Artist who is inspired by toys of childhood

What are you going to be when you grow up? It’s the perennial questions that never perturbed Rosemary Fallon.

She always knew she would be an artist.

In the last year the whole of Ireland has finally caught up. With two solo exhibitions under her belt and a third planned for a Cork Museum, her pop surrealist paintings were featured in last year’s seminal publication, Goblin Market: Irish New Contemporary Art. Her work has a constant presence in the White Lady Gallery in Temple Bar, Galway Bay Galleries in Lower Dominick Street in the city and Eakin Art Gallery in Belfast.

Rosemary swirled into the city’s consciousness when she was the artist chosen to grace the programme of this year’s Galway Fringe Festival, with her fantastical creation called Let Breadcrumbs Live. Her unique doll boxes have become a talking point of Dominick Street, taking over a shop window for the duration of the fest.

The 38-year-old from Ardrahan has steered a very carefully navigated path to this juncture.

She readily admits she was useless at school – she has dyslexia although never diagnosed – and had no interest in sport. The only thing which she excelled at from an early age was art.

But for a self-confessed struggling student, she certainly took to study, with no less than eight years of third-level education under her belt. She started off with a diploma in fine art in Sligo, went on to complete a BA in National College of Art and Design (NCAD). After that it was a year-long City and Guilds in computer arts followed by a Masters in multimedia in Dublin City University (DCU) where she learned techniques in animation. She also did several business courses.

After college, she worked for several years in Galway as a designer, animator and lecturer. But for the last five years she has concentrated on oils while running her own art school which she built alongside a new house in her native Ardrahan.

She shares it with her boyfriend, a Salthill web developer, and her Jack Russell, Kickie.

“It was always the plan to build my own place because you can’t paint in rented accommodation; my paintings were tiny when I lived in a box room. I didn’t know about the teaching until after I opened the school and realised I was brilliant. Don’t put that in, but I’m as good a teacher as I am a painter,” she laughs.

Some of her pupils have been with her since she opened in 2008, ranging in ages from three to 70-plus.

Her school is her saviour, giving her the chance to interact with humans, and pay the mortgage and bills while giving her the freedom to produce art that she loves. And these pieces are certainly labours of love.

Each painting depicts a scene that she has already set up in the computer programme, Photoshop.

She often stage-photographs herself for the scene, borrows objects such as a stuffed hedgehog from the natural history museum or a coffee set from her mum Alice’s house, takes a photo of a city skyline snatched on her holiday last year to Shanghai or a glen in Sligo which has a particularly haunting atmosphere.

Her female characters are what makes her stand out from the crowd, with their haunting expressions and doll-like qualities. This is the greatest challenge to get right and she draws from a large collection of eyeballs, lips, faces, all pulled from magazines and newspapers.

For more about Rosemary Fallon see this week’s Tribune here.