70cm x 100cm

About artist: James Wellwood is a Kilkenny based artist specializing in painting, photography, and sculpture. Wellwood’s work serves as a visual exploration of the intricate colours, shapes, and patterns found within the Irish landscape and culture. His art education began at Ormonde College in Kilkenny, where he completed his level five and six certificates in Fine Art. Seeking to further his artistic education, Wellwood chose to study in Limerick School of Art and Design where he completed a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting. Wellwood’s work explores the interplay between landscape and the human experience, investigating themes of isolation, time, memory, and nostalgia, offering a more personal and intimate look at rural life. Drawing on documentation from site visits and found objects, he uses observation and interpretation to offer an analysis of the site from his perspective shaped by his experience as a queer, neurodiverse person. His work integrates space and perception, reflecting personal experiences and places he has visited. His approach emphasizes seeing beyond the surface—using imagination to reinterpret spaces rather than relying solely on what is visible, allowing viewers to see familiar spaces in new, more imaginative ways.
About artwork: Wellwood’s work depicts twilight skies, fireweed growing amongst wrapped bales, a disused milking parlour, fields, puddles, various types of trees, all images that are silhouetted against the late evening light. This body of work acts as an investigation of the human experience in relation to the land. Equipped with a phone camera, Wellwood captures and records what he encounters on his frequent evening walks around the farm and surrounding countryside where he grew up. He has taken his own path through this familiar landscape, fondly responding in his own way, observed through his eyes and life experience. Through a process of analysis in the studio, selected photographs were transformed into oil paintings. Through these works, he explores the quiet moments when the familiar transforms into something otherworldly, evoking a sense of both comfort and unease, uncanny yet nostalgic. As a neurodiverse and queer artist, Wellwood’s perspective brings a distinctive lens to these traditionally conservative spaces. Rural environments are not typically associated with neurodiversity or queerness, yet they shape his experience and identity in profound ways. A departure from the normative, the farmyards and fields, bathed in the soft glow of the setting sun or the cool light of the moon, take on an almost haunted quality. It challenges the conventional narratives of rural life, infusing these landscapes with a sense of displacement, isolation and longing, while also celebrating their beauty and significance, delving into the interconnection of memory and place.
Instagram: @james_wellwood99

Excellent Condition

Oil on Linen

Yes