At the early age of sixteen Patrick Graham was awarded a scholarship to the National College of Art and Design in Dublin (NCAD). Frustrated by his ultimate inability to express feelings or to communicate through drawing in spite of his natural talent, he began a search for a visual language that could express inner consciousness and address issues of human experience. Graham’s paintings are large, gestural and expressive; the densely layered canvases are often ripped or slashed, revealing the workings of the canvas stretcher. In ‘Ark of Dreaming’, Graham explores colour and gesture. Words combined with vestiges of figurative imagery, and layers of heavily worked and reworked paint, are applied to canvases which have been ruthlessly split open, or crudely stitched together, often in diptychs or triptychs that suggest altarpieces. His practice is driven by his intense experience of political mismanagement, and religious and sexual repression to which his paintings refer in alternately savage or tender and compassionate terms.