EAMON COLMAN: CURATED BY RAIN

In Curated by Rain, Eamon Colman extends a lifelong engagement with landscape, observation, and the lived experience of nature into a body of work shaped by immersion, duration, and chance.  Developed following his 2025 artist residency at Mount Congreve Gardens,[1] the exhibition emerges from sustained encounters with one of Ireland’s most celebrated horticultural environments,  a place where cultivated order and natural unpredictability exist in constant dialogue.

Colman’s practice has long resisted spectacle in favour of attention.  Like his recent exhibition One at the Tea House in Kilkenny, these works arise from prolonged looking: sitting, noticing, waiting, and returning.  The paintings carry the atmosphere of repeated visits through changing weather and seasons, where colour, texture, natural forms, smell, and shifting light accumulate slowly into visual thought.  During the residency, Colman created sketches, photographs, notes, and plant material directly from the gardens, translating these experiences into paintings that move between observation and memory, structure and intuition.

The exhibition’s title originates from necessity, when, during the installation of several paintings in Mount Congreve’s charming derelict Peach House, ‘the frequent showers of rain became an integral element of the curation due to the numerous leaks in the roof.  The artwork was placed safely in the dry areas - curated by rain.’[2]  What began as a practical necessity evolved into a central metaphor within Colman’s thinking.  In this accidental choreography, weather assumed authorship.

From this moment, Curated by Rain expands outward into a wider reflection on human behaviour and vulnerability.  Rain determines movement: whether we venture outside, what we wear, where we gather, and what we avoid.  Increasingly, climate and extreme weather shape not only individual routines but collective futures.  Floods, environmental instability, and climate change now alter landscapes and lives on a global scale.  Colman suggests that, in different ways, all of us are becoming curated by the weather.

Yet these paintings are not didactic.  Rather, they remain rooted in close observation and sensory experience.  The garden becomes both subject and thinking space,  a site where beauty, fragility, growth, and uncertainty coexist.  Colman’s immersion in Mount Congreve Gardens deepens his longstanding research into the relationship between culture and ecology, while reaffirming painting itself as an act of sustained attention in an accelerated world.  Ultimately, Curated by Rain is less about depicting the gardens than about inhabiting them - and recognising how deeply human life remains entangled with forces beyond our control.

[1] This year-long residency is a collaboration between Artform, Dunmore East and Mount Congreve Gardens, Co. Waterford.