About
Artist Statement- Biography- Contact- CV
Artist Statement
WHERE WE ARE MATTERS
I am an Irish visual artist whose practice positions drawing as experience before thought. Working through my methodology Drawing in-Space (DiSp), I treat drawing as a phenomenological and spatial act that registers atmospheric conditions through bodily attunement. My work is grounded in the conviction that we are not separate from the world, but sensorially and materially entangled within it.
My works do not represent place or personal emotion. They function as affective cartographies — registrations of how spatial forces impress upon the felt body prior to interpretation. Each drawing arises through sustained attention to perception, pressure, drift, and interruption, tracing how the spatialised feelings of atmosphere act upon and with the body. These works emerge through in-situ engagement with specific places and environmental situations.
My practice moves between small-scale drawings and collages and large-scale spatial works, including wall-based and public drawings, allowing acts of attention to extend into architectural, exhibition, and public contexts. I compose exhibitions as relational fields in which drawing tests how atmospheric conditions operate across proximity, duration, and space.
The body functions as a register through which spatial forces are sensed and negotiated. Drawing operates for me as a practice of noticing — slowing perception and reattuning attention to the affective and material conditions that shape everyday experience. Rather than producing atmospheric environments, my work makes perceptible the often-invisible forces acting upon and with the body, positioning drawing as a sustained practice of aesthetic attention to how bodies, spaces, and environments are bound together within contemporary socio-ecological conditions.
Biography
Kiera O’Toole (b. 1977, Dublin) is an Irish visual artist based in Ireland. Her practice centres on drawing as a phenomenological and spatial act, developed through sustained studio practice, research, and international exhibition. She is currently completing a PhD in Creative Arts at Loughborough University.
Working across small- and large-scale drawings, collages, wall-based and public drawings, and experimental animation, O’Toole investigates how drawing registers atmospheric conditions as spatial forces rather than representing place. Her methodology, Drawing in-Space (DiSp), positions drawing as an experiential and attentional practice that operates across architectural, exhibition, and public contexts.
Her work has been exhibited in Ireland and internationally, including at Ormston House (as part of EVA International), Royal Hibernian Academy, FRISE Künstlerhaus, DAS ESSZIMMER, CCA Derry-Londonderry, and National Museum of Australia.
Alongside exhibitions, O’Toole has delivered seminars and talks in academic and curatorial contexts, and her writing has been published in Project Anywhere IV (University of Melbourne / Parsons School of Design) and Body, Space, Place in Collective and Collaborative Drawing (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). She is a professional member of Visual Artists Ireland and co-founder of Drawing deCentred.
CONTACT
ATU Sligo, Assistant Lecturer, MA Creative Practice: Kiera.otoole@atu.ie
Fine Art Doctoral Researcher, Loughborough University, UK: K.OToole@lboro.ac.uk