Patricia Burns : Morning Commute

Morning Commute has evolved from previous bodies of work exploring the subject of home. It begins with the largest paintings, which depict the trees outside the artist's house and act almost as portraits. Seen on dark, early mornings when Burns leaves her home to start her working day, they appear in relatively sharp focus - stationary except for the movement of crows and seagulls through their branches. As she drives past the suburbs and out of the city the pace quickens, with small incidental details and the horizontal lines of telegraph wires picked out against the lightening sky above a blur of tail lights, thickets of conifer and bare winter branches. These smaller paintings are of ambiguous invented places, layered compilations of landscapes recorded subconsciously by Burns' mind's eye as she moves away from the defined security of home and out into the world beyond.

Reviewing her previous exhibition, Dublin Paintings, in The Irish Times in 2016, Aidan Dunne noted that "Burns paints with increasing skill and assurance, suggesting things rather than spelling them out. Mist and dampness are pervasive... [and] the unknown, the incalculable, always lingers at the borders of her painting." Mysterious in-between spaces, neither urban nor rural, recur frequently in her work. Anywhere and nowhere, familiar but not, they allow the viewer to project their own lived experience onto the paintings while simultaneously accompanying the artist on her travels.

Born in Dublin, Patricia Burns studied Fine Art at Dublin Institute of Technology and Crawford College of Art + Design, Cork. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Taylor Galleries, Dublin (2016, 2014); Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford (2012); Triskel Arts Centre, Cork (2011); Vanguard Gallery, Cork (2008); and the Ashford Gallery, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2007). In 2013 she received the ESB Silver Medal for her painting in the RHA Annual Exhibition, followed by the Whyte's Award in 2015. She has also exhibited in the Summer Exhibition at London's Royal Academy on several occasions. Burns' work is represented in corporate and private collections throughout Ireland and in the public collections of AIB Group, AXA Insurance, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, NUI Galway, and the OPW / State Art Collection, amongst others. She lives and works in Cork, and a second solo exhibition of her work takes place at the Lavit Gallery, Cork in March/April 2019.