Tracy Sweeney
Contemporary Abstract Painter
“It’s intolerable to be stopped by a frame’s edge.” — Clyfford Still
Tracy Sweeney is an Irish contemporary artist and abstract painter based in the west of Ireland. Her practice has evolved over more than two decades, with painting at its centre. Working through abstraction, materiality and process, her work explores place, memory and the traces of human presence.
Sweeney has exhibited extensively in Ireland and internationally, with solo and group exhibitions across Ireland, Sweden, the United States, France and the UK. Her work is held in public, institutional and private collections, and she is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award.
Her work is held in collections including the Office of Public Works, the Health Service Executive and Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, at Quinnipiac University, Connecticut, USA.
Working across abstraction, Sweeney explores memory, materiality and the residue of human presence through a singular visual language shaped by a physical and process-led approach to mark-making. Working beyond conventional painting techniques, she works with chisels, scrapers and industrial floor brushes to carve, scrape and layer surfaces. The resulting works possess a palpable materiality, bearing the marks of gesture, process and the artist’s physical intervention.
"Pushing each work to the very brink of collapse before it can be resolved is central to my practice. The dynamic between abandon and restraint drives me — an approach that continually frustrates and excites me.”
Sweeney’s practice exists in the tension between construction and deconstruction. Her compositions emerge through accumulation, erasure and physical intervention, as records of making as much as undoing. Rooted in place, yet not confined to it, the work offers a compelling commentary on the ways in which landscapes, surfaces and identities are continually altered.
Selected Recognition
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award
2011
Selected Collections
Office of Public Works · Health Service Executive · Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum · Microsoft Sweden · AIB