Sorca O’ Farrell is a landscape artist from Howth, Co. Dublin. She is a graduate of N.C.A.D. Dublin.
Her work is represented in the public art collections of; The National Gallery of Ireland, the Allied Irish Bank Collection, The Office of Public Works, Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council, The Department of Transport Northern Ireland, along with many private collections both in Ireland and overseas.
Awards include the Drawing Prize at the Royal Ulster Academy, the Cairde Visual/Hamilton Gallery award, the Fingal Council ‘graphics studio’ award. Her work has been included in the exhibition ‘A Celebration of Drawing’ at the National Gallery of Ireland. She has also exhibited at many Royal Hibernian Academy’s (RHA) annual exhibition’s, The Royal Ulster Academy (RUA), and many other group and solo shows.
A sense of place – the work.
“Her current work is a direct and emotional response to the landscape close to where she lives, a place with many memories. It is a living connection to family, and to the past and the present. In essence, it is a place for the artist, beyond what we can touch. It is rooted in her emotional core, emblematic and evergreen, living trees standing mute and noble like sentinels that bookend her life from childhood to middle years.
She works with charcoal, built up, fixed and layered, burnished to a velvety sheen, enhanced by ink, and punctuated by pastel hues to convey a rich and atmospheric sense of place. The deliberate use of black and white is a constant, as it suggests memory better than the lure of colour.
O’Farrell’s quest is to harvest a visual landscape of the soul; to register how a sense of place, a sense of memory and a sense of meaning can override this simple translation of the visual facts. It is a veritas over verisimilitude, truth over description.”
(Ref; James Hanley RHA, Aosdana, writing about Sorca’s work in The Irish Arts Review)
