Aileen Conroy Artist

                      

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Aileen Conroy is an artist whose work stems from the personal and personal experience. Her work looks deals with identity and how the conscious and unconscious states of being affect them both as an artist and a woman. Her work is grounded in reality yet there is a surreal nature about their figures which often appear as fragmented, isolated figures. The figures in her work display the fragility of the human condition and the conflict which exists between the inner self and the outer identity. She looks at how identity can be constructed and can be deconstructed through the fragility of the human condition and also explore the isolation which can exist whilst trying to remain true to oneself as an artist. Her own individual struggles with their own originality as an artist and the struggle existing to push against becoming a mediocre product of her immediate circumstance and environment which has often held her back in their struggle to be artists. There is an honest narrative like a self portrait, autobiographical nature to her work and it can be captured through observational drawing and painting as well as drawing inspiration from photography as well as more recently monotypes and etching.

Her work is primarily associated with the search for an individual truth amid the collective mire of uncertainties that characterize the contemporary character. The figures in her work seem to retreat into a surrealistic, immaterial landscape that is at once shelter and ephemeral – a kind of inner mind palace transposed into an analogue of the natural world. But within this seeming closed system, a different truth begins to emerge, one of an ideal synthesis between humankind and the natural order. Perhaps when people stop striving in the name of progress and just exist in the moment the ‘real’ world begins to manifest around them from the rush of the everyday and becomes the sanctuary that they never fully appreciated or knew existed.