Maria Simonds-Gooding was born in India in 1939 and came to live in Co. Kerry in 1947, where she has lived ever since. She studied art at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Le Centre de Peinture, Bruxelles and the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, where she began working with plaster on board. Simonds-Gooding’s work is largely concerned with landscape, and both the rocky fields of the south-west of Ireland and the farmlands of India feature frequently. Using a neutral palette, she creates subtle works in plaster and on paper textured with grog and carborundum that reduce the landscape to strong abstract lines and irregular shapes. The artist is also interested in man’s relationship to the land, and through the exploration of the primal connection between people and place her work becomes reminiscent of cave drawings and early painting.
Maria Simonds-Gooding represented Ireland at Young Artists 75 in New York and has received several awards for her etchings and carborundums including a special commendation at the Firth National Print Exhibition at Galway Arts Centre in 1995 and a prize at the Fourth International Print Biennale in Listowel in 1985. She also won the Oireachtas Landscape Award in 1986. In 1981 Simonds-Gooding was elected a member of Aosdána. She has exhibited her work in numerous group shows with the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin; An Galeraí, Donegal; and the Lavitt Gallery, Cork; as well as the RHA in Dublin. Solo exhibitions include the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York; Lemonstreet Gallery, Dublin; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Graphic Studio Dublin; and Vangard Gallery, Cork. Her work features in the public collections of AIB, the Arts Council of Ireland, IMMA, the National Self-Portrait Collection, Limerick, the OPW and the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst others.
Exhibitions with Taylor Galleries:2004 Fields of Vision
1998
1987
1985
1980