o t h e r w i s e - Cléa van der Grijn

Opening Saturday 16th January, 3pm

Cléa van der Grijn is an internationally award-winning visual artist, filmmaker and screenwriter based in Sligo. Working across painting, experimental film, site-specific installation and sculpture, her practice explores memory, transformation, temporality and the psychological spaces between presence and absence.

o t h e r w i s e has been curated specifically for Esker, bringing together paintings spanning more than ten years of van der Grijn’s practice with digitally embroidered counterparts and film. Her paintings are process-oriented compositions, often deconstructed and reformed to reveal traces of their own histories. The embroidered works retrace and reinterpret these vivid forms, introducing a comparative fragility and extending her exploration of transience, repetition and recognition.

Van der Grijn has exhibited internationally for over forty years, in Ireland, Britain, Europe  and the USA. Her films have received numerous international awards, showing in film festivals throughout the world , with JUMP acquired by the Irish Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection in 2021. Her subsequent films include FLUX, The Disembodied Adventures of Alice and ELISA IN WONDERLAND.

Her practice has received significant support from the Arts Council of Ireland and Culture Ireland. In 2023 she received the Arts Council’s €250,000 Authored Works Award to create ELISA IN WONDERLAND, which premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh and screened at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin.

Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including IMMA, the Arts Council of Ireland, the Office of Public Works and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Exhibition runs until Saturday 27th March