Within and Beyond


 

Within and Beyond
Ita Freeney & Cathy Dorman 

21 May– 13 June 2026  

Opening reception Thursday 21 May, 5.30-7.30pm. Wine by Bubble Brothers 

Artists in conversation with art critic, broadcaster and author Cristín Leach, Saturday 30 May, 12pm 

 

Lavit Gallery presents a two-person exhibition by painters Ita Freeney and Cathy Dorman. Their respective sources are landscapes and interiors, while for both, the work lies between abstraction and representation.  Although no humans appear in the paintings, their presence is implied. Both artists go through a very considered process of experiencing, observing and investigating light and shape, and distil, emphasise and manipulate these elements in their paintings. 
 

“Light, atmosphere and a quietness are often key characteristics of my landscape inspired paintings.  I have always been interested in both the division of the canvas into shapes and the creation of mood/atmosphere.  I gravitate towards looking for abstract forms within the landscape - playing with diagonals, horizontals and verticals while also being equally drawn to light, atmosphere, distance and subtle transitions of colour. This series of work has been in the making since my last solo shows in 2024 and follows on with some similar themes to that previous Water’s Edge series. Again, I am mostly drawn to the coast even if the sea sometimes only appears as a narrow strip or small rectangular patch.  Piers, walls, and roads are prominent in this series.  The definite shapes of walls and piers against the airiness of sea and sky (emptiness and activity) are explored. I am interested in the way these definite shapes interact with this ‘emptiness’ of sea and sky- surrounding, cradling, anchoring, forming boundaries and giving way to openings.  The shapes of roads, paths and walls act as lead ins- creating turns, and directional pulls through the canvas. The majority of these paintings have been inspired by North Mayo, while other inspirations have come from West Waterford, Kerry and Germany. Time is spent immersing myself in places through repeat visits, observing what interests me from different vantage points and in different lights and taking photographs, notes and thumbnail drawings back to the studio. The paintings come about through many light layers of paint, constantly re looking and subtly shifting colour and tone.” Ita Freeney 

“My work explores and responds to site specific domestic spaces. The domestic setting of a home plays a significant part in the shaping and sustenance of who we are. Our home becomes a storehouse of our existence. It holds our memories, our fears, our aspirations, embodying the unique experience of each occupant. Modern architecture has changed the definition of home by accommodating its occupants in spaces that reflect their activities and values. My work to date has responded to specific iconic modern houses exploring how they redefined domesticity through their vision of a new way of living that was both physical and spatial and which held profound political and social implications. My work process begins by making models to explore spaces within these houses, a slow and pains- taking journey. Through black and white photography of the models, I investigate light and shadow within the space breaking it down into a series of planes, offering an intensely palpable experience. Using these images I construct my compositions and the paintings gradually emerge through the manipulation of materials with layering, patterning and constant reworking of paint. There is always something liminal at play in the work, small shifts of focus, an uncertainty and otherness that never quite explains itself. The depiction of furniture, architecture and inanimate objects in my work creates a sense of calm or frenzy, sadness or gaiety, a weighty stability or aerial lightness” Cathy Dorman 

Dublin born, Ita Freeney graduated from Crawford College of Art and Design with a BA Honours degree in Fine Art (1994).  She now lives in Cork. During 2023 and 2024, solo exhibitions of her series of paintings – Water’s Edge, have taken place at South Tipperary Arts Centre, Custom House Studios & Gallery (Westport) and The Paul Kane Gallery (Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin).  Other solo exhibitions have included Outer Edges at The Lavit Gallery, Cork (2019), A New World, Paul Kane Gallery, Dublin (2008), New Paintings, Fenton Gallery, Cork (2006), the Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick (2002), Strata, Paul Kane Gallery (2001). Recently her work has been included in the following  group exhibitions - From Source to Sea, curated by Michael Waldron at the Crawford Art Gallery,2024; Visual Presence, Boyle Arts Festival, 2024; the Ballinglen Biennial Exhibition at the Ballinglen Museum of Art, Mayo 2023 and the 192nd RHA annual exhibition( 2022). She has exhibited with the Paul Kane Gallery since 1998, with several solo and two person exhibitions and many group shows there. Her work features in many collections including:  Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art, Mayo; Cork Co. Council; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (as part of the National Collection); Dental Hospital, Dublin; Department of Finance; The Office of Public Works and University College Cork. 

Formerly a practising architect, in 2020 Cathy Dorman graduated in Fine Art from NCAD where she was joint recipient of the Fine Art Student of the Year award and shortlisted for the RDS Awards. In 2021 she was a recipient of the IPUT/RHA Wilton Park Studio award. Her first solo show ‘Domestic Planes’ took place at the Ashford Gallery, RHA in March 2022. Dorman exhibited as part of a two person show ‘Double Bounce’ at the Copper House Gallery, Sept 2023. Her second solo show ‘Step Away Closer’ was at the Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar in March/April 2024. Dorman’s work has been included in group exhibitions at RHA (2020,2021), Dunamaise Arts Centre (2019) (2024), Hang Tough Gallery (2021, 2022), Outset Gallery Galway (2022) and Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray (2023). In September 2024 Dorman exhibited in the Wilton Park Studio exhibition at the RHA and recently (January 2025) completed the first segment of her fellowship at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ballycastle. 

The 2026 Cork Arts Society t/a Lavit Gallery visual arts programme is kindly supported by Arts Grants from the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork City Council. 
 

Lavit Gallery
Wandesford Quay, Clarke's Bridge, Cork, T12 E26D
021 4277749
www.lavitgallery.com
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10.30 – 6.00pm
Cork Arts Society T/A Lavit Gallery is a Company Limited by Guarantee | No. 243114 | CHY. 13297

Water's Edge

Ita Freeney: Water’s Edge art inspired by her views in East Cork

The Cork art stalwart also recalls painting adverts on buses with her dad

Ita Freeney pictured at the opening of her exhibition Water’s Edge at the Custom House Studios Gallery in Westport.  Picture: Conor McKeown

MON, 19 FEB, 2024 - 02:00

MARC O’SULLIVAN VALLIG 

Ita Freeney’s work is known for its Zen-like stillness. A lover of the great outdoors, her new exhibition at the Custom House Gallery in Westport, Co Mayo features a body of paintings inspired by walks near her home in East Cork and Ballycastle, Co Mayo, where she has been a regular visitor.

“I’ve called the exhibition Water’s Edge. Our house in Glounthane overlooks the estuary of the River Lee, so that’s been an obvious influence,” she says. “This particular series of paintings is very much about the boundary between land and water. I don't know what fascinates me so much about that. I think it's just a contrast between the hardness of the land - and manmade structures like the piers - and the openness and airiness of the water and sky.

“I usually gravitate towards the quiet. But there’s one painting in the show that's inspired by the old fisherman's pier in Cobh. It's a very busy place, and it's very unlike me to have gone for this subject matter, because it's all old bins and containers. But I think that's just what I liked about it; that row of bins and things against the sky.”

 Freeney’s association with Ballycastle came about through the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, which is based in the village and awards residencies to artists throughout the year. She has visited regularly since 2019, having stepped back from her full-time position as administrator and manager of the Lavit Gallery in Cork, where she continues to work part-time as a senior gallery assistant.

She was just back from a two-week stay in Ballycastle when covid hit in early 2020. “And then the gallery closed,” she says, “so I had all this time in the studio and all this fresh inspiration. I used to have a space at Backwater Studios in Cork, but after we moved to Glounthane in 2012, we knocked the wall between two bedrooms so I could have a studio at home. Obviously, the lockdowns were terrible in many ways, but I did get a lot of work done. There's one painting called Lifting that I think of as my Covid painting because it's got a brighter blue than I’d usually use; I was kind of hanging on to a bit of hope.” 



Ita Freeney, Incoming, oil on linen.

Freeney is such a stalwart of the art scene in Cork that one could easily mistake her for a native. In fact, she grew up in Dublin. She comes from a long line of artists; her father Edward is a plein air painter, who worked as a signwriter and designer until his retirement. His contracts included painting full-colour 7-Up and Harp ads on the buses for CIE, and Freeney often worked with him in the summers. It was not unusual to see examples of their work trundling around the city centre.

“We’d paint these big bulletin boards as well,” says Freeney. “Growing up, it was great to have those kinds of experiences. Signwriting was the family trade, but it was just the day job for my father. He’s been showing for years with the Watercolour Society of Ireland and the Dublin Painting & Sketching Club. He brought us to exhibitions from a very young age, and he was always getting us to give our opinions on his paintings. At home, it was always understood that I wanted to go to art college. I was lucky to have had that kind of support.” 

Freeney studied at the Crawford College of Art in Cork. There was, she insists, no great plan to get out of Dublin. “It just happened that way,” she says. “And I ended up staying. At college, I studied painting, with photography as a subsidiary. It was all black and white at that stage, and I think that brought something into the paintings because I'm very much interested in tone and composition. But really, it was painting all the way, and I’ve always preferred to work in oils. You get so used to the smell of the paint, and the flow of it. I’ve tried acrylics, but when they harden they have more of a plasticky feel to them. You don’t get that with oils.” 

Freeney’s influences include the 19th-century artist James McNeill Whistler, who is celebrated for his depictions of London at night. “I love the mood of his monochrome paintings, and their lightness,” she says. “But then on the other hand I also love Agnes Martin’s resolutely abstract paintings. They're two very different artists, but I like them both.”



Ita Freeney, Winter Water's Edge, oil on board.

 Freeney initially set out as an abstract painter. “I would have always been interested in blocks of colour or transitions between one colour and another,” she says. “But then slowly the details started coming into them. I think it was probably when I went down working at the West Cork Art Centre in Skibbereen, after I finished college, that the landscapes started coming into the paintings a little bit, and then just more and more. But the basis of my paintings is still really abstract, even if they have gone more towards representation. It's a contrast, I think, between the two. The paintings are still very much about hard formal shapes. But then they're also about a kind of lyricism, there’s a mood in them as well. So there’s a marriage of both these approaches, I think.”

 After Westport, Freeney’s Water’s Edge exhibition will travel to Dublin, where the Paul Kane Gallery has organised a run at the Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square in April.

“I’m not sure what I’ll work at next,” she says. “I’m going up to Ballinglen again for two weeks in May. I’ve always been very much a studio painter, I haven’t really done much painting outside, but I wouldn’t mind experimenting with that.”

 Ita Freeney, Water’s Edge runs at the Custom House Gallery in Westport, Co Mayo until 3rd March, and the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin from 18th – 27th April.

Further information:










A busy year so far.

2019 has been a busy year so far. The year kicked off with an enjoyable residency at the Ballinglen Art Foundation in Mayo. Since then I have been continuing work on my Outer Edges body of work for an exhibition at the Lavit Gallery in Cork, which will open on May 23rd.

Outer Edges

Outer Edges

 

A two person show featuring new works by 

Megan Eustace and Ita Freeney.

 

December 6 - 14th

The Paul Kane Gallery

at

The Irish Architectural Archive,

45 Merrion Square,

Dublin 2

Open daily noon to 5pm, closed Saturday and Sunday, 8th/9th December.

To see more images of current work, click here

Megan Eustace

Megan Eustace

Ita Freeney

Ita Freeney

Upcoming Exhibition

I am busy preparing for a two person exhibition with Megan Eustace at at The Paul Kane Gallery’s Pop-Up Space at The Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square, Dublin 2. The exhibition is due to run from December 6th - 14th.