Appraisals
The connection between the body and the earth seems to speak out from these paintings. There is a cross current of stress, not in the negative sense of overwrought, but in the positive sense of a force through which transformation can occur. The kind of stress which holds you up and allows you to grow.
Professor Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Founding Director, Irish World Music Centre, and former Chairman of Culture Ireland
Catriona O'Connor's paintings enabled me to see stone, in landscape or as sculpture or monument, in an entirely new way. Her exploration of the colours and tones inherent in stone was a revelation to me, as I had thought of stone as basically monochrome. Catriona's paintings realise how stone is part of a whole landscape of vibrant colour. Its colour and form in her work are an echo of that landscape, and a celebration of its richness, that truly makes the stone sing.
Paddy Bushe, Poet
Catriona O'Connor's paintings of the west coast of Ireland are cold to the bone and are correctly Atlantean in feeling. The greys, browns and blues of her watered-colours evoke an atmosphere only present in Ireland; the meeting of northern and southern worlds through the European Irish eye. This is the world of the primitive, of ancient conquest and discovery and of the true nature of the Irish who have been through history holistic, refusing to reduce experience into separate parts.
Samuel Walsh, Artist and Art critic