Caoimhe Fitzpatrick

Artist Bio

Caoimhe Fitzpatrick is a visual artist based in Cork whose work explores the material qualities of painting and investigates how we physically engage with the spaces and surfaces of our daily environments.

Her practice engages with expanded approaches to painting challenging the constraints of traditional media and embracing contemporary approaches that situate painting as a dynamic, spatial and process driven practice. A key focus of her investigation is the intrinsic relationship between painting and surface. Through a combination of drawing and painting, she employs methods such as staining, tracing, and spontaneous mark-making to create paintings in a meditative and embodied process.

Caoimhe graduated with First Class Honours from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design in 2025 and received the shared Graduate Residency Award with Crawford College of Art Design and Backwater Artist Group. She will also be part of the NCAD Superprojects/Clancy Quay Studios Professional Development Programme 2025/26.

Artist Statement

My art practice is rooted in abstraction in the physical realm and informed by my immediate surrounding environment of the Crawford College of Art and Design Sharman Crawford Street building. I focus on painting in an expanded way emphasizing that modern painting today is no longer confined to traditional boundaries.

Painting’s inescapable relationship to surface has inspired my current work. Fusing material observation with intuition, and association with a familiar environment, allows me to create abstract paintings that respond to the building’s surfaces, and in the colours and marks around me. By staining canvas with spillages and splats of paint, and analysing different surfaces deemed insignificant from my environment, allows for the creation of visual representations which contemplate various layers.

Utilising both drawing and painting I can create artworks that embrace colour and incorporate tracings, staining fabric with thin veils of colour in a spontaneous manner, while layering with marks, helps me navigate and create meditative works that reference time, place and human engagement with physical structures and surfaces.

Membership: Backwater Artists Network