Artist Profile

Teresa Ward is a Galway-based artist working primarily with painting, drawing, and collage. She completed a Master’s in Creative Processes at Galway and Mayo Institute of Technology in 2017 and is a studio member and board member of Artspace Studios Galway. Working from photography, found imagery, and imagination, Ward explores memory, place, identity, and the relationship between utopian and dystopian spaces. Her visual language is influenced by decorative patterns, particularly Willow patterns and the work of William Morris, which connect ideas of domesticity, nature, and memory. Her current practice centres on Turbot Island, the small island off Ireland’s west coast from which her family originated. Through drawings, paintings, and prints created on discarded coffee-cup lids, she reconstructs fragments of family history and collective memory, drawing on photographs, imagination, and stories of island life. The intimate scale and fragile material of the cup lids evoke domesticity while reflecting the vulnerability and impermanence of memory, community, and cultural heritage.