Louise West is a Fine Art Gradute from the National College of Art and Design. West has a background in animation and painting and has recently spent three years on the Turps Mentorship Programme. She has exhibited in both Ireland and the UK in galleries such as; The Royal Academy Belfast, Crawford Art Gallery, Draíocht Art Gallery, The Mermaid Arts Centre, Mura Ma Artspace in Manchester, The Elysium Gallery Swansea, Courthouse Gallery, The RHA Dublin and th Mall Galleries , London.West has recently been awarded the Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award and a Culture Ireland Bursary. She has been Longlisted for the Beep Painting Biennial 2024 and the Jackson’s Art Prize 2025. She was previously selected as the 14th (reserve) artist on the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year Award in Ireland and has completed a residency in The Tyrone Guthrie Centre. She was published as a part of Artrepreneur’s Orange Book (New York) and the Arts to Hearts Magazine issue 9.West has been reviewed in The Irish Times (Aidan Dunne)and The Cork Examiner (Crawford Open).West is currently showing six paintings at the Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries, invited by Rosie Millard.
Aveum
Mura Ma Artspace Manchester
West’s body of work entitled Aevum explored the genre of Still Life. Created as a response to the lockdown during the pandemic West found solace in the objects she had to hand to create domestic assembalages. The work repurposes keepsakes, postcards and photographs handed down from previous generations of the women in her family. The paintings depict worthless souvenirs , simple and often broken, that connect the artist to their aura of hope, aspiration and pride that they held in the feminine dwellings that they inhabited.
The title of this body of work refers to the Aevum referenced by Norman Bryson in his essay “ Still Life in the Feminine Space” in the book “ Looking at the Overlooked”. Bryson
“ The forms of still Life are strong enough to make the difference between brutal existance and human life: without them there is no continuity of generations, no human legacy; only flickering chaos; with them there is cultural memory and family, an authentically civilised world.
In the Stratum of Western sites unearths variations on the same basic ideas, of storage jar, oil lamp, beaker , vase. Such objects belong to the aevum , time which has a beginning but no end. Their forms keep solutions to particular material problems on permanent reserve and when the same material pressures that first brought them into being are felt agan along a path that connects the past to the future need.”
Moiety
The Mall Galleries, London
Moiety is a small body of work that extends from “Aevum” to realise the familiar assemblages in West’s previous work substituting postcard backgrounds for dream scapes.