Elva Mulchrone

Elva Mulchrone is an Irish artist currently based between Dublin and London. She has a first class BA in Fine Art (Painting) from the National College of Art and Design, (2016) Ireland, and a primary degree in Economics, Business and Social Science from Trinity College Dublin. 

She received an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2021. Currently visual artist in residence at Dublin City University 2022/23 she has been selected as a Fulbright Scholar Finalist for 2022/23. She has exhibited internationally and is currently showing work at the 192nd Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts Annual Exhibition in Dublin.

Mulchrone presented her solo show Res Ipsa Loquitur with Gibbons & Nicholas (November 2020-online), a solo show Building Blocks at the Blyth Gallery, Imperial College London, (January 2020), and her debut solo show Irrational Exuberance with Eight Gallery, Dublin (March 2018).

Selected recent group exhibitions include The 192nd RHA Annual Exhibition in Dublin, The Highlanes Gallery Open Submission in Drogheda, The Future is Clean and Round (2 person show) at Gallery 126 Galway, The Distance Between (3 person show) at the Hockney Gallery London,  Gibbons & Nicholas at Art on Paper NYC, Arrival at Municipal DLR Lexicon Dublin, Context Art Miami, Cairde Visual at The Model Sligo and The Rua Red Winter Open in Dublin.

She has been awarded grants and bursaries including The Mainie Jellet travel Bursary, The Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust Award, The Emerging Artist Bursary from DLR County Council and is included in Infrastructure-Fingals Public Art Programme 2017-2021. She was awarded an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland in June 2021.

Her work is in the OPW (Irish State Collection) and Trinity College Dublin collections and corporate and private collections.

Conceptually driven, my practice seeks to represent truth and move with the medium, be it paint, installation or video, and speak to a new room in the house. Work examines the role of information and abstraction in contextualising and re-contextualising an understanding of who and where we are, social science concerns, repeat pattern and of aesthetics.

I am continually inspired by contemporary experience, academic research and discourse and studio experimentation. Current work spans research covering inequality within the social contexts of everyday experiences as well as perspectives of people as they navigate multiple systems of inequality and the reality of social immobility. Relating and responding to these issues is a key element of my work.

I present layers of information, and through paint, colour, movement and video question notions of representation and critical observation. To me, colour is subliminal and sublime. The use of or restraint in its use presents its own narrative.

I seek to operate within a time-lag between argument and interpretation, between the objective and the subjective so that another sort of meaning, and another sort of understanding can arise.