// of sorts

Sorcha McNamara works as a painter, or more accurately as a maker of things.

But even ‘maker’ isn’t really the right word. It’s too organic, too suggestive of the handmade, or the nobility of a craft. Instead, she is more of a composer, a conductor – the person in front of the orchestra waving their arms about, whose function and purpose you may question, but you know are important for the stability of the whole piece.

Her approach to making things questions and challenges the structural conventions of material and spatial composition. She often works directly with the shape of the frame to draw attention to the devices that surround something, and in a wider sense, destabilise how visual information gets described, presented, contextualised and circulated.

Her choice of materials is relational and responsive to a given context, site, or situation, often using processes of layering, fragmentation and removal to make compositions that blur the boundaries between illusory space and built space.

In many ways, she has no urge to add anything more to the world, only to respond to what is discarded and construct new ways of looking at it – moving through an ongoing negotiation between language, materiality, image, and experience.