Having returned to County Fermanagh after many years in London, Senga Sharkey’s painting practice is shaped by having lived in both urban and rural environments. While these experiences inform her work, inspiration more often arises from memory, emotion, and imagination rather than from specific people or places. Storytelling sits at the centre of her practice, underpinning both her semi-abstract and fully abstract paintings, and she aims to evoke a contemplative response that invites viewers to form personal narratives. Experimentation, risk, and play are fundamental to her process, with layers of paint, text, and fragments of collage added, scraped back, or obscured in an ongoing exploration of what lies beneath the surface, both materially and metaphorically. Decisions about what to keep and what to remove drive this continual push and pull, allowing each painting to guide the emergence of its own narrative.