Sarah Beegan is a 2021 graduating student from The National College of Art and Design's Joint Hons degree in Fine art painting and education. A practicing artist, she also teaches Art at Sandford Park School, Ranelagh, Dublin. She has exhibited work at Inspire Gallery, Dublin, Temple Bar Medical Centre, The National Treasury Management Agency, NCAD's Yellow Box and most recently The Lab Gallery Dublin. In 2021, her work was also selected by both The RHA and RUA for inclusion in their Annual Exhibitions.

 

Beegan's work explores the themes of resilience and power and the complex relationship between these opposing forces through the juxtaposition of various images and suggestive contrasts to represent them. More recently the covid pandemic and resulting lockdowns have prompted her to explore health and illness as manifestations of the same themes and their resulting tug of war relationship. Her current body of work is therefore very much within the here and now. It is informed through a mixture of personal experience, medical imagery and is rooted in Beegan's photographic interaction with the blooms in her immediate environment. Through experimentation with photographic images, she creates photomontages, which create a strange narrative of growth and sterility. This narrative is then translated onto canvas through carefully considered brush strokes which at times tenderly glide across the canvas and at other times are forceful and brutish in their application of thick layers of impasto paint. A deliberately vibrant and often psychedelic colour palette coupled with a strange double negative effect in some of her work is used to pull the viewer in as both spectator and actor within the covid drama, seeking resonance within them to provoke an emotive response which alternates between fear and hope for survival. Beegan aptly appropriates the magnolia bloom (one of the first flowering plants that evolved on earth) in her current body of work  to symbolise endurance, continuity, hope and eventual triumph in our battle to make the world safe again.

 

Beegan works in both oil and acrylic on large canvases and walls but also enjoys experimenting with other surfaces eg. prosthetic limbs, paper and wood. Her work has been purchased and is now apart of the public collections at Temple Bar Medical Centre and also at The National Treasury Management Agency, Dublin.