ARTIST BIO
Gerard O’Brien is a visual artist working in drawing and video. His work is predominantly concerned with landscapes – built and unbuilt and natural history. There is a blurring of boundaries in his work between design and fine art.
He has degrees in Zoology, Landscape Architecture and Fine Art and his work reflects his varied studies.
He has been making artwork for decades but went back to study Fine Art in 2022, graduating with an MA in 2025.
For a number of years while living in Scotland he was part of Dundee Artists in Residence (D-AiR) and exhibited with them in several art ‘festivals’ in the city of Dundee. More recently, as part of his studies he had the chance to exhibit with his cohorts in an interim show titled ‘Gaffer Tape’. Furthermore The MA final show ‘Waystation’ took place in the Complex, Dublin in 2024.
After graduating he was visual artist for a theatre project concerning endangered birds in Ireland (those on the Red List). This brought together many of his different themes and was a collaborative processes – collaboration having become an important aspect of his work.
He is part of collective Landscapes in Motion, whose members span across a number of European countries.
SELECTED WORKS
Becoming
2024
Media
TU Dublin MA Degree Show 2024
Credits
Video was made as a collaboration between Gerard O’Brien, Julia Benedict, Shane Galvin with additional input from Susan Gogan. Installation photos by Susan Gogan.
This work was developed as part of Gerard’s degree in Fine Art from TU Dublin and brought together different interests of the artist – performance, drawing and an interest in natural history. The artist used a combination of technics and methods, green screening the character of the piece (“The Zoologist”) into a drawn world. Elsewhere ‘real’ objects combine with drawn ones. This creates a recognisable but also fairytale world. The premise of the piece is that “The Zoologist” is studying endangered birds but becomes subsumed by their work, eventually morphing to a bird/person, when they become enclosed in the “Cloak of Feathers”. The work sits within theories of the post human, where we recognise our less than central place in the world. An important aspect of the process was the collaborative nature of the work.
Birds of the Red-List
2025
Conference of Birds
Credits
Performance directed by Floating World, with The Elders group and Cor na Nóg
Gerard received a commission to produce a series of drawings – the over fifty birds on the endangered list of birds in Ireland (Red-List). This work was shown alongside the performance called The Conference of Birds, performed by the community acting group The Elders, accompanied by Cor na Nóg – National Concert Hall Children’s Choir and directed by Andrea Scott. It was created with the help of funding from the Arts Council Ireland Participation and supported by OPW.
Boundary
2011
Dundee Live Festival, Scotland
While living in Scotland Gerard was part of a group called “Dundee Artists in Residence (D-AiR)” and the associated “If the city were a commons”. A part of a number of organised activities and sub-groups was the art and ecology reading group “Reading Towards Action”. After reading about art and walking and walking as art, Gerard developed a project to walk the perimeter of Dundee, in order to “Know Space, Know Place”. Working at the time as a Chartered Landscape Architect he knew a number of the green spaces he passed but the journey gave him fresh perspectives. You can read his thoughts here:
Sketch Drawings
1998-Present
For more than twenty five years Gerard has been keeping sketchbooks recording architecture,
landscape architecture and his design ideas. They are a record of his observations and travels.
Wherever he goes he keeps such a sketchbook. The sketches are sometimes quick and
impressionistic but have become more carefully observed in recent years.