Rocketgirl is a pseudonymous painter from Northern Ireland whose practice she describes as post-iconic figuration: figurative abstraction with a signature of eyes obscured by bright painted-over flashes. Classically trained in oils since childhood, she works in a hybrid process, generating digital variations with custom AI models trained on her own paintings before applying changes back to the physical canvas.
She grew up in rural Northern Ireland during the Troubles, drawing constantly as a child and staging weekend exhibitions of her work in the family attic. After studying at the University of Edinburgh, she earned two bachelor's and two master's degrees in business and PR rather than art, at her mother's insistence, and set painting aside as she built a career and raised a daughter. After six or seven years without painting, a conversation with her partner led her to pick the brush back up, and a curator, Paul Nesbit, encouraged her to organize her first solo exhibition.
