Lara Quinn
Lara Quinn
Photo by Shaunagh O'Connell
Artist Bio
Quinn is a Cork-based artist and studio-holder at Sample Studios. She holds a BA First Class Honours Degree in Fine Art from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design (2024) with prior education studying the History of Art at University College Cork. Quinn’s visual art practice spans painting and performance with recent developments in film and sculpture. Informed by art movements such as magic-realism, her work harnesses mythological themes and art-historic symbolism to address autobiographical narratives concerning identity and womanhood. Quinn’s recent awards include the Agility Award (2025), Cork Arts Society Student of the Year Award (2024), Best Thesis Prize (2024), long-list for the RDS Visual Art Awards (2024), The Maclise Art Society Award for Outstanding Skill in Drawing/Painting (2024) and a Cork City Council Purchase Prize (2024) which acquired several pieces for their private collection at Cork City Hall. Her work has been reviewed in the Irish Arts Review, Visual Artists News-Sheet and the Irish Examiner. Quinn’s past solo shows include ‘Lady Lazarus’ at the Lavit Gallery, Cork and upcoming solo shows include the Laneway Gallery, Cork and Engage Gallery, Galway.
Artist Statement
From her figurative paintings to embodied performances, Quinn’s practice is always rooted in a loosely autobiographical narrative, blending fact with fiction as she creates veiled representations of her own lived experiences. Her work addresses themes of identity and womanhood, transposing herself upon characters from mythology and folklore to deeper and more universally explore the events that defined her own sense of self. Quinn explores these narratives through the reimagined landscape of a mythical Ireland, often engaging with historical, heritage sites in the research and making of her work. Quinn’s practice primarily spans painting, performance and sculpture. Paralleling her conceptual motivations to merge fact with fiction, Quinn’s technical skill in painting realism is purposefully hijacked by the fantastical representation of mythical content. She expands this further in her performances, where the artist physically embodies these characters at historical sites across the Irish landscape. For Quinn, these devices reinforce the biased subjectivity of her own memory and perception of events that she is trying to represent. This is amplified by contextualising the work within the backdrop of mythical Ireland, a liminal space where the lines between fact and fiction, legend and land are inherently blurred.
Website www.laraquinn.ie
Instagram: @laraquinnart
Youtube: @laraquinnart
Membership: Backwater Artists Network 
