WELCOME

About the Artist

Nestled on a 250-year-old farm beside the wild Atlantic coast of southwest Ireland, Tillaughna Farmhouse is the creative home of fine artist and ceramist Kirsi O’Connell (née Salo). Here, on this ancient land, the rhythms of sea, stone, wind and memory find their way into every work.

Kirsi’s artistic life unfolds across two intertwined media: painting and ceramics. Both practices are rooted in a love of place, an awareness of time’s passing, and the quiet mysteries that linger when we pause to look more deeply.

The Landscape, The Memory, The Story

The landscape of County Kerry—with its open skies, shifting seas, hidden coves and rugged terrain—is never simply background; it is living material in Kirsi’s work. In her paintings, the land becomes a mirror for emotional terrain: light flickers across canvas like sunshine on waves; forms stretch and recede like coastline at dusk; and the palette recalls the moss, peat, salt-grey stone and sea-foam of her Irish home.

These works invite interpretation: what appears as a ripple of colour might evoke a memory of childhood field-games or peering into tide-pools; a shadowed form might hint at a story half-heard, a legend whispered among hedgerows. In Kirsi’s hands, the landscape is both subject and language—it speaks of past and present, of belonging and wanderlust, of wonder hidden in plain sight.

Paintings — Emotional Cartographies

In the painting studio, Kirsi explores light, form and emotion through evocative compositions that foster a dialogue with her ceramic practice. Her works are less literal landscapes and more emotional cartographies: maps of longing, quiet transformation and the ebb and flow of thought.

Each painting offers multiple layers of meaning. A bold sweep of colour may suggest a horizon, but also a boundary between memory and imagination. A faint marking might reference a footpath in sea-mist, or the trail of childhood games among rocks and bracken. Her style evokes the way a scent or colour can unlock a buried memory and how a familiar view can suddenly feel otherworldly.

Ceramics — Vessels of Story and Use

In the ceramics studio, Kirsi creates both functional and sculptural pieces that carry the textures and colours of land and sea. Earthenware vessels are shaped by the rhythm of tides and seasons, and they hold within their surfaces the hush of wind through grasses, the salt of sea air and the warmth of hearth-light. Each piece is designed to be used, touched and lived with—bringing the magic of place into everyday ritual.

A Unified Practice

Painting and ceramics are two sides of the same coin: surface and depth, form and feeling, story and material. They speak to one another in Kirsi’s practice—and invite the viewer into a world where stories arise naturally from soil and sea, where memory and myth dance in the light of something very real yet quietly extraordinary.

She hopes that the works presented here will transport you—if only for a moment—to a place where the past is tangible, the present is felt, and the future is imagined. A place where colour, texture and story meet in the art of living.

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