Rachel Ballagh

Rachel Ballagh is an Irish artist, working with photography, drawing and painting. From Dublin, she now lives and works in south-eastern County Cork. She has exhibited since the mid-1990s, and her work is held in a number of private collections, and was added to Ireland's National Collection in 2023.

Early life and education Rachel Ballagh was born to artist Robert Ballagh and his wife Betty (née Carabini, 1950–2011) in 1968; she has a younger brother. She later attended the National College of Art and Design a short distance away, graduating in 1992. In advance news of the show, she participated in an exhibition called Signals at the Gallery of Photography, while seeking animal skeletons as she prepared Flock.

She has participated in multiple group shows, including one at the Stephen Pearce Emporium in Shanagarry, Dublin: In the Palm in 2021, and as one of two main artists at an exhibition in Castletownbere in 2019.

Ballagh's Back Garden (2021) was shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait Prize in 2022, She has been awarded bursaries from the Arts Council (of Ireland). Around 2012, she survived a severe bout of diverticulitis (a condition which contributed to her mother's death in 2011) and related complications, had another serious medical incident involving an induced coma in 2015, and later had to have radiotherapy; she has mentioned that mortality is a major theme in her work.