Micky Donnelly's art practice is exploratory and multilayered. His paintings, drawings, and installations are notable for their innovative and slightly ironic reworkings of familiar genres. They concern themselves with the poetic possibilities of everyday perception, and often include playful references to art history. His work resists a signature style, but employs various ongoing threads and connections, along with elements of chance, to maintain its distinctive momentum.
Referring mainly to themes of nature within culture, Donnelly frames the world as a series of contingent events and images that fleetingly capture our interest and then disappear, leaving behind a flux of sensations, memories, and associations. These allusive remnants often make little sense, but are, in fact, what constitute our awareness of place and identity.
Donnelly's works, in various media, offer representations that are rich in these fugitive associations. While they remain visually seductive, they are hard to pin down because they embrace uncertainty and ambiguity as part of their continual opening up to other possibilities.