Lelia Henry
Lelia Henry holds an MA in Art and Process from Crawford College of Art, and has won a number of awards, including the Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust Award, Agility Awards, and Irish Landscape Artist of the Year at the National Open Art Competition, London. She has exhibited at the RHA and the RUA, Mall Galleries, London, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, and has just had a successful solo show at the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Ashford Gallery. The artists work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the OPW.
Her practice is rooted in drawing, using charcoal and graphite as her primary media to explore the quiet, often overlooked details of rural landscapes. Her work traces the enduring imprints of human presence, where the absence of figures evokes a sense of lives once lived and now withdrawn, suggesting the subtle passage of time and memory within the land.
Henry’s most recent work focuses on the islands of Lough Ree and the lives that existed there prior to rural electrification and modernisation. Island life was demanding, yet many remained, sustaining themselves through farming and fishing into the 1970s. By this point, the arrival of electrification and broader processes of modernisation had eroded much of what had defined island living, and a distinct way of life began to disappear. By the late 1970s, these islands had been largely abandoned, leaving behind only traces of habitation embedded in the landscape.
www.leliahenry.com 
