In 2017, a car accident left Lucienne O'Mara with a brain injury that fundamentally altered her relationship with vision. She lost all spatial awareness and the ability to process visual information - even the simple act of identifying the floor became impossible. "It was as if I couldn't understand the language of visual understanding," she recalls. During extended periods of bed rest, she began meticulously cataloguing images of artworks, particularly drawn to Giorgio Morandi's still life paintings, where objects simultaneously assert and dissolve their boundaries to create depth. This systematic study became her method of reconstructing visual understanding, revealing how perception is as much a function of the brain as it is of the eyes - each new visual experience is inherently shaped by every image that preceded it.
O'Mara's paintings reject linear time and fixed spatial relationships in favour of simultaneous moments and fluid boundaries. Her work operates through a series of grid formations that simultaneously impose structure whilst fostering chaos. Her paintings present multiple temporal and perceptual planes at once, allowing viewers to move freely between states of understanding and ambiguity. Depth and form remain deliberately fluid, the rules of perception productively broken, and the conventional order of vision dissolving into something more intuitive and emotionally resonant. This ambiguity becomes not merely an artistic choice but a gateway to a more liberated form of seeing, one where the boundaries between object and space, moment and memory, continually shift and reform.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Alone Together, Vigo Gallery, London (2024), Eternity in an hour, Nino Mier, New York (2024) and Through the Grid, Gillian Jason Gallery, London (2024).