At One in the Tea Houses, Irish artist Eamon Colman presents a single work entitled: The Pulse and Glide of Fulmar’s Cliff, paper on aluminum, that invites an unusually sustained encounter. Made several years ago, the painting emerged from the artist’s habitual practice of walking along the seashores and riverbanks, where looking is slow, attentive, and shaped by the shifting conditions of weather, light and season.
Colman’s work has long engaged with the relationship between humans and the natural world, not through direct representation but through abstraction that hovers between recognition and dissolution. In this painting, forms seem to surface and recede: a gesture that might suggest a bird diving into water, a buoy drifting, or the meeting of sky and river. These are not fixed images but fleeting impressions, held in suspension. The use of paper, worked with paint in a fluid, responsive way, reinforces this sense of immediacy and fragility, marks absorb, bleed, and settle, echoing the rhythms of the environment that inspired them.
Installed alone, the work resists quick consumption. Colman’s own studio chair is positioned directly in front of the painting, creating a quiet but deliberate invitation to sit, pause and look. It mirrors the artist’s own process: a practice grounded in time and reflection. The viewer is encouraged not simply to see, but to dwell, to allow the image to unfold gradually, much like the experience of walking and observing in nature.
While such strategies of slow looking are not new, many galleries and institutions have explored single-work presentations, they take on renewed significance in the context of contemporary life. As attention spans contract and the average museum visit viewing is reduced to mere 25-30 seconds per artwork, exhibitions like One offer a counterpoint. They create space for a different tempo, one that resists distraction and the pressure to move on to the next.
In Colman’s case, this deceleration also deepens the work’s environmental dimension. The painting does not depict nature as an external scene to be consumed; instead, it evokes immersion within it. The shifting forms and ambiguous spatial cues suggest a world in flux, where boundaries between air, water and land, and between observer and environment, are porous. Such an approach aligns with a broader ecological awareness, foregrounding interconnectedness rather than separation. By structuring the exhibition around a single work, One sharpens this experience. With no alternative objects to draw the eye, attention settles and intensifies. Subtle details, variations in tone, the layering of marks, and the tension between control and chance begin to emerge. The longer one looks, the more the painting yields, not as a fixed meaning but as an evolving encounter.
In this way, Colman’s exhibition One becomes both a reflection on painting and a quiet proposition about how we might re-engage with the world. It suggests that attention, patient, sustained, and open-ended, is not only an aesthetic practice but an ethical one. Against the speed of contemporary life, One offers something increasingly rare: the possibility of simply staying, looking, and allowing time to do its work
Weekday opening times: 12:30–2:30 & 5:30–7:30 pm
Saturday opening time: 11:00 am-4:30 pm
Artist talk taking place on Saturday 4th April at 3pm. Book here.
Closed Easter Sunday 5th & Monday 6th April.
About the Artist
Eamon Colman was born in Dublin in 1957 and has lived and worked in County Kilkenny since 2003. He has been an elected member of Aosdána since 2007, an accolade bestowed in recognition of his major contribution to Irish culture. His professional career spans from 1979, during which he has created forty-seven solo exhibitions presented nationally and internationally.
In 1997, he was invited to host a major mid-term retrospective exhibition of his work entitled ‘Post Cards Home’ at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, at the age of thirty-nine. This was accompanied by a monograph on his work by writer and art critic Brian McAvera entitled ‘Dreams from The Lion’s Head, The Work of Eamon Colman’, published by Four Fields Press. A 25-year retrospective of his work is featured in a substantial publication by Gandon Editions, Kinsale: ‘Profile 25 – Eamon Colman’ (2006).
In 1989, he won the First Prize Painting Award in EVA International; in 2001 First Prize Painting Award in Eigse, Carlow Arts Festival; in 2002, he was the first Irish artist to be awarded Full Fellowship Award from the Vermont Studio Centre, USA; in 2005, he won a CCAT Interreg Major Award for touring an exhibition in Wales, UK and in 2018 he was awarded a Culture Ireland GB18 Award. In 2023, he was invited to exhibit ‘28-Acres’ at The Butler Gallery and Museum, Kilkenny, which was accompanied by a new film by Kevin Hughes, Wallslough Studios, about the artist and his local environment, where he finds inspiration.
His work has been featured in many international exhibitions showcasing contemporary Irish art, such as ‘Woven Fine Grain’ at Sasse Museum, Los Angeles, USA, curated by Ciara Hambly (2023), ‘Ground Zero 360’, BUH Museum, Texas, USA (2021). He has also exhibited in Austria, Brussels; Denmark; France; Spain; the UK; The Netherlands; Hong Kong; Canada, and the USA.
Colman’s work is held in numerous prominent public collections including The National Gallery of Ireland; The Arts Council of Ireland; The Danish Arts Council; The Office of Public Works – Government Collection; The Irish Museum of Modern Art (Gordon Lambert Collection); Tralee Regional Technical College; Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast; AIB Bank; Bank of Ireland; Ulster Bank; KPMG; Smurfit Ireland Grp.; The Crawford Collection at the Belle Isle Hotel; The Lough Erne Resort Hotel; Citibank; Deutsche Bank; Arthur Anderson; Fyffes Ireland; Delta Airlines; De Vere’s private collection and various private collections worldwide.
See more: www.eamoncolman.com
Upcoming solo exhibition: Curated by Rain, Solomon Fine Art, 30 May – 20 June 2026.
Two-person: Eamon Colman & Dougal McKenzie, Hambly and Hambly, Northern Ireland, 17 April
Curated by Shane Gallagher and Shannon Carroll as part of the Spring & Summer Programme at The Tea Houses.
Presented as part of the Kilkenny County Council Arts Office Programme
