Artist Biography

Esther O’Kelly is an Irish visual artist from Wexford, based in Belfast. Working primarily in paint, she creates large-scale abstract landscapes shaped by memory, movement, and embodied experience. Her practice explores the intersection of landscape, abstraction, and storytelling, drawing on fieldwork and emotional engagement with place to examine disorientation, transformation, and shifting perspectives.

Rooted in remembered landscapes, her work reflects the layered experiences we carry — whether formed during a single walk, across a lifetime, or through generations. Through gestural mark-making, O’Kelly considers what it means to lose one’s bearings and how disorientation can open new ways of seeing. For her, getting lost can become part of finding a way forward.

A graduate of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, O’Kelly holds both a BDes and a BA (Hons) (1998). Her work has been exhibited widely across Ireland, the UK, and internationally, including selection for the Ballinglen Museum of Art Biennial 2025. Recent projects include a solo exhibition at Pigyard Gallery, Wexford, and a project space at Ranelagh Arts, Dublin, where exhibition-making was combined with public talks and workshops.

She is represented by Canvas Gallery, Belfast. Her work is held in the Guinness Storehouse Collection, Dublin, The Dead Rabbit Collection, New York, and in private collections worldwide. O’Kelly has received support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the British Council, and CCA x Jerwood.

Alongside her studio practice, she is a founding member and former vice-chair of Vault Artist Studios, Belfast — a community of over 100 multidisciplinary artists — where she continues to support artist-led infrastructure and community development. She was a guest speaker at the Visual Artists Ireland Get Together National Conference 2025.

O’Kelly currently works from her independent studio in East Belfast.