Portraits of Irish Art in Practice mines the space where aesthetic expression for Irish artistic Rita Duffy, Mairead McClean, Paula McFetridge, and Ursula Burke. Portrait essays, woven with photographs, documents each artist's coming of age in Ireland and Northern Ireland, in the context of her emerging practice. As individuals, their work considers infringements on human rights, systemic violence, gender roles, and the negotiations of figurative and literal borders and boundaries. Together, they interrogate past and present conflict and emergence from conflict, locally and globally. Their critical work is threaded with hope in the context of past and present political fragmentation.