Siobhan McNutt is a Galway-based visual artist whose practice moves fluidly between drawing, painting and printmaking. A graduate of Central Saint Martins, London, and the Limerick School of Art & Design, she worked internationally in design for over a decade before returning to focus on her studio practice. Her work is held in private collections across Ireland and internationally, and she currently teaches drawing and design at the Galway Technical Institute.
Siobhan’s current work explores abstract painting and drawing as a means of cultivating presence through an intuitive, open-ended engagement with her chosen media. Her practice responds to the behaviour of her materials, where mark-making and gesture become conduits of both form and meaning. Rooted in a dissatisfaction with systems of control and subjugation – over the environment, its resources and its species – her practice proposes an alternative orientation: releasing the urge to dominate what lies outside the self, and instead cultivating inner attentiveness and discipline.
Her work reflects on the puzzle of how to be in the world as both an individual and a fragment of a greater whole, within a culture shaped by the illusion of separation. Through abstract compositions, she examines the interdependence of animate and inanimate forces, tracing how forms, materials and encounters continuously shape one another.
This hybrid practice of painting and printmaking becomes a meditation on balance: between order and chance, freedom and restraint, rhythm and repetition, the individual and the collective. Her work celebrates the physical act of painting and prioritises the body’s sensory intelligence over intellect.
Attentive to the haptic and proprioceptive (the body’s sense of self-movement, force and position), Siobhan’s work seeks to make visible a lighter, more reciprocal way of being in the world.