About
Artist Statement- Biography- Contact- CV
Artist Statement
WHERE WE ARE MATTERS
We are increasingly disconnected from the environments we move through, from the sensorial conditions that profoundly shape how we feel, think and behave, whether we consciously register this or not. These atmospheric conditions are already acting upon us, shaping experience at a pre-personal level, before thought or identity. This presence is intersubjective, shared before any division between self and world. It is felt before cognitively known.
Drawing is itself a form of presence, a phenomenological act, unfolding in the same moment as the encounter with place. Through my methodology Drawing in-Space (DiSp), drawing becomes a means of staying with what is already there, attuning to and revealing the often-invisible atmospheric forces that profoundly shape our everyday lived experience. The marks that emerge are not personal expression but belong to the place, registrations of atmospheric forces acting upon the body. From this, the artistic practice develops into collages, large-scale wall drawings and experimental animation, where colour, tone and approach are determined by that feeling. These works are affective cartographies, maps to be sensed rather than followed, making perceptible what is already shaping us.
Where we are matters.
Biography
Kiera O'Toole is an Irish artist and researcher whose practice investigates how atmospheric conditions are felt in the body as spatialised, intersubjective forces. Working through her methodology Drawing in-Space (DiSp), she produces affective cartographies — in-situ works that trace pre-reflective encounters between body and environment through gesture, pressure, and duration, foregrounding sensation and relational perception over representation.
Her practice operates across large-scale and wall-based drawing, collage, experimental animation, and public drawing projects. Exhibitions are composed as relational fields in which drawing shifts scale to test how atmospheric conditions operate across proximity, duration, and space. O'Toole's research is grounded in new phenomenology and environmental aesthetics, developed through practice-led doctoral research at Loughborough University (UK).
She has exhibited nationally and internationally across Ireland, the UK, Europe, and Australia, including Ormston House (EVA International), the Royal Hibernian Academy, FRISE Künstlerhaus Hamburg, DAS ESSZIMMER Bonn, CCA Derry–Londonderry, and the National Museum of Australia.
Alongside her studio practice, O'Toole lectures in Fine Art and MA (Creative Practice) at ATU Sligo and co-founded Drawing deCentred, an international platform for contemporary drawing discourse. Her writing appears in Project Anywhere IV (University of Melbourne / Parsons School of Design), Body, Space, Place in Collective and Collaborative Drawing (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), and Art, Connection, and Creative Encounters (Intellect / RMIT, forthcoming 2026).
CONTACT
ATU Sligo, Assistant Lecturer, MA Creative Practice: Kiera.otoole@atu.ie
Fine Art Doctoral Researcher, Loughborough University, UK: K.OToole@lboro.ac.uk
