Niamh Porter

Niamh Porter

Niamh Porter is an artist based in Limerick, Ireland. She graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design in 2016 in Fine Art, Painting. She is an Artist-in-Residence at Ormston House and was recently a Co-Director of spacecraft Studios, Limerick. She has recently exhibited in the RHA 190th Annual Exhibition and has been shortlisted for the Hennessy Craig Award, 2022. In 2021, she represented Ormston House at Juxtapose Art Fair in Aarhus, Denmark, and is currently participating in The Feminist Supermarket.

Niamh’s practice responds to architecture through drawing and painting. Her current work looks at the great women architects of the Modernist movement and their designs for domestic space, including Aino Aalto, Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand and many more. These architects challenge our expectations of domesticity by creating multifunctional spaces that are negotiated by the women who occupy them. In her practice, the act of drawing is to gain a deeper understanding of the space. Through minimal mark-making, she looks at those carefully considered details that present an alternative use of domestic space, such as the living space that leads to the architect’s home studio. With a sensitive use of coloured pencils, Niamh aims to reveal how functional and rational design can feel deeply intimate. The objects depicted in this body of work play an integral part in the negotiation of space. The furniture allows the user to decide the function of the room. It is the carefully considered relationship between architecture and furniture which makes these spaces liveable and desirable. Through observations of ‘the bedroom,’ ‘the dining-room,’ and ‘the terrace,’ this new work presents the synonymity of collected objects with autonomy, privacy, and nourishment. The title for this series is taken from a Provençal proverb ‘Avec le temps et la paille, les néfles mûrissent’ which translates to ‘With time and straw, the medlars ripen’.