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To mark the opening of the exhibition Irish Gothic, we are thrilled to welcome IMMA Collection artist Patrica Hurl for a preview talk with art historian, writer, and curator Catherine Marshall.

This conversation will span Hurl’s longstanding painting and multi-media practice, to her engagement with the community arts sector and finding solidarity with other women artists, including, most recently, the Na Cailleacha Collective. This talk is moderated by her old friend and fellow-member of Na Cailleacha, Catherine Marshall, and sheds light on the personal and the political impulses that are the defining force of Hurl’s creative and collaborative practice.

Our guests discuss key works featured in the exhibition, from the 1980s to the present day, exploring the processes and recurring themes that have inspired this prolific body of work. It will include work made in response to the Kerry Babies controversy, maternity care, the Magdalene Laundries and other attempts to control women. Artwork themes of discussion include loss, pain, frustration, and loneliness; the treatment of women internationally and closer to home; and evolving ideas of age, gender, identity and body politics that informs Hurl’s approach to figuration and uses of her own body as a vehicle and site for political statement and freedom of expression.

Please join us after the talk for the opening reception and launch of the exhibition Patricia Hurl, Irish Gothic.


Listen Back

Listen to artist Patricia Hurl, for a keynote discussion on her major retrospective exhibition at IMMA. The artist is joined in conversation with art historian, writer, and curator Catherine Marshall, together they reflect on the significance of Hurl’s longstanding, socially inclusive art practice and the context for some of the most challenging feminist artworks made by Hurl from the 1980s to today.

About Speakers

Patricia Hurl
Originally from Dublin and a former member of Temple Bar Galleries and Studios, Dublin, Patricia Hurl often works in collaboration with artist Therry Rudin. Hurl was a lecturer in Fine Art Painting at the Dublin Institute of Technology and studied at the National College of Art and Design,1975 and at Dun Laoghaire School of Art and Design,1984. With Therry Rudin, Hurl founded and ran the Damer Gallery in Co Tipperary and is now a board member. In 1984 she won the Norah Mc Guinness award for painting.

Hurl’s work was recently included in The Narrow Gate of the Here and Now: IMMA 30 Years of the Global Contemporary: Queer Embodiment; IMMA, Dublin 2021 – 2022; Elliptical Affinities: Irish Women Artists and the Politics of the Body, 1984 to the present, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Co Louth and Limerick City Art Gallery, 2019 – 2020. Hurl has exhibited in selected group and solo shows and has represented Ireland in symposiums in Atlanta USA, Caversham, S.A. and Zaragossa, Spain. She was a contributor to The Great Book of Ireland. Her work is included in the recent publication Art and Architecture of Ireland Volume V: Twentieth Century, Royal Irish Academy, 2014, and is represented in private and public collections including IMMA; The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon; The Highlanes Gallery and the Collection of the University of Limerick.

Catherine Marshall, 
Catherine Marshall is a curator and art historian. She lectured in art history at Trinity College Dublin, the National College of Art and Design and University College Dublin. As founding head of collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art she curated exhibitions of Outsider art from the Musgrave Kinley Collection, exhibitions of Irish art in China, USA and the UK and throughout Ireland with the IMMA National Programme, and was curator to the Engagement project, which brought together artists from the Kilkenny Collective for Arts Talent, Callan, with artists from widely differing mainstream practices for a series of exhibitions 2013–21. She co-edited Art and architecture of Ireland, Vol. V, Twentieth Century (2014), Janet Mullarney (2019) and Irish Art 1920–2020, Perspectives on Change (2022). She is an active member of Na Cailleacha (NaCailleacha.weebly.com). In 2019 she was recipient of the first honorary doctorate in the History of Art from University College Dublin.