Disc Unknown: Artist and Curator Tour

Joe O’Rourke

Joe O’Rourke (b.1995) is a Manchester-based artist and teacher. O’Rourke is interested in the emotional responsiveness of painting and its expanded possibilities. He’s drawn to painting because it offers both an internal psychological space and an external encounter – pulling the viewer inward while also referring them back to the world. Working across multiple scales and media, found materials and text often function as points of entry and departure into both the making and viewing of the work.

He’s interested in the ideas that materials carry; how they can root the work in a time and place and hold tensions between the handmade and mass-produced, the intimate and the public. Living in Manchester has shaped his sensitivity to the felt experience of urban environments, using materials and motifs that reference urbanisation, labour, and thresholds between internal and external, private and public space. In the studio, his ideas emerge from intuition through slow looking– allowing objects, images, text and materials to collect meaning.

O’Rourke graduated in 2017 from Edinburgh College of Art, and in 2018, he was a prize-winner in the John Moores Painting Prize. In 2019, he began the national collaborative painting project ‘Painters Posting Paintings’. He has taught at Edinburgh College of Art, Manchester School of Art, and the University of Greater Manchester.