Lara Quinn: Cork artist inspired by the legend of Lilith
Crawford graduate Lara Quinn was the winner of the Lavit Gallery Student of the Year Award.
Lara Quinn was probably the only one surprised when she won a slew of awards for her degree show at the Crawford College of Art and Design in 2024. Her work - an installation of paintings and sculptural objects - was inspired by the legend of Lilith, who appears in Hebrew and Mesopotamian mythology as the first woman on Earth. Moulded from the same clay as Adam, she was said to have been cast out of Eden when she refused to obey him.
“I was looking for a mythological figure that I could project myself onto,” says Quinn, “and Lilith kept coming up. She was the subject of my thesis as well.”
Quinn’s thesis, which argued for Lilith’s presence in the 15th century frescoes at the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, won the overall prize for the best of her academic year. Her other accolades included the Cork City Council Purchase Prize, which saw the City Council acquire six of her pieces; a nine-month studio residency with Backwater Artists; and the Lavit Gallery Student of the Year Award.
The latter was established in 1967, and has helped launch the careers of creatives such as Eilís O’Connell, Maud Cotter and Vivienne Roche. The award, currently sponsored by Baker Tilly Accountants, includes a cash prize of €1,000 and a solo exhibition at the Lavit Gallery on Wandesford Quay.
Ten months on from her degree show, Quinn’s Lavit Gallery exhibition has just opened. Entitled Lady Lazarus, it occupies two adjoining rooms in the gallery’s vaults. The space, which Quinn describes as “almost subterranean”, inspired her to make a performance video based on a cave.
“I chose Oweynagat - or Uaimh na gCat in Irish, the cave of cats – in the Rathcrogan area, which is a kind of cultural mythological hotspot up in Roscommon,” says the artist from Carrigaline, Co Cork.
“Symbolically, Oweynagat is the gateway to the underworld in Irish mythology. I went up and filmed a performance on site. I meant to film inside the cave as well, but two weeks before I visited, I found out that the cave had been flooded with carbon dioxide and was really dangerous, so I couldn't go in.”
Quinn’s new exhibition picks up again on her interest in Lilith, whom she channels in the video, disappearing into and then re-emerging from the mouth of the cave.
“I was connecting a specific mythological site within the Irish landscape to the gallery space and linking the two like a portal. My performance gave birth to this whole new body of work.”
Quinn is naked throughout the film, and the paintings in her exhibition, like those in her degree show, are also nudes. The decision to go unclothed in her work did not come easily, she says, “but all my favourite artists are women who have done this kind of thing as well. Tate Modern in London has a line-up next year that includes exhibitions by Tracey Emin, Frida Kahlo and Ana Mendieta, all of whom are a huge influence on my practice. I’ve also been inspired by Irish artists, like Jesse Jones, Alice Maher, Aideen Barry, and the performance artist Áine Phillips. I had a tutorial with Áine at Crawford. She's doing really controversial stuff, but I think she navigates it in a really interesting way. It's very progressive.”
Quinn is modest about her skills as a painter. “I first started experimenting with oils when I was 20. I bought a set of paints online, but I had no idea what I was doing. There was no painting elective in Crawford, it came in the year after I started. But I got a lot of advice from the tutors on the technical side of things, how to prime a canvas and so on.
“I still paint quite crudely. I just use oil paint and turpentine, I don’t mix anything else in. I keep it very simple because I learned intuitively. I know the textures, and I just have to trust my instincts on it.”
Quinn made her work for the Lavit exhibition over the past several months, while availing of her residency at the Backwater Studios next door. Sadly, her time there will end in the autumn. “Beyond that, I’m just hoping to find another studio space,” she says.
“Ideally, I’d like to be in my studio at least five days a week, but the biggest worry for me is that I may end up painting in a shared living room. I don’t as yet have another exhibition lined up, but I think this body of work has the potential to be expanded and developed.
"I see it as phase one, and I have a plan for phase two and three. My hope is that I can get an exhibition in a larger space in 2026, so the work will have more space to breathe.”
Like many emerging artists, Quinn has to balance her artmaking with earning a living. “It’s very challenging,” she says. “I was working part-time as a gallery assistant at the Glucksman, but I quit a few months ago so I could dedicate myself to finishing the pieces for this exhibition. Realistically, I’ll have to find another job in the next month or so to keep going. I’m also selling artworks I made at Crawford. Ultimately, I hope to keep producing and selling work, and the ideal situation would be to make a living out of that.”
Quinn also hopes to go on to further study. “I’d love to do an MFA at some point in the future,” she says. “Ideally, I’d do it abroad. I think it would really benefit me to get some new perspective in a different country, and then return to Ireland. But it’ll probably be 2027/28 before I start looking into that. For now, I want to keep producing work off the back of my degree, and establish myself as a working artist.”
- Lara Quinn, Lady Lazarus is the Lavit Gallery, Cork until May 3. Quinn will be in conversation with Dr Marion Dowd, archaeologist and author of The Archaeology of Caves in Ireland, at the Lavit at 12pm April 19.
- Further information: lavitgallery.com; laraquinn.ie
