Janet Mullarney was born in Dublin in 1952. She studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti and Scuola Professionale di Intaglio in Florence and divided her time between Italy, where she lived and worked in the Tuscan countryside, and Ireland. Janet died in April 2020.
Her work encompasses a wide range of media, and while the influence of medieval wood carving is strongly felt, her sculptures often feature a combination of bronze, foam, glass, rubber, papier maché, textiles, terracotta, plaster and wax as well as wood.
References to religious iconography and art history are ever-present in her work, and the ambiguous creatures Mullarney creates preserve a sense of the sacred while looking to the animal kingdom as a metaphor for personal human relationships.
Janet Mullarney received the Irish-American Cultural Instute's O'Malley Award in 2005 and the Pollock Krasner Award in 1998. A member of Aosdána, she was elected as a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. Mullarney has exhibited her work extensively in both Italy and Ireland. A major touring exhibition, MY MIND'S I, travelled to Highlanes Gallery, the Butler Gallery, Wexford Arts Centre and F.E. McWiliam Galery & Studio in 2016-17, and IMMA presented a survey exhibition of her work from the 1980s to 2018. Mullarney's work is represented in the public collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, The Arts Council, the OPW / State Art Collection, Limerick City Gallery of Art, AIB and Royal