About

Biography

Majella Clancy is an artist and lecturer in BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. She gained her MFA at Ulster University, Belfast (2006) and later completed a practice led PhD that examined gendered space through paint and print practice also at Ulster University (2012). Recent exhibitions include: RBSA Print Prize, RBSA Gallery, Birmingham (2024), IMPACT 11, UWE Bristol, (2022), Structure, QSS Gallery Belfast (2022), Future Forward, QSS Gallery, Belfast and MART, Dublin (2022). How the Image Echoes, Ulster University Gallery, Belfast (2020) and PSSquared, Belfast (2019), prINT, invited artist, Munsterland Print Festival, Kloster Bentlage, Rheine, Germany (2019), Impact 10 International Printmaking Conference, Santander, Spain (2018). Recent and forthcoming publications include: Clancy, M. Felmingham, S. ‘Drawing Out: Encounter, Resistance, Collaboration’ in Drawing Research Theory Practice, Intellect, UK, (2019), Clancy, M. ‘The Thinking I: Self, Materiality and Paint Practice’, in Teaching Painting: A Publication, Cambridge Scholar, UK, (2024). Forthcoming exhibitions include Ulster University Gallery, York Street, Belfast (March 2025)

Artist Statement

My practice explores ideas of motherhood, the gendered body and its relationship with gendered space and material making. I draw from life, building up images and mixed media sketches within several research notebooks. These experiential references continue to grow and visualise their own language and presence through painting and screenprinting. My practice encompasses painting, drawing and printmaking, oftentimes on one surface. 

The work suggests internal landscapes held together by figurative fragments and semi-familiar forms. Repeated motifs perform on the surface suggesting the carnivalesque and other worldly spaces. The materiality of making in the studio is held within the work where references to a stage-set or performed space is played out. In my work the act of painting takes over to visualise expansive, richly layered surfaces that are complex and nuanced. These tactile surfaces are autobiographical mediations on and of the body, motherhood and materiality. The gesture, the embodied mark is an important part of the work, and at times takes centre stage. My approach is intuitive and speaks to and from a history of painting that includes Lee Krasner and Willem de Kooning. 

The paper stencils used to make my screenprints are reused as collage in the paintings. This approach offers an expansive reading where paint and print come together on one surface creating language which is ambiguous, tactile and slippery. The work oscillates between figuration and abstraction holding a personal register of images and marks that make direct and