Eileen Mulrooney

Eileen Mulrooney has been a member of KCAT studio since 2005. Eileen has shown widely in Ireland and internationally 

Eileen works primarily in water-based oils and sometimes in pencil, often exploring how the built environment and the natural world intersect. Many of her works feature locations and contexts that she feels a personal connection with, such as places that she has lived, worked, and visited. She also makes drawings and paintings of various domestic and wild animals.  

 In addition, Eileen makes portraits of family and friends, including a compelling series of portraits of KCAT colleagues. However, her paintings frequently capture evidence of human existence without directly portraying people. For example, the work Cuan House, Castle Street, Carrick-on-Suir (2022) depicts chairs placed around a garden table, giving a sense that people have only just moved off or are just about to arrive. Sometimes evidence of human existence is captured as though the artist is standing back at a distance. For example, rooftops are depicted in the middle ground of the painting Ballytobin Area (2019), with the buildings almost hidden by well manicured trees and hedges. 

 This sense of standing back from a scene and capturing traces of human existence perhaps emerges because of the way that Eileen takes photographs to work from in the studio. She often takes a discrete approach to photography that may be borne from a somewhat shy approach to artmaking, where the capturing of source imagery occurs in private and out of sight of others.