but powerful presence, a suggestion of life persisting where human connection has been severed.
The paintings are built from three distinct zones, each demanding its own tool and language. The land is laid down with a palette knife, the paint pushed and dragged across the surface. Above, the sky is brushed — open and atmospheric, worked with a softness. And in the foreground, always the boundary, rendered realistically, often as a brutal force of barbed wire, or sometimes just bracken — softer, but no less a barrier.
Paula Kearney’s work asks the viewer to sit with questions of belonging, displacement, and the enduring relationship between people and place.
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