Caitlín O’ Doherty is an Irish artist and facilitator working across sculptural painting, film, audio and community engagement to explore love, loss and growth. Her practice asks what forms of love exceed the boundaries of the body. Rooted in pre-colonial cosmologies and the land-based metaphors embedded within the Irish language, she aims to embody the feeling of tenalach – the almost sacred relationship one has with the natural world; connection to the land, air and water.
Within her sculptural painting practice, she works on raw muslin using water, natural dyes, and acrylic inks. Liquidity is central: pigments bleed, pool, and migrate beyond her control, allowing the material to assert its own agency. This fluid media disrupts boundaries between abstraction and representation. The coexistence of plant-based and industrial pigments creates a productive tension between natural and synthetic, control and surrender – allowing transformation to become both subject and method.
She is drawn to the pre-cognitive moment, where sensation is felt before language forms. Influenced by affect theory and ecological thought, she approaches making as a site where the material and incorporeal converge. Her suspended installations echo the energetic, contemplative qualities of Irish artist Isabel Nolan, inviting viewers into a slower encounter with colour, light, and form.
Her film and audio work extends this sensibility through collaboration and narrative, exploring connections to land, one another and forces beyond the visible body from research-based collaborative projects. Her sound works are shaped by experimental approaches, poetic storytelling and blends of recorded conversations with sounds from nature’s elements.
Across all mediums, her practice holds tensions between solitude and community, material and spiritual, thinking and feeling and love and loss – creating space for reflection on the complexity of being alive.
Caitlín is originally from Derry, currently completing her BA Fine Art with Contemporary Cultural Theory at the University of Leeds. She belongs to the long, storied tradition of Irish artists who retreat from their home country for new experiences and to observe it from afar. It is this connection to land, nature and people that inspires parts of her practice to reclaim pagan cosmological histories disrupted by colonial erasure.
Recent exhibitions include ‘Return Collective’ at Studio One, Derry (December 2025), ‘Time Will Tell’ at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, Leeds (November 2025), ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ at Void Art Centre, Derry (August 2025), ‘Carried Over’ at Project Space, Leeds (September 2025) and ‘Ephemeral’ at Hemera Hub, Barcelona (March 2025). Future exhibitions include ‘Making Space’ at Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds (July 2026).
Instagram: @flujo.ealain