Cathy Dorman: Art inspired by the world of architecture
Cathy Dorman and Ita Freeney at the Lavit in Cork.
Cathy Dorman’s joint exhibition with Ita Freeney at the Lavit Gallery is aptly named Within and Beyond. Dorman, a former architect, is largely interested in the built environment, and particularly in interior spaces, while Freeney is more preoccupied with the outdoor landscape.
The two met on a residency at the Ballinaglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Co Mayo in January 2025. Both are painters, but their paths to working professionally were a little dissimilar. Freeney went on to art college after school, graduating from the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork in 1994, while Dorman, by her own account, took longer to answer her calling.
“Growing up in Coalisland, Co Tyrone, I always wanted to go to art college,” she says. “I was offered a place in Belfast, but at the very last minute I did a U-turn and decided to study architecture instead. I went on to work at Scott Tallon Walker for about ten years, I had a family and worked on my own house in Dublin. But then, slowly but surely, I got back into art, doing night classes at the National College of Art and Design, and at the Redwood Art School out in Dun Laoghaire.”
Eventually, Dorman enrolled as a full-time student at NCAD. As a mature student, she found the experience nerve-wracking at first, but soon met others who were in a similar situation. “There was a great camaraderie among the students, no matter what age you were,” she says. “I’m still in contact with a lot of them.”
It was in the library at NCAD that she came across a book by Alice T Friedman called Woman and the Making of the Modern House. “Friedman’s book was a revelation to me, because basically it was looking at iconic modern houses designed by architects that we all kind of know, people like Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and a few others, but it also told the stories behind them. Very often it was a woman that had the idea for those houses, but their stories are not well known.”
One of the buildings featured was Farnsworth House, designed by Mies van der Rohe for the physician Edith Farnsworth near Plano, Illinois in 1951. “He designed this most iconic, beautiful steel building, simplicity personified. But Farnsworth hated living there. It was basically a glass box, with no solid walls, and she couldn’t relax, as she felt she was on view all the time.”
Some time later, Dorman heard the British art historian Katy Hassel interview the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist on her Great Women Artists podcast. “One of her questions was, if you could meet anyone from history, who would you choose? And Obrist chose the architect Lina Bo Bardi, who designed a house called Casa de Vidro in Sao Paulo, Brazil, around the same time as the Farnsworth House. It was also a glass box, but it was raised up on pillars, so nobody could see into it.”
Dorman built models of both houses, which she then photographed in black and white. These images then became the basis of her paintings. “Very often I’ll put the models on my kitchen window,” she says. “There’s this wonderful light, particularly in winter, and these fantastic shadows. Sometimes I’ll catch the trees in the background, or even the side elevation of my own house. It brings a little bit more mystique into the photograph.
“I use black and white because it lets me see more shapes and tones, and helps me set the construct of the painting. And then, from there, I kind of fracture it, fold it, break it. I try and mess it up, basically. I wreck my paintings so many times, then pull them back again. It’s all part of the process.”
Dorman has not yet had the opportunity to visit Farnsworth House or Casa de Vidro, but she has been to see another modernist building that continues to fascinate her, the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Built by the Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld for the pharmacist Truus Schröder-Schrader, the house is celebrated for its pioneering use of geometric forms and emphasis on functionality.
“It was very emotional,” says Dorman, “cycling down that street past all these brown brick early Victorian houses, and then you find the Rietveld Schröder House at the very end of the terrace. It looks like it was designed yesterday, but it was actually built in 1925.”
Dorman is currently working on a series of paintings based on the Irish designer Eileen Gray’s E-1027 villa in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in France. “It’s a difficult house to get to, even today. It’s down on the cliffs, and it’s almost impossible to drive there. It’s only when you visit that you realise just how tremendous a feat it was, bringing all the materials down to the site by donkey cart. But it’s a beautiful area, and the house is amazing. Gray was very influenced by the Rietveld Schröder House. She went to visit it in 1927, and used a lot of their theories in her design.”
Dorman is showing paintings inspired by both the Rietveld Schröder House and E-1027 at the Lavit. This is her first time exhibiting in Cork, though she has had several shows around the country since graduating from NCAD in 2020. “Unfortunately, that was during COVID,” she says, “and we never got to have our graduate exhibition. But I was awarded a studio space right after college, and it meant I could continue developing my ideas.”
The studio award was a collaboration between the Royal Hibernian Academy and IPUT Real Estate, who sponsored three studio spaces at Wilton Park in Dublin 2 between 2019 and 2023. It led to her first solo exhibition, Domestic Planes, at the RHA’s Ashford Gallery in 2022.
More recently, Dorman has been allocated studio space at Independent Studio Artists in Eustace St, Dublin. “It’s so important to have a studio to go to. It’s right in Temple Bar, and I’m in there every day. There are eight studios, and I’ll have mine for the next year.”
Dorman is currently working towards her next solo show, which she hopes will travel internationally. “It would be wonderful to exhibit my work in the Visitors’ Centre close to E-1027 or some other location in France appropriate to the extraordinary legacy of Eileen Gray.”
She has considered continuing her art education, but is too busy to do so just now, she says. “Since leaving college, I’ve just gone from one project to the next. I feel like I am still learning how to paint, and still experimenting. Maybe sometime, if I find the time, I’ll go back and do a Master’s. But for now, I’m very happy to keep painting.
- Ita Freeney & Cathy Dorman: Within and Beyond runs at the Lavit Gallery, Cork until June 13. Further information:lavitgallery.com
