Elaine O’Dea is a visual artist who lives and works in Dublin. Through her sculptural practice, she explores the relationship of the body and its surroundings, interrogating boundaries and spaces of conflict, and questioning societal structures and the ways in which we move against and within those frameworks.
O’Dea aims to highlight the influence of power dynamics and structures within patriarchal society from a female perspective. Her work is physical, using materials such as plaster, jesmonite, wood, steel, aluminium, copper and fabric, she plays with the tension between materials to construct forms. These sculptural forms become her subjects, semi organic, anthropomorphic entities and oddities that probe and prod, push and pull, challenging boundaries and spaces of conflict.
In this new, ongoing body of work O’Dea explores themes of the maternal space, an interior domestic architecture. She explores the institution of motherhood alongside her own memories of her mother and her experience of mothering.

Run & Fell
Fabric, wood, steel, copper, plasterboard, wallpaper, clay, jesmonite
NCAD Works exhibition 2023, installation view

Run & Fell
Fabric, wood, steel, copper
NCAD Works 2023 exhibition, installation view

Run & Fell
Plasterboard, wallpaper, copper, clay, jesmonite
NCAD Works 2023 exhibition, installation view

Run & Fell (detail)
Plasterboard, wallpaper, copper, clay, jesmonite
NCAD Works 2023 exhibition

Run & Fell
Fabric, steel, copper, plasterboard, wallpaper, clay, jesmonite
NCAD Works 2023 exhibition, installation view

Run & Fell
Fabric, wood, steel, copper
NCAD Works 2023 exhibition, installation view

Run & Fell (detail)
Fabric, wood, steel, copper
NCAD Works 2023 exhibition

Run & Fell
Fabric, steel, copper, concrete, clay, jesmonite
NCAD Works 2023 exhibition, installation view

Run & Fell (detail)
Fabric, copper, concrete, clay, jesmonite
NCAD Works 2023 exhibition