James Earley

James Earley is an artist based in Dublin, Ireland.  His distinctive style celebrates and pays homage to his family’s rich artistic past within Irish stained glass art (Earley & Co. 1861 – 1975).  Earley’s career began in painting letter-based graffiti and he played an active role in the Irish graffiti movement. From 2010, he started to develop abstracted works with an aesthetic rooted in stained glass.

Earley’s work deals with wide ranging themes of power, societal imbalances, religion, politics and ultimately, the inhumanity of man.  His artworks are a visual meditation and reflection of these themes, as well as current global affairs.  From an Irish perspective, the artist aims to interrogate the place of the Church in Irish society, and to highlight the growing disillusionment with religion and state that currently exists in Ireland.

The prints highlight the strong link between Ireland and America via St. Patrick’s Cathedral in both cities.  They depict deconstructed stained glass windows and reference shared architectural elements within each.   The coloured glass shards have detached themselves from the leading in various sections creating a sense of heightened drama, moving freely within the form of the rose window.  The overlapping transparent colours are evocative of the intense, vibrant tones and materiality of stained glass.

These works look to the future of contemporary stained glass, fusing today’s technology with age old techniques.  Similarly, the prints use modern printing methods but also employ traditional gilding in the application of the gold leaf sheets.