Sorca O’Farrell’s work conveys a rich and atmospheric sense of place, writes James Hanley ahead of her exhibition at the Easter Snow Gallery in Dublin
For many years in the canon of Western art, landscape was a bit player in the hierarchy of history painting. It was a background foil to the dramatis personae foregrounded in order to educate, elucidate and inspire. Landscape never really threatened to eclipse the main players until Poussin gave it equal status in his ideal classical constructs to emphasise the gravitas of his subjects. Then the secular 17th century Dutch middle-class adorned their houses with fully-blown scenes of their local land, without a whiff of church rhetoric to look down on them. So, as landscape established itself as a genre, an overarching question might be: could a scene without people tell a story? The answer is yes.
The Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick is now one of the most digitally advanced libraries in the world, writes Judith Hill
