Cornelia O’Donovan

“When I was a child, my sister and I would spend days making paper cardboard houses, sometimes whole villages – using toothpaste lids to make light bulbs, scraps of fabric for curtains, making interior worlds.

That feeling never left me and still today I work with the idea of making something from nothing. It is fascinating, entirely insular and personal, but speaks of today and time, and is a female voice. The first drawings and scribbles are stiff, then after I am relaxed enough, they begin to be playful. I work without judging or editing and it seems to pour out. I find the process of setting up, layering colour down, cutting up and arranging shapes totally absorbing.

The time I spend working is a complete other world, a time to reflect and map out dreams, nightmares, my fears, and obsessions. The images sometimes repeat themselves, playing out different roles and interpreting the same meaning again and again – images from the stories I collect, my own and other people’s lives, from film, paintings, poems, and myths.