Hurl’s work references her experience of growing up in a religious household, where the sacraments and ritual of communion, marriage and death were revered and firmly abided by. Irish Gothic, the painting which lends its title to Hurl’s current retrospective exhibition at IMMA, presents a newly married couple standing solemnly in front of a quintessential suburban house surrounded by a picket fence, their faces obscured as they are faced with a lifetime mortgage. In her early works Hurl exposed the suburban home as less than perfect.