Julie Breathnach-Banwait: Cloch, Críoch agus Croíleacán' - Rock, Realm and Root
My practice is rooted in paint—bold, expansive and unapologetically vibrant. I create large scale works that serve as a dialogue between the landscapes that shaped me and the ones that continue to shape me now. Each canvas is a kind of remembering, a way of tracing the emotional and sensory imprint of place. I am drawn to the environment not just as subject, but as collaborator. The land speaks in colour, texture and rhythm and I respond with gesture and pigment. My work is an attempt to translate that conversation—to make visible the invisible threads of connection that bind us to the earth and to each other.
Painting is how I listen and observe and learn. It’s how I reconcile distance and belonging, memory and presence. Through scale and saturation, I seek to evoke the immensity of feeling that comes from standing still in a place and knowing it deeply. My motivation is not just to represent the land, but to inhabit it—to let it move through me and onto the surface as a form of release and ultimately peace. My work is always about connection and connecting to land, to self and to the quiet truths that emerge when we pay attention and stand still in a world I perceive as rotating too fast.
I am firstly inspired by colour always and I feel my pieces are bold and vibrant in terms of colour. I find art, all types of art, to be soothing and grounding. We are all creative beings and beings that need to create. Creating art is a survival instinct and a way to make sense of the world. It is also to gain understanding and to connect with the beauty of the physical earth around us, its people and its creatures. Creating art is a way to focus on beauty, which can be exhilarating and comforting. Looking for beauty in the world is a worthwhile endeavour and can in turn calm us, soothe us and comfort us and indeed connect us with ourselves.
Julie Breathnach-Banwait is a Chartered Psychologist, bilingual artist and poet/prose-poet and a member of the Tinteán Editorial Collective, who has built a distinctive literary artistic and psychological career whilst living in Australia. Her work bridges Irish cultural memory with contemporary bilingual expression and she is widely published across Ireland, Australia and the U.S. Her poetry moves between Irish and English with an ease that reflects her lived experience of bilingualism. Themes of belonging, memory, migration and the emotional architecture of landscape recur throughout her collections, including Dánta Póca (Pocket Poems), Ar Thóir Gach Ní (In Search of Everything), Cnámha Scoilte (Split Bones) and Ó Chréanna Eile (From Other Earths). Her most recent collections Hiopnagóige/Hypnagogia and Gealach Chúlchríche (Bush Moon) are imminent and contains elements of her art.
Alongside her writing, Breathnach-Banwait creates visual art that echoes the same sensibilities: layered, textural pieces that explore the porous boundaries between place and self. Her artwork often incorporates natural forms, loud palettes and subtle symbolic motifs, extending the emotional terrain of her poetry into a tactile, visual dimension. Together, her words and images form a body of work deeply rooted in heritage yet continually shaped by movement and reinvention. She has exhibited pieces in Tasmania, Western Australia and in Queensland (Logan Art Gallery and Logan City Council). Julie studied art as part of her pedagogical training at university and later expanded her practice through a series of evening classes in sculpture and pottery offered by vocational education programs in Dublin, Ireland.
Selected artworks will be available to purchase through the Box Office.
Opening Night:
Friday 3 July | 6pm - 8pm
Exhibition Open:
Monday 6 July - Friday 24 July | 10am - 3pm
Excluding Saturdays, Sundays and Public Holidays.