Michelle McKeown’s artistic research engages intensively with critical posthuman thought and proposes a correspondence between figurations of feminist, nomadic subjectivity and contemporary painting as an expanded practice. Her recent studio inquiry attends to the condition of painting as a situated and embodied knowledge practice. The female painter within this framework is apprehended as an enfleshed and networked subject, materially rooted in, and accountable for the specific location and time in which she is embedded. As the feminist philosopher, Rosi Braidotti explains, a feminist nomadic art is not only bound to ‘ certain territorial or geopolitical coordinates but also points out one’s sense of genealogy or historical memory.’ McKeown’s most recent body of work purposively endorses Braidotti’s nomadic approach by taking as their stimulus representations of the feminine as it is encoded in Irish visual culture. Deploying techniques of pliage (folding) and decalcomania (transfer) in her painting process, McKeown seeks to disrupt the masculine gaze and will to mastery. Folding submits the painting to itself and by ‘staging the ritual of its own destruction’ consumes phallocentric representation from within. Radical surrender yields to an ontological openness that liberates woman’s imago from the cultural and political ideologies which have traditionally sought to arrogate it.