These paintings bring together an unexpected cast of motifs: wolves appearing at dusk, circus tents pitched incongruously in open fields, and the looping doughnut rings carved into empty beaches by “little boy racers.” Each image seems at once familiar and uncanny, rooted in real places yet touched by something dreamlike and unsettling.

Gale’s wolves move through the landscape with a sense of wary sovereignty. They act as both symbols and intruders, hinting at the return of something wild and ungovernable beneath the surface of rural life. The circus tents, meanwhile, introduce a more overt theatricality—bright, temporary structures poised against vast, unpeopled horizons. They suggest spectacle and escape, but also fragility, as though the show might evaporate at any moment, leaving only the wind.

In contrast, the doughnut rings—those looping marks left by night-time joyrides—carry a peculiarly human presence without ever showing a figure. They speak to bravado, boredom, and the small rebellions that animate otherwise quiet places. Gale paints them not as mere vandalism but as fleeting signatures, the evidence of lives lived at the margins.

Across all these works, Gale maintains his characteristic precision: crisp light, deep shadows, and a meticulous attention to surface. But beneath this clarity lies ambiguity—a sense that something is about to happen, or has just happened, unseen. The result is a landscape that feels alive with stories, both whispered and unresolved.

This exhibition invites viewers to dwell in that in-between space: where the ordinary becomes strange, where the rural becomes symbolic, and where the world we think we know reveals its deeper, more mysterious layers.

The exhibition features around fifty paintings, ranging widely in scale and price, from intimate works on paper to large-scale canvases. Each artist explores a distinct relationship with the material and symbolic life of colour: Tim Millen’s creaturely forms navigate a dissolving natural order; Elizabeth Cope’s new and past works form a vibrant continuum of struggle and renewal; and Budi Gugi’s poetic paintings balance solitude, joy, and sorrow through a meditative use of light and tone. Peter Burns’ vivid narratives blend myth and humour in charged compositions, while Nuala Clarke’s atmospheric abstractions evoke the sensory experience of place and memory.

Together, these artists create a dialogue that moves beyond boundaries—tradition and experimentation, the seen and the felt. Colour Beyond the Pale celebrates painting’s enduring ability to illuminate, to provoke, and to connect through the transformative language of colour.

Claremorris Gallery is delighted to present Slow Heat, a new body of work by Emma Stroude.

The exhibition has its roots in a collaboration with three actors, whose performances became a catalyst for the paintings. Through this process, Stroude explored themes of women’s resilience, transformation, and the need to move beyond inherited preconceptions. As she reflects, “Slow Heat has emerged from a collaboration with 3 actors. Together we worked with the question of women’s potentiality, their ability to endure, acknowledgement of their innate capabilities and the need to move beyond past preconceptions.”

Stroude’s paintings also developed in dialogue with wider cultural influences. The writings of Virginia Woolf were a constant presence in her studio, particularly Woolf’s use of fire and heat as metaphors for transformation – energies needed to dismantle and rebuild systems that constrain women’s equality. These ideas resonate in the steady, simmering intensity of Stroude’s images, which embody not revolution but persistence and endurance.

As she worked from her collaborative source material, Stroude began to notice the emergence of archetypal figures that link back to both myth and art history. She recognised echoes of familiar characters – from the Fool to Mary Magdalene – while also finding connections to feminist artists such as Paula Rego, Rebecca Horn, and Ana Mendieta.

The title Slow Heat captures the spirit of the exhibition. As the artist explains, “I imagine this heat as the steadfast intention that permeates my paintings. I paint the performed experiences of the female body through the female lens. In these works, young women undergo transformation, protect each other and themselves, they share love, loss and hope together without shame and they invite you, the viewer, to do the same.”

Known for his masterful command of texture and light, Teskey’s paintings capture the shifting moods of water, sky, and land. A Wave from the Hill showcases a dynamic range of works on both canvas and paper, varying in scale from intimate studies to large-scale immersive compositions on canvas.

The title A Wave from the Hill evokes both the ceaseless motion of ocean waves and a familiar, personal connection to the land, as though the artist himself is greeting a landscape he knows intimately. A landscape always evolving and adapting. This deep connection with the landscape and with the artist’s materials is echoed in Aidan Dunne’s comments about Donald Teskey’s work, noting that: “Teskey’s method is instinctive and gestural. Rather than slavish, detailed descriptions, information is imparted via touch, but never in an overbearing way.”

Teskey takes as inspiration a poem by Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist entitled, Fear which begins, “It is said that before entering the sea, a river trembles with fear.”

The inspiration for Unlimited stems from the artist’s participation in a group psychotherapy process. Reflecting on that experience, she explains, “The simplicity of the room and the depth of experience explored in that space changed eventually into the chair as an entity/metaphor of sitting with yourself and witnessing life” The artist continues, “The intimate space of the psychotherapeutic experience opens out into life itself.”

In Unlimited, Kelly explores the relationship between image and title, and how the gap between them becomes a limitless space for contemplation. “Between the painting and the title there is an unlimited gap beyond the image itself,” says Kelly]. “The chairs are the holding blocks for the passage of people, time, self and life. I hope there is space for everything and anything in those spaces.”

Before Mary Kelly’s return to painting in 2016, she was known for her lens-based projects that captured the traces people leave behind as part of their survival and existence. Projects such as The Landing (2003), which documented the marks men made on their cells at Portlaoise Prison, and Asylum (2005), which explored the remnants left by patients in St Mary’s Asylum, Castlebar, reveal Kelly’s fascination with the marks of human presence. Other notable works include Father & Child (2009), which examined fathers’ tattoos of their children’s names, and I Believe, Help My Unbelief (2010), a study of baby grave arrangements at Glasnevin’s Angels Plot.

Having shifted from photography to painting, Kelly now leaves their own mark on the canvas, engaging viewers in a dialogue about life, memory, and experience.

O’Leary’s unconventional approach to painting, marked by the reconstruction of materials and exploration of spatial dynamics, finds resonance within Tyrrell’s structured compositions, where the grid serves as a foundation for intricate exploration. Through this juxtaposition, D U E T encapsulates the collaborative spirit of these two artists as they navigate the visual landscape together.

In D U E T, viewers are invited to witness the convergence of divergent artistic voices. O’Leary and Tyrrell’s artworks resonate with rhythm and depth, inviting audiences to immerse themselves in the symphonic interplay of visual storytelling.

Born in Trim, Co. Meath, Charles Tyrrell’s large-scale canvases feature in all major Irish collections. Since he graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, the grid has underpinned almost everything Tyrrell has accomplished as an artist. His work practice incorporates painting on canvas and aluminium as well as drawing and print.

Speaking about his grid paintings, Tyrrell said, “A grids existence is the result of a collection of independent events. They’re like maps of what it takes to organise – in terms of politics and society – all the twists and turns and compromises and accommodations that have to be made to pull everything together into some kind of unified whole. These are images over which I have little control. This idea is fundamental to my way of working. It suits my desire to allow the painting to have a certain autonomy. I don’t want to dominate the process, I want a partnership.”

Originally from Wexford, Helen O’Leary is an internationally renowned artist based in New Jersey and Leitrim. Although self-described as a painter, her artwork defies traditional structures. She constructs paintings that can stand by themselves, that have their own architecture. Her paintings hold a history of their past lives, created from pieces of previous paintings, wood and materials she stores in her studio.

Speaking about the upcoming exhibition, Helen O’Leary, said “The inventory and archaeology of memoir, place, histories, big and small, are embedded in my work. I knit with wood, bending the painting out of the ruin of its own making. Each piece is cobbled together from the detritus of earlier attempts. I build ‘history paintings’ that are created in the process of dismantling and redress. I think of my forms as the upholstery and bulge of middle age, blank places for new memory. Failure, paralysis, grief and ultimately self-determination are cyclical points on the wheel of my work.”