Patricia Killeen met with renowned Irish artist Mary-Ruth Walsh at the Centre Culturel Irlandais during her three-month residency. They spoke about the residency, her work and her love of Paris.

Mary-Ruth’s art practice explores all kinds of buildings and how architecture affects the way we move and behave in the urban environment. She also sees architecture as part of our identity. Her explorations are realized in drawing, painting, filmmaking, sculpture-installation, critical writing and occasionally performance.

She constructs imagined proposals exploring ideas relating to the built environment and contemporary culture. The theatrical aspect of how the art is displayed both juxtapositions and parallels architecture using seductive surfaces that lead the viewers in. Her art objects or ‘architectural proposals’ (which she names: ‘Guerrilla Architecture’) are often placed in undocumented spaces. The work engenders ideas of why and for who the space is created.

A recent award enabled her to explore architecture and its relation to the human body in her body of work entitled SKIN DEEP. Perceiving the architectural skin of contemporary corporate buildings as sheer, smooth, and ageless she explored contemporary desire for human skin to also be sheer, smooth and ageless.

https://www.maryruthwalsh.org/

https://www.centreculturelirlandais.com/en/whats-on/artist-in-residence

https://www.maryruthwalsh.org/shop

Instagram: @maryruthwalsh