The Female Image Claimed

Exhibition Opening June 26th 7.30pm

Open weekly Wed-Sat 10am-4pm until end of August 2026

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In my work I explore what women carry quietly – memories, gestures and unseen stories. The starting point for this exhibition was my urge to respond with my own work to some hand finished prints by John Ferrera that I have had for many years. An even greater urge was to be in the good company of artist and poet Jo Slade while I painted and fought my way through this response.  

These portraits by John Ferrera are quiet, composed - head and shoulders of women who hold more than they show.  

I first met John in his studio in an old mill in Southbridge MA over 20 years ago, an art space packed with work of many themes. It was his hand finished prints of women that immediately caught my eye, large eyes, bruised lips, solitary.

My response was both emotional and visual, something in them tugged at me, as if I’d met them before. It took a while to recognise that echo but I believe it was anchored in a photograph of my grandmother Margaret D’arcy Rainsford.  It was taken with her in a similar pose, and of course that graceful stance of feminine composure was all too familiar in my own lineage.  I wanted to tell a story that was never fully shown, the cost behind being polite in our distress but also the wisdom of knowing and celebrating our feminine truth. 

I was imagining the rest of these women, the curve of a waist, the shape of a foot. I believe I imagined the women in frocks with gloves and fans, handbags and hats.  Poised and carefully contained, I’m of an era where I struggled with gloves –warmth or  touch withheld or the etiquette of distance. Fans- handy on holidays or concealment and the controlled release of emotion.  I wanted to explore beneath that surface, the tension between appearance and rebellion.  Where better, (for me anyway) to play with these ideas than in the landscape, in nature, but also in my own home and with the photographs, heirlooms and memories I have gathered over decades. 

 My work reclaims what is unseen, the inconvenient truths, the erasing of truth, the poetic portrayal of loss and betrayal.  I’m right there in the middle of it!  But it also celebrates what is beyond that composure for those brave enough to want to accompany as an equal. If those composed faces in Ferrera’s prints are what we show to the world then what lies beyond composure could be the things we hide:  disappointment, anger, uncertainty, joy, fear or wonder.  Maybe what we dread or lack courage in is to stand up, fully human in the presence of others. Or our dread possibly is in their response to our courage. 

After Ferrera these ladies were waiting. I hope you find something of your own story in our responses, which are shaped by many years of living, creating and experiencing life as women and artists.

~ GC

When my friend, the artist Gerry Carew gave me four prints by John Ferrera and asked me if I could respond in my work to his work, in whatever way I wished, I was doubtful I could. I can admire the quiet, seductive beauty of his prints. I can see how his prints please the eye, their soft colours, their carefully contained likenesses, their uniformity which comfort the viewer. These images of women never challenge or disturb; they appear to me to be almost transparent — therefore non-existent. They are exotic, decorative, invitational images of silenced women. What I mean is that I felt the artist had rendered the images of these women as devoid of individuality, of identity. I didn’t feel any immediate urgency to respond. But an old anger, a dis-comfort began to emerge, and I think ultimately it is to that latent anger that I have responded. But also, to a desire to find the transformative possibilities of the poetic in painting, to present alternative narratives that question ways of seeing. 

We live in a time of a proliferation of images, of mass-media and the visibility of male depictions of the objectified female body. I wanted these women to participate in their fate, not to be passive victims of beauty, of the gaze, not to be silenced. There is still, even after the progress that has been made for women in all aspects of life, the necessity to reconfigure the female voice within contemporary discourse. The motivation, the challenge was to attempt to find or to give them identity through the materiality of paint. To delve deeper to find traces of their individual characters, to explore perception, memory and experience through abstract painting. To open a window into “the quiet theatre of femininity” (Gerry Carew)  

I’m a painter and a poet. My interest is in the languages of paint and the written word. Both are connected parallel processes; both are continually in conversation. I am interested to explore the human head as a subject in painting, to discover the face behind the face and through a layering of paint and gestural brushwork to investigate the depth of the subject’s experience and emotions. 

The abstract paintings are felt reactions to the real and imagined narratives of women’s inner lives. They are passionate, physical expressions, tied to the body, that seek to capture raw emotion in motion. They are the traces left behind in moments of unguarded creativity. My focus is on allowing the body to lead, allowing instinct and gesture to guide the marks on the surface. It is visceral work tied to the physicality of painting, where the act becomes a dance between passion and presence.

~ JS

Gerry Carew is an artist and art therapist and owner of At 6s & 7s Gallery in Tipperary Town. She studied at the Limerick School of Art and Design and Crawford Art College Cork. Recently retired from UHL Department of Psychiatry where she worked as senior art therapist for over 30 years Gerry believes in the value and joy of art ‘Art isn’t something separate from daily life – its woven into how we see, feel and make sense of the world. Gerry has had a number of exhibitions in Ireland , her most recent work was exhibited in Perugia Italy as part of the 2024 Art Therapy Biennale.  The female in the landscape is a reoccurring theme in her work.

Jo Slade is a poet, and a multimedia artist. She lives and works in Limerick. Studied at the Limerick School of Art & Design, The National College of Art and the University of Limerick. Jo has exhibited her paintings, sculptures and installations widely in Ireland, France and Italy in both solo and group shows. Her work is included in private collections in the UK, France, Italy and Ireland and in National Collections. Her most recent solo exhibition Nostos, an exhibition of paintings, sculptures & assemblages was in The Courthouse Gallery Ennistymon Co.Clare 2020. She is the author of seven collections of poetry and two chapbooks of poems. Her new poetry collection, O N C E, was published by Salmon Poetry, in March 2025.

Joh Ferrera | Southbridge MA, USA.

A Journeyman Artist is how he describes himself, John has worked for over 7o years with a variety of creative mediums, drawing, watercolour, ink, print, pastel, sculpture and photography. A truly prolific artist who has explored a variety of themes from nature, the sea, to birds and animals. Figurative, portrait and oriental themes are a small selection of what had inspired him through his long creative life.  His illustrations have been inspired by characters in the Civil War and all of Dickens characters.