About

Biography

Majella Clancy is an artist and lecturer in BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. She gained her MFA at Ulster University, Belfast (2006) and later completed a practice led PhD that examined gendered space through paint and print practice also at Ulster University (2012). Recent exhibitions include: IMPACT 11, UWE Bristol, (2022), Structure, QSS Gallery Belfast (2022), Future Forward, QSS Gallery, Belfast and MART, Dublin (2022). How the Image Echoes, Ulster University Gallery, Belfast (2020) and PSSquared, Belfast (2019), prINT, invited artist, Munsterland Print Festival, Kloster Bentlage, Rheine, Germany (2019), Impact 10 International Printmaking Conference, Santander, Spain (2018). Recent and forthcoming publications include: Clancy, M. Felmingham, S. ‘Drawing Out: Encounter, Resistance, Collaboration’ in Drawing Research Theory Practice, Intellect, UK, (2019), Clancy, M. ‘The Thinking I: Self, Materiality and Paint Practice’, in Teaching Painting: A Publication, Cambridge Scholar, UK, (2020). Forthcoming exhibitions include: Impact 11, International Printmaking Exhibition, Hong Kong (Sept 2020), BPW@ Strule Arts Centre, Northern Ireland (2020).

Artist Statement

My practice is hybrid in its approach encompassing collage, paint, screenprint and inkjet prints. It takes as its starting point found ephemera and material references that come out of an Irish rural experience and in particular their relationship to ideas of home and gendered space. Bearing the history of their own making the paintings appear as pseudo landscapes held together by quasi-architectural fragments and semi-familiar forms. The materiality of making in the studio is held within the work where references to a stage-set or performed space is also played out. Reoccurring motifs imply a support structure, roof, shelter, table, shield or portal and travel from one painting to another activating painted space, refusing any fixed interpretation. Structure is considered here as both a noun and a verb, an object and an action, held in a shifting space of painting. In my more recent work, ideas of working ‘from’ a (gendered) body takes on a more prominent role where I am thinking about what it feels like to occupy a body.

The artist acknowledges funding support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland