Eimear Nic Roibeaird

I sat with the dying queen and listened (2021)

Eimear Nic Roibeaird (b.1995) is a painter from Belfast. A graduate of Belfast school of art 2020, she has previously been included in group exhibitions and most recently had her first solo show in the Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, Gerard Dillion Gallery. Growing up in an Irish language community, Nic Roibeaird holds a strong connection to her Gael culture. She has a love and pride in her Gael hertiage and native language of Gaeilge. Her work is inspired by the mythology tales of Irish women and of the very real Irish women imprisoned in the Magdalene laundries. It was from the artists own research into the laundries and knowledge of myth, that Nic Roibeaird saw a link between these women of lore and real. That these women had suffered the stigma of shame and censorship. It is these which influences her painting and drawing work. It is the artist’s intention to reclaim the divine, powerful, mythic Irish woman in her work, thereby erasing the passive, mother Ireland narrative attached to Irish womanhood. The figures in Nic Roibeaird’s paintings are the mischievous, Síle-na-gigs, the mystic Banshee and the daoine sídhe, fairy folk.