Cardboard People: exhibition texts

 

This exhibition was my first solo, painting-only exhibition. It got its name from the fact that I paint on cardboard that I rob from my retail job and that the only thing that I am interested in painting are people. The people I paint are friends and family, kitschy celebrities and crime scene photos.

This exhibition was curated by Sadbh Maher and the following photographs were taken by Caoilinn O'Neill.

He Plays Guitar While I Sing Lou Reed 

2026. Acrylic + gouache on cardboard. 

Based on a recurring dream I have about people I no longer know and my dog who lives with my parents but always knows when I am sick.

My Godfather 

2025. Gouache on canvas. 

Last summer while stressed I went through a phase of painting real crime scene photos that I had found online. I think that this is a remnant of when I would go on gore subreddits to procrastinate studying for my leaving cert (not my proudest hobby). 

When painting this snuff piece I took liberty with the faces since the original image was too pixilated to use as a reference. The man in the image accidentally took the face of my godfather, an ex army man who now rescues tortoises and does sauna in the bog. 

The face of the woman ended up too pretty and I couldn’t find a way to fix it. It made the darkness of the painting seem gratuitous and a bit wanna-be-edge-lord, I just want to be an edge-lord full-stop. This is why it is covered in masking tape. 

Not Katie

2023. Gouache on cereal box. 

It actually is Katie. When I am stuck for something to paint she always suggests that I paint her.

Gunpowder Tattooing 

2025. Acrylic on cardboard. 

There is a photo I saw once of a woman’s skull after being shot. Gunpowder tattooing is when a speckled pattern appears around a gunshot wound in a person’s skin. This usually occurs when the shot is close range. 

The Reading for the Evening  

Yesterday evening, Thoth tarot deck.

Our cup is full. 

Elvis in His Argentinian Bunker 

2026. Mixed Media on Cardboard 

Once my friends and I convinced a busker on Dury ST that Elvis wasn’t real. It is now an in joke with people who weren’t even there that when someone mentions something very serious or very intrinsic to pop culture, that one ends the point with “I wish it was real”. 

I wish One Direction was real.

I wish Hasbullah was real.

Custard creams with black coffee is surprisingly nice…I wish it was real. 

Erling and Oscar (ON LOAN)

2026. Gouache on the box for a Casio children’s keyboard.

For Oscar’s 31st birthday I painted him and his current celebrity crush (in no way influenced by the meme), Erling Haaland. Inspired by those kitschy 80’s couple’s photoshoots. 

The Last of The Basque Cowboys 

2026. Acrylic on cardboard. 

My main babysitter as a child was a man from the Basque Country. His father was one of the last true Basque Cowboys and had brought him up learning how to train horses. In his early twenties he joined the French Foreign Legion as a sniper and said that they would play metal music into their helmets to trick them that this was Call of Duty and not Real Life. During this time a mortar exploded near him making him deaf and blind on one half of his head, leaving a piece of shrapnel in his brain.

He then came to Ireland to volunteer on organic farms and has not left since (over a decade ago). 

While I knew him as a kid he planted courgettes for my neighbours, looked after goats and horses, loved cats and my dog. He fell in love with my mother’s best friend (an ex London punk from the dying remains of the 70s scene who was twice his senior and was now a horse-girl and acupuncturist). This meant he was at my house nearly everyday to train horses, chain-smoke and babysit me.

When minding me he would teach me krav maga, letting me always win. Tell me what it was like to be in the foreign legion, letting me poke my fingers into the bullet holes on his body and look at his hidden identifier tattoos, dog tags weren’t enough. Once he kept a fox with a broken leg in his bathtub as a pet and let me cuddle it, a wild fox. He once made my Dad green-out at Christmas because he let the poor whiskey-drunk fool have a toke when he was smoking a joint out the back door. My da fell asleep in the bathtub while we all explored the abandoned house next door, we had dinner on Boxing Day that year.

I don’t know this man anymore since becoming older and since he separated from my mum’s friend. Having PTSD from being a mercenary at war and being a stoner living in a caravan on a stallion farm doesn’t make you the most supportive boyfriend to a much older career-woman. 

I always say to people, it sounds like a joke but I promise this is true and tragic… admittedly a bit absurdly funny, I always say to people that it’s really sad because if I went back home and saw him I wouldn’t recognise him because he has since had his face eaten off by a stallion and sewn back on. This is true, my mother told me. 

The following triptych is based on screenshots from his old Facebook posts before the stallion incident. 

A Painting of a Photo of The TV while a Documentary About North Korea is Paused (PPTDANKP)

2026. Gouache + acrylic on airfryer box. 

The woolen colourful tights that the baby has on reminds me of the ones I wore as a toddler. I had green stripy ones that I called my “Froggy Legs”. 

Venetian Gothic // The Curator 

2026. Gouache + acrylic on paper. 

While on a college trip to Venice to see the Biennale we all stayed in a convent hostel. They sold relics there. I like to say that the piece of cloth in the pendant I took is Bishop’s dandruff. Looks like it. 

I took this picture of Sadbh and liked the composition so I painted it. 

The 4 Ladies 

2022. Gouache on cardboard. 

When Katie and I first moved here we decided that I would do a painting for her Granny (the most wonderful eccentric woman, an artist and a riot, who we would spend summers with in return for doing odd jobs). In this she is sitting with a bald head from cancer treatment (she beat it the following year) and is sharing a bed with her two sisters and lifelong friend. We joke that this friend of katies granny is her version of me, adopted by the family and somehow in every family dinner picture. I never really finished it and it got to a point where we were too embarrassed to give it to her. Now every time Katie's granny or mum comes to the house they ask if they are right in recognising the people in the painting, if it’s them. We proclaim “No!” “that is just us when we are older, we thought it was a fun idea”. 

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