Bio

Emma O’Hara is a visual artist based in Cork City, Ireland. She graduated with a BA majoring in Printmaking in Contemporary Practice from the Limerick School of Art and Design (2016). O’Hara was awarded the Cork Printmakers 12-month Bursary (2016) where she has continued to hone & expand her visual practice. She has exhibited in numerous National and International exhibitions and he work has been collected by a number of private and public collections including the Crawford Art Gallery. Emma was also the recipient of the 2021 & 2022 Arts Council Agility award. 

O’Hara’s most recent Solo exhibition “Strangers we will stay” took place in So Fine Art editions, powers court town house, Dublin in March 2023 . Emma Recently completed a two month residency in August and September of 2022 with Rimbun Dahan Arts Centre in Kuala Lumper, Malaysia.

Artists Statement

Rooted in escapism and personal ecology, my practice manifests through bold, colourful, abstracted dreamscapes realised through paper and clay. Layers of memory, expectation, and reality intersect—where what we once imagined, what we’ve built, and what we’re still figuring out collide.

Through expressive mark-making and fluid, abstract landscapes, I obscure the mundanity of daily life, evoking a dreamlike state of dissociation, longing, and reflection. My recent studio developments have shifted my practice towards exploring personal narratives and exploring the quiet frustrations of adulthood.

Feeling lost and overwhelmed yet seeking escape, my work becomes a reckoning—a space where imagination can thrive despite the constraints of modern society. It incorporates imagery that emerges from unconscious to conscious: memory, emotion, symbols, figures, and shapes that range from wholesome to sarcastic and resentful.

These layered visual languages become landscapes of contradiction and contemplation—expressions of what it means to be both present and elsewhere.