FOREWORD
Looking at the paintings by Andrea Maguire they become mirrors of our own 'inscapes'. She is involved in the oldest and noblest task as a mediator between mythology and reality. With echoes of Icarus and his tragic flight and Isis with her winged arms giving protection and the breath of life. Uprising movement, metaphors of ascension. The closest construct to capturing and holding the motion of feeling. Her surfaces define the adjective of touch. Areas hum, sing and turn to silence. The text of impasto scumbling, glazes and pentimento are an emotional topography. Spirit scapes. These forms enchant the mind and her colour brings light into existence. Seeing is an act. Enjoy
Ross Mendes
(excerpt from exhibition catalogue for Voices of the Ancestors, Gallery Arcturus, 2000)
At the Stillpoint, mixed media on canvas, 150x100cm
ARTIST STATEMENT
Ancient Song - the Cailleach 2026
It is difficult to escape the noisy, anxiety-ridden and crisis-oriented world in which we are caught up, the endless tirade of too much information giving us too little information. We are starved amid a huge surplus of spectacle and consumption. Sensing our insecure place in the world we arrogantly attempt to impose a predictability and control over it in our over-confident trust in scientific empiricism, rationalism and materialism.
Perhaps in rare moments we do escape, as did naturalist/philosopher Loren Eiseley, to reposition our focus and peer into the depths to find that the organic process is never predictable or controllable. ‘We can only enter by a great act of the imagination to understand the mysteries in nature.’ (The Immense Journey). Random patterns form, disappear and then reform, preparing the way for ever new reinterpretations. Complex, diffuse, its source is in the unconscious and our own unconscious still reacts readily to it. It is this transitional, ‘between’ space that I too seek to inhabit for it offers a world of possibility. It is where transformation can occur. This is the work for the poet, the artist: look, listen and then be content with silence.
Andrea Maguire
FIGURATIVE Work
Shore walker, mixed media on canvas, 102x71cm
Her forms and figures are not symbols of the unconscious but rather stripped down, intensified visual facts firmly based in sensation. The viewer stands before the figure and feels the posture and movement of it, becoming with the artist a ‘vessel to embrace raw energy’ rather than a thinking subject. Maguire’s works are devoid of the old paradigm of fantasy and surrealism but offer ‘extra realism’, penetrating the present through the use of sensation-inducing textures and gestures which are timeless archetypes.
Cathy Stilo, Gallery Arcturus
Whirl, mixed media on canvas 110x75cm
Moon, sun, mixed media on canvas, 133x53cm
from the Beara Blue series
Between worlds, mixed media on canvas, 120x80cm
from the Beara Blue series
The Moon is not reflected light -
Alchemical quicksilver, mixed media on canvas,112x77cm
Alchemist's crucible, mixed media on canvas, 114x77cm
Moon, cloud, rain, mixed media on canvas 87x65cm
from the Alchemical Notebook series
Citrinitas, from the Alchemical Notebook series
She aspires to raise the collective consciousness with her figurative, abstract and mixed media works. Philosophical and spiritual, Maguire’s art stirs us to question our multi-faceted existence from the personal, unconscious realms to social and political spheres. Her drawings are imbued with a sense of raw, transformative motion.
Ana Trask, Surface
The dreamer, mixed media on canvas, 77x112cm
from the Beara Blue series
Prometheus, mixed media on canvas, 111x77cm
Earth witness, mixed media on canvas, 120x80cm
Elemental Dance, mixed media on canvas, 102x65cm