Victim

“She has always been a figurative painter, and like all the others spent many years in an unfashionable limbo until abstraction relinquished its hold on critical minds. She came to terms with that situation by sticking to her guns and painting the way she wanted to. She responded to a six-year stint teaching in the Bone in much the same way. Instead of painting the ‘main event’, i.e: the bombings and destruction she painted the people who in general took no active part in it. She did a series of paintings of the children she taught and the women she met.

Most of the work was bought by the women of the area. It included works like ‘Lizzie Mulvenna’ and ‘Victim’. In the 1970s the landscape or background tended to dominate her work. The figures took on a sense of isolation, particularly in paintings of women living in areas like the Bone. She portrayed these women as passive individuals in a landscape of deprivation and violence.”

Anne Davey Orr, Art Column, Fortnight Magazine, 27th May - 9th June, 1985