Image 1 of 1
Image 1 of 1
Image 1 of 1
Image 1 of 1
O’Leary was born on a small farm in Wexford, Ireland. Her father’s early passing and mother’s sickness put the family at risk of loosing the farm. While keeping the farm afloat with her sisters, O’Leary learned feminism and patriarchy firsthand from a young age.
“The complexity and cruelty of the unreliable support structures and unreliable truths of that childhood haunt my practice, but they also supplied a ready armature for the language of painting.”
She attended the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and earned a BFA and MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. In 1991 she accepted a position at the School of Visual Arts at Penn State University where she continues to teach.
O’Leary’s current work focuses on three-dimensional art. She assembles elegant formulations of broken wood and stretched fiber into the gestural lyricism of reimagined sculptural paintings. Which she describes in her own words as “knitting with wood”. She uses bricolage and handicraft approaches to refashion older works, studio castoffs and diverse materials into abstract pieces that explore materials, language, remnants of the past, and the visual, cultural and emotional influences of origin.
She has been honored with the Rome Prize from The American Academy in Rome and, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. She has presented work at solo and group exhibitions internationally.
O’Leary was born on a small farm in Wexford, Ireland. Her father’s early passing and mother’s sickness put the family at risk of loosing the farm. While keeping the farm afloat with her sisters, O’Leary learned feminism and patriarchy firsthand from a young age.
“The complexity and cruelty of the unreliable support structures and unreliable truths of that childhood haunt my practice, but they also supplied a ready armature for the language of painting.”
She attended the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and earned a BFA and MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. In 1991 she accepted a position at the School of Visual Arts at Penn State University where she continues to teach.
O’Leary’s current work focuses on three-dimensional art. She assembles elegant formulations of broken wood and stretched fiber into the gestural lyricism of reimagined sculptural paintings. Which she describes in her own words as “knitting with wood”. She uses bricolage and handicraft approaches to refashion older works, studio castoffs and diverse materials into abstract pieces that explore materials, language, remnants of the past, and the visual, cultural and emotional influences of origin.
She has been honored with the Rome Prize from The American Academy in Rome and, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. She has presented work at solo and group exhibitions internationally.
