CV
Elizabeth Kinsella is an Irish multidisciplinary artist and educator whose practice spans drawing, printmaking, bookmaking, and extended painting, exploring pattern, repetition, and historic textile traditions. She was born in Meath and lives in Sligo.

Educated at The Belfast School of Art, University of Ulster, she received the Spectrum Painting Prize Graduate Award for her Fine Art Degree Exhibition and the Peter Moores Foundation Scholarship for her MFA studies.

Recent invited solo exhibitions include Then and Now at Limerick City Museum in 2024, responding to Limerick Lace as part of the museum’s collection, and Stack at Solas Gallery, Leitrim in 2023.

In the last four years, Kinsella has been a finalist in The John Richardson Foundation Residency Award, sponsored by the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris and Hambly and Hambly Gallery, Northern Ireland, and was long listed for the UK Beep Painting Prize in 2024.

Her recent group exhibitions include Inside Out, Drawingbox International at Leitrim Sculpture Centre; An Flintean, The Folded Land, Ballina Fringe Festival; St Brigid’s Well at the Irish Embassy, Beijing; and Mining | Matter, NINE Collective at Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo.

As a member of Floating World Artists Book Collective, Kinsella has exhibited in Unfolding the Archive (response to the NIVAL Collection) at NCAD Gallery, Dublin, as well as at FE McWilliams Gallery, Northern Ireland, and Bank Street Gallery, Sheffield, UK. She has also exhibited artists’ books individually and as part of NINE Collective, including the Art Book Fair, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin.

Kinsella Lecturers Drawing and Printmaking on the Fine art degree programme at Atlantic technological university Sligo. She is a member of Pulled Print Studio, Sligo, and Black Church Print Studio, Dublin and is a member of Drawingbox since 2020.

Artist statement
In this ongoing series, Kinsella employs silkscreen techniques to create unique, hand drawn prints. These monoprints draw inspiration from natural environments, with a particular focus on trees, developing imagery based on leaves and flowers. These simplified forms reference historic wallpaper, creating an abstract interpretation of place.

Kinsella draws directly onto the screen, with elements hand drawn as stencils. She also makes marker drawings on transparencies, which are used to produce photo silkscreen stencils. Line and gesture remain central, with each mark retaining a directness that carries through the process. Within this series, leaf forms are built up through multiple silkscreened layers. The compositions evolve through deliberate misregistration and the offsetting of shapes across varied colour applications, creating dense, vibrant surfaces with heightened and intensified colour, where each layer responds to the last.

The final stage introduces a grid structure that emerges from and partially obscures the underlying imagery, leaving behind traces and echoes of earlier stages. Areas of density and openness shift across the surface, with darker overlays at times consolidating the image into more defined, branch like forms. Each phase of the process remains responsive and spontaneous, with technical decisions shaped by preceding layers and colour interactions, resulting in a form of drawing through colour layering.