Local artist's Marked Lands exhibition on display at Esker Arts
by Julie Spollen
Esker Arts Centre is providing the opportunity to see Marked Lands, a new exhibition by Tullamore-born artist David Fox. Marked Lands is a real treat for Offaly audiences, showcasing familiar scenes from Tullamore and beyond in a striking, thought-provoking style.
Fox’s paintings capture well-known, everyday landscapes and sites, from the comforting rural structures and waterways to familiar street frontage.
Honest, homely, and just a little cheeky, these works give pride of place to spaces we often overlook in our everyday. It’s rewarding to see them so carefully recorded and celebrated in paint.
Originally from Tullamore and now based at Pallas Projects Studios in Dublin, David Fox is known for contemporary landscape painting that uniquely incorporates graffiti and street art motifs. His practice explores the visual marks and scrawls that shape our built environment, from Dublin’s bustling backstreets to rural outbuildings and containers adorned with bold, layered tags.
In Visual Artists Ireland Critique (Urban Fingerprints, July–August 2025), his recent paintings were described as “an incisive meditation on the meeting of landscape tradition and contemporary urban culture, where graffiti is not vandalism but a complex visual language embedded in place and identity.” Fox’s use of text and graffiti within muted, traditional landscapes challenges us to see our everyday journeys in a new light.
One personal standout piece in Marked Lands features a graffiti-tagged container in the Wicklow mountains, its vivid red commanding attention while guiding the eye to the grandeur of the Sugar Loaf beyond, a perfect example of Fox’s interest in the tension between human mark-making and natural form.
Fox, who graduated from GMIT and the University of Ulster, has exhibited extensively in Ireland and internationally. His work is part of major collections including the OPW and the National Transport Authority in Dublin.
For details on opening hours, events, and other exhibitions, visit eskerarts.ie or social media channels.