Daniel Coleman explores the impermanence of life and the significance of the everyday. His work is steeped in symbolism and meaning, in relation to his rural Irish upbringing. Through the ritual of making, Coleman aims to link the themes of self, family, place, loss, faith, time and memory. The works of Irish writers, poets and playwrights navigate a lot of the themes within his work. The figure, objects and the family home are at the forefront of his practice. The ancestral home is central to his research. Coleman investigates the relationship one has with the interior and the exterior landscape, with a particular interest in addressing the solitude. Relying on memory, he then seeks to deconstruct these spaces and rebuild them through the medium of paint, creating new places entirely – places that feel familiar yet unfamiliar.
Objects and their contexts inform Coleman’s art. An inanimate object can contain emotional memory and act as a vehicle to other times and places. Therefore he selects key objects to act as a catalyst for memories. In painting them he hopes to create another catalytic object – a means of exploring transience and history. In Coleman’s treatment of the figure he applies the same process of ‘objectification’. The process of wiping the identities of his subjects and suffocating them through the medium, ultimately celebrates the physical properties of the paint itself. Coleman’s paintings are by no means certain of themselves, much like the artist, they are quiet but constantly overthinking.
