7th November 2025 – Exhibition

Holding Space presents a fascinating collaboration between Mollie Douthit and Sara Baume. The exhibition will include paintings, sculpture and needlework, all reflecting the artists’ common process of building pieces gradually, almost ritualistically. Both also share a certain curiosity in spirituality and mysticism, which is referenced by the gap at the centre of the handkerchiefs Baume will be showing, the literal space that each piece holds, which has also become a kind of signifier of their friendship. Douthit, her paintings and their friendship are also the subject of Baume’s forthcoming book, Opening Night, which will be published by Granta in the summer of 2026.

MOLLIE DOUTHIT

Catherine Marshall, former Head of Collections at IMMA, has written of Mollie Douthit that she “shows extraordinary maturity for a  young artist. She paints objects so commonplace in everyday experience that they would be comic, were they not painted with such seriousness and such careful study…… Douthit’s wonderful little canvases ask us simply to look at them, at the painting process, at existence itself.”

Douthit places her work in the tradition of 18th century still life painters, most notably Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin  and his depictions of everyday objects. She is also drawn to the stillness found in the work of Giorgio Morandi and Gwen John. Contemporary influences include Alice Neel, Chantal Joffe and Peter Drecher. “These painters allow paint to speak for itself, for the subject and for a moment in time,” she says. “With their own language, they each extend something beyond the surface of a painting.”

Although technically more challenging, Douthit likes to work wet on wet, enjoying the fluidity of the medium. If she is unsure of the direction a painting needs to go in she will put it to one side, ruminating on it, before deciding on the direction it needs to take.

Born in the US, Douthit studied at the University of North Dakota and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She completed her MFA at the Burren College of Art 2014. Douthit won the Hennessy Craig Award at the 2013 RHA Annual Exhibition and has been shortlisted for the Saatchi Art New Sensation Prize and the John Moores Painting Prize. She was awarded an Arts Council bursary in 2023.

As well as three solo exhibitions at The Molesworth Gallery, she has also had solo shows at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, the RHA Ashford Gallery and at the Northwest Arts Centre in North Dakota. She has also shown at the Saatchi Gallery in London.   

SARA BAUME

In her art practice, Sara Baume is interested in ritual and sacred objects, and in miniatures, and by the uniquely human tendency to create miniaturised utopias – both as a form of play and a means of exercising control over the reality of a world that is increasingly unpredictable. Among the works she’ll be showing in ‘Holding space’ are a series of hand-sewn handkerchiefs which draw influence from folk art and amateur craft. ‘They are essentially domestic objects,’ she says, ‘that have been stripped of function in favour of decoration and symbolism. My tendency to gravitate toward mysticism is referenced by the gap at the centre of every handkerchief, the literal space that each piece holds.’

Baume is a writer and artist based in West Cork. She is the author of three novels and a non-fiction book called handiwork. In 2018 her debut solo exhibition took place in the Morley Gallery in central London with the support of Culture Ireland. In 2020 her neon text-work, so sick and tired, was displayed on the façade of the National Sculpture Factory in collaboration with Cork Midsummer Festival and subsequently purchased by the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery. In 2021, she showed as part of the group show, Home: Being and Belonging in Contemporary Ireland, in the Glucksman Gallery, and in 2025 her installation, Altarpiece for Medieval North Main Street, was exhibited in St. Peter’s Church in Cork city. In summer 2026 her fifth book, Opening Night, is due to be published.

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