Elaine O'Dea is a visual artist living and working in Dublin, Ireland.
Boundaries create limits, interiors and exteriors, insides and outsides. Boundaries have borders, edges, thresholds — liminal spaces. O’Dea explores the relationship of the body and its surroundings, interrogating boundaries and spaces of conflict with a subtle gesture towards societal structures and the ways in which we move against and within those frameworks. O’Dea aims to highlight the influence of power dynamics and structures within patriarchal society from a female perspective. Her work challenges both the tangible and the intangible, the physical and the cognitive barriers that confine us and the divisions that are created and continuously perpetuated between one and other, subject and object, human and non human, leading to the fragmented nature of our world experience.
Drawn to the construction and materiality of the world around her, O’Dea’s believes materials have associations... with emotions, histories and memories. Her sculptural practice involves the manipulation of natural and man-made materials used in the building of homes and their interiors such as plaster, wood, steel, aluminium, copper, concrete, plastic and fabric. With this strong interest in form and material she builds, constructs and deconstructs, testing the relationship between the human body and object, manipulating her materials so as to play with the tension between the body and its surroundings and to create forms between the two. These sculptural forms become her subjects, semi organic, anthropomorphic entities and oddities that probe and prod, push and pull, challenging their boundaries. André Breton said ‘Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject’ and through mould making, casting, sculpting and material manipulation, O’Dea produces and reproduces her subjects — soft and hard, dark and light, inside and outside, human and non human.
Education
Master of Fine Arts
National College of Art and Design, Dublin
2021 - 2023
Bachelor of Fine Arts with Critical Cultures,
National College of Art and Design, Dublin
2016 - 2019
Sculpture and Expanded Practice — First Class Honours
Portobello Institute, Dublin
Diploma (RHODEC) Interior Design
1999 - 2000
Higher Diploma in Education
University College Dublin
1993 - 1994
Bachelor of Arts - Economics and Geography,
University College Dublin
1988 - 1991
Awards
Fire Station Artist’s Studio Sculpture Bursary Award, 2020
Group Exhibitions
2023
NCAD Works, Graduate Exhibition
NCAD Annex, Dublin 8
2022
Continuum
Irish Georgian Society, Dublin 2
Subjective Objects
BKB Visual Art Studios, Dublin 9
2021
AFFECT
BKB Visual Art Studios Dublin 9
2020
Fragility—Delicate Aspect and Precarious Presentation
BKB Visual Art Studios, Dublin 9
2019
Sculpture in Context 2019
National Botanic Gardens, Dublin 9
NCAD Works, Graduate Exhibition
NCAD, Dublin 8
2018
Sculpture in Context
National Botanic Gardens, Dublin 9
Disjunction
Eblana House, Dublin 8
Press
File Note IV, Fire Station Artist’s Studio publication, 2021