Noelle Gallagher is a visual artist based in Galway, Ireland. A graduate of painting (ATU 2011), she has since expanded her practice to include moving image, photography and printmaking techniques. Forest/ry, her new moving image artwork, premiered at Earth Rising festival at IMMA in October 2022 and screened at Docs Ireland, The Galway Film Fleadh, KIFF and DC Environmental Film Festival, USA. Her paintings have been selected for numerous juried shows both nationally and internationally, including PeripheriesOPEN, Rua Red, the neo:artprize, Cairde Visual, and The Claremorris Open. As a member of Interface, Engage Arts Studios, Ormston House and 126 she has participated in various residencies and curated shows created by these supportive artist-led spaces. She is a recipient of the AIR on the Edge residency award to Denmark, the Debi O’Hehir Residency Award from the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, several Individual Artist Bursaries from Galway County Council and Visual Arts Bursary Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland.
Noelle Gallagher’s film Forest/ry, sitting inside her wider body of work Fractals and Jay Birds, addresses the darker side of forestry in which economic exploitation of land takes precedence over any care for habitat or biodiversity. ‘The experience of filming the harvesting of Sitka spruce at night was unforgettable’, she writes, ‘the sounds and images were a chilling reminder of the efficiency of human destruction. The action was mesmerising, trees that took 50 years to reach maturity were felled in a matter of seconds.’ This darkness, then, is countered by experiencing the dawn chorus at Derryclare Oak forest which forms part of the score.
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