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 togetherwithin contemporary socio-ecological conditions.
Biography
Kiera O’Toole (b. 1977, Dublin) is an Irish artist working at the intersection of drawing, installation, and spatial practice. Her work investigates how atmospheric conditions are sensed through the felt body as spatialised, intersubjective forces, producing what she describes as affective cartographies — visual traces of encounters between body and environment. Through large-scale drawings, wall-based collage, experimental animation and public drawing projects. O’Toole explores how drawing registers atmospheric forces as spatial conditions of place, foregrounding movement, sensation, and relational perception rather than representation. Her work engages directly with specific sites and places, translating the emotional and sensory qualities of place through gesture, mark, colour, and spatial composition.
O’Toole’s research is informed by phenomenology, particularly new phenomenology and environmental aesthetics, and draws from her practice-led doctoral research at Loughborough University (UK). She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with projects spanning Ireland, the UK, Europe, and Australia, including presentations at Ormston House (as part of 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, she lectures in Fine Art at Atlantic Technological University (ATU) Sligo, delivers seminars and talks in academic and curatorial contexts, and co-leads the Drawing deCentered artist collective. 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), with forthcoming work in Art, Connection, and Creative Encounters: Mapping Social Imaginaries in Uncertain Times (Intellect / RMIT, 2026). Her work contributes to expanded understandings of drawing as an experiential, relational, and spatial medium.
CONTACT
ATU Sligo, Assistant Lecturer, MA Creative Practice: Kiera.otoole@atu.ie
Fine Art Doctoral Researcher, Loughborough University, UK: K.OToole@lboro.ac.uk