Tracing Memory Part Two: a journey along the black river.

Mullaniff’s project links with a group of works prepared in 1997 entitled Tracing Memory. The following commentary written by Michael Phillipson and refers to the background of the current paintings. Sticking to painting (from catalogue Foil3 1997). Kathleen's creative project, her movement across and out of a range of ways of making paintings has always been driven by the need to match
means and subject matter. Practice for her is always a site of experiment, play, openness and risk, in the recognition that even subtle shifts of feeling, thought and impulse may demand drastic moves in ways of making. Her work is defined by the need to find just the right means for rendering the unavoidable, that which she cannot get round in any other way - the matters which subject her to themselves. Working
within this self-critical vision makes utterly different demands to the modernist search for the identifying 'personal style'. For her nothing is ever settled; the work comes to life in and as the
differences the subject matter requires.’
“As the immigrant looks back at what was left behind, a sense of disassociation is accompanied through
the act of looking.” It is this that I have endeavoured to explore in the paintings exhibited at the Leinster
Gallery in Dublin”. Statement Mullaniff.