What the Women in Art Biennale London Meant for My Practice

In September 2024 I exhibited at the Women in Art Biennale London at Chelsea Old Town Hall and left with the Women in Art Excellence Award, recognising outstanding achievement and impact in the visual arts.

I hadn't gone to London expecting an award. I'd gone to show the work, to stand in a room with artists from across the world and see how my paintings held their own in an international context. The award arrived as confirmation of something I'd been quietly building toward for years.

 

The Women in Art Biennale is not an open submission where anyone can pay to participate. I received an invitation through my professional Instagram, a message that arrived quietly one afternoon and took a moment to sink in. Selected alongside women artists from across the globe, brought together in one of London's most beautiful historic venues.

That kind of invitation doesn't happen by accident. It's the result of work being visible in the right places, to the right people, at the right moment.

My path to that submission began at the Edinburgh College of Art, where I trained in sculpture before returning to painting. The RSA New Contemporaries Award in 2013 was the first external validation that the work was serious. The subsequent exhibitions in New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Milan and Brussels built the exhibition record that made the Biennale application credible.

 

In my studio with original artworks Tonn and Coinnle Corra

The Work I Showed

The paintings I brought to Chelsea Old Town Hall were original abstracts on enamel, layered, textured, built over weeks rather than days. Enamel on metal behaves differently to canvas. The paint moves, resists, settles in ways that can't be fully controlled or replicated. Water guides the pigments into organic forms. The result is work with genuine physical depth, surfaces that change with the light, that reward in depth gazing.

This is exactly the kind of work the Biennale curators were selecting for. Not decorative. Not trend-driven. Work with a material story behind it.

 

What the Award Confirmed

Receiving the Women in Art Excellence Award at Chelsea Old Town Hall with an international artists and collectors was a moment I won't forget. It confirmed that the decision to work on unconventional surfaces - to paint on enamel rather than canvas, to use Irish language titles, to build slowly rather than produce quickly - was the right one.

It also confirmed something for collectors. When you acquire work by an artist with a verified international exhibition history and peer-recognised credentials, you're not buying decoration. You're buying a piece of a practice that has been tested, selected and recognised by people who know the difference.

 

Chatting with collectors at the Biennale

For the Eclectic Collector

Provenance matters. Exhibition history matters. The Women in Art Biennale London is not a vanity fair, it's a serious platform that has presented work from artists across mulitiple nations. Being selected and then recognised within that context is a credential that carries genuine weight in the fine art market.

Every original painting I make carries that history with it. The enamel, the layered acrylics, the micro photography that captures details invisible to the naked eye, all of it is underpinned by an exhibition record that stretches from Edinburgh to New York to London.

 

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