Courthouse Gallery & Studios - Summer Open - 19 June - 12 August 2026
Trudi van der Elsen, Yellow Studio, oil on canvas, 50x50cm_2018
Trudi van der Elsen, Yellow Studio, oil on canvas, 50x50cm_2018
TRUDI VAN DER ELSEN - PORTALS - Curated by Sharon Murphy
PORTALS invites the viewer into a threshold a gateway into another world, a multi-dimensional field where perception expands and the boundaries between the visible and the unseen loosen. Each painting becomes a portal of fiction: a space for projection, meditation, and the gathering of information.
The process of making these works is itself a kind of crossing. Through repeated gestures, erasures, re-markings, and the slow accumulation of surface, a portal gradually comes into being. The paintings evolve through cycles of emergence and disappearance - spaces growing, contracting, dissolving, and re-forming. Time here is dynamic: it is embedded in the movement of paint, in each trace of revision, and in the perceptual shifts that unfold over the duration of making.
The works draw on multiple spatial registers: hyperspace and the digital web, natural space and bodily space, atmospheric and cosmic space. As the layers build, the canvas becomes an experimental terrain where these dimensions meet. The strata of marks form an abstract language, a conversation between lines and openings, between interior and exterior worlds, between what is known and what lies beyond recognition.
To make or to view a portal requires courage. It asks for a loosening of perception and an openness to transformation. These paintings trace that journey, the subtle psychic shifts, the emotional thresholds, the moments where one crosses into a wider field of experience and emerges altered.
Portals may be narrow at first, but once passed through, they release the viewer into unfamiliar expanses: spacious, resonant, and alive with possibility.
https://www.burrencollege.ie/exhibitions/
The Craic Beneath the Waves I, II and III, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 160 cm, each.
Connla’s Well Series, 2022, acrylic on cotton rag paper, 47 x 47 cm, framed
Echo 2019 acrylic on canvas 100 x 160 cm
Connla’s Well Series, 2022, acrylic on cotton rag paper,47x47cm, framed
Estuary, solo exhibition, June 2023 at Custom House Studios & Gallery, Westport, Co.Mayo
UFO, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 42x42cm framed
Continuum Drift, 2021 acrylic on canvas 120 x 180 cm
Amorphous Drift, 2021 acrylic on canvas 120 x 180 cm
Drift, 2021 acrylic on canvas 120 x 180 cm
Adrift , 2021, acrylic on canvas, 120 x180 cm
4 Drift paintings in Breaking Borders - Exhibition curated by Valeria Ceregini in GOMA Gallery of Modern Art - Waterford
https://valeriaceregini.com/2021/12/27/breaking-borders/ - January 2022
Paintings in Artform Annual 44 Exhibition - Waterford - Dec/Jan 2022
All artworks are available in the online gallery at www.artform.ie or https://theannual44.viewingrooms.com/
Fragmented Perception
curated by Valeria Ceregini https://valeriaceregini.com
part of the trilogy Painting through its poetical emotions #3 at Weber & Weber Galleria, Turin, Italy
http://www.galleriaweber.it 14 September - 30 October 2021
NOTES FROM A DIGITAL SEA - Paintings at the Gallery I Burren College of Art - 2020
https://www.burrencollege.ie/exhibitions/?exhibitions=past
XR-Extended Reality, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 100x100cm - OPW State Art Collection, Ireland
exhibited in 2020 - RHA 190th Annual Exhibition, Dublin
exhibited in 2020 - RHA 190th Annual Exhibition, Dublin
XR- Series, mixed media on cotton rag paper, 30 x 30 cm, 2018/2019
Studio with Toledo Strings and Monkey & Grasshopper











































