OHHI/LULU’s Celtic Revival
Written by Erin Palmer
Published on September 7th, 2026
For generations, the walls of Limerick City have testified to Ireland’s rich cultural landscape. This ancient city on the banks of the River Shannon beams with over a thousand years of history. In every stroke, OHHI/LULU, honouring this history, enters a captivating dialogue between artistic innovation and tradition; each piece stands in proud tribute to a fascinating cast of characters who, from the Vikings to the Cranberries, have etched stories into the city streetscape.
Working with what their college art teacher once dubbed a “sweet” colour palette, Lulu’s vivid pieces emerge from a bag constantly overflowing with cans of spray-paint. “I was so sick of being surrounded by grey metal and grey walls all the time, it didn’t have to be that way,” they said, recalling an early product of their evolving artistic imagination: an electricity box painted entirely blue. “I think that was part of my mission, to bring a bit of beauty, a bit of colour to the world,” they added.
The Beauty in the Bestial
Still rejecting monochrome, Lulu’s mission fast evolved beyond block-coloured street furnishings, and rather into complex compositions that showcased – in their words – “hideous little creatures”, the hideousness a byproduct of their initial inexperience with proportions.
Notably, Lulu started painting during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and thus their work, in its negation of conventional artistic forms, is largely bound to a world suspended from quotidian rhythms.
For Lulu, it was the French cartoon Lascars that would introduce this emerging fascination to street art as an embodied artistic subculture.
For Lulu, it was the French cartoon Lascars that would introduce this emerging fascination to street art as an embodied artistic subculture. Renowned for its rapid minute-long episodes interwoven with verlan (French back-slang), social satire, and a comic-strip-style aesthetic, the show offers caricatured snapshots of urban life that celebrate early European street art and culture. Lascars works raw, geometric, and exaggerated features, notably expressive eyes, pronounced chins, and recognisable character archetypes, into a strange and almost surreal imagery. Its writers lean heavily into its disjointed visual language as an agent for comedic storytelling.
Comedy aside, Lulu’s fierce female figure – now a recurring motif across their work –embodies the hybridity of pictorial forms and creative storytelling. Searching for beauty in the bestial, Lulu’s imagination too favours exaggerated proportions, bold lines, and intense colouring over precise anatomical detail.
Draped in vivid colours, transposed upon figurative backdrops, and crafted with careful precision, their method flirts with the ephemerality of the artform.
Draped in vivid colours, transposed upon figurative backdrops, and crafted with careful precision, their method flirts with the ephemerality of the artform. By replacing realism with Lascars’ fluidity, nonsensicality, and intriguing narratives, they enable this detailed deity to expand at both a local and mythic level. As their figure sets up camp across the world’s walls, each stylised adaption inscribes in spray-paint a dynamic tableau of alien undertakings, of comic-book style prints that transcend the intricacies of its immediate human environment. We trail with colourful curiosity the piercing gaze of this feminised figure, following her through Lulu’s ever-expanding artistic universe.
Celtic Revival
That said, Lulu’s work never truly strays too far from home. Where grey walls and sombre streets initially presented creative targets, public canvases for a budding artist, their mission seeks to do more than merely decorate their environment, but rather to entirely reimagine it. It is about resurgence, and most notably, Celtic revival.
Lulu consistently layers their murals with emblems and anecdotes drawn from Celtic mythology, grounding their approach in the dialogic power of urban expression. The snake, for example, is a recurrent symbol throughout their work, representing paganism and a pre-colonisation Ireland. As explained in one of the many detailed captions on the artist’s Instagram that describe the works’ historical, linguistic, and cultural nuances, “snakes in Ireland were seen as a symbol of spirituality, femininity, mysticism, and rebirth, used by druids and mystics before Christianity was brought to Ireland by St. Patrick.”
They continue, “St Patrick himself was said to have rid all these snakes, which basically meant purposefully displace the ancient practices of the people who used to live on these lands.” The question of displacement, and artistic censorship is certainly central to much of Ireland’s contemporary cultural production.
Indeed, from as early as the 16th and 17th centuries, the crude caricature of the foolish, drunken, and emotionally volatile Irishman remained a perennial trope in British colonial rule. Marked by shallow stereotypes and reductive social roles, Britian heavily suppressed and outlawed much of traditional Irish art; the Crown, threatened by the fertility of Celtic culture, saw to it that music, poetry, and storytelling be prohibited, reduced to a dehumanising performance of British supremacy.
In the present day, such notions haunt Irish culture in the conflict between commercialised visual imagery – a sea of four-leaf clovers, leprechauns, and Guiness-themed décor comes to mind – and the reality of contemporary Irishness. As Lulu acknowledges, “Irish identity and culture used to be a lot of stuff for tourists; Irish people themselves weren’t interested in it.”
Yet, where Lulu’s snakes coil around concrete canvases, the symbol appears as neither kitsch nor cliché. Instead, the return to folkloric imagery refuses pre-packaged myths of Irish identity.
Yet, where Lulu’s snakes coil around concrete canvases, the symbol appears as neither kitsch nor cliché. Instead, the return to folkloric imagery refuses pre-packaged myths of Irish identity. Coupled with clear captioning, Lulu reclaims tradition, returning the recognisable motif, character, and folkloric staple to the artist themselves, and encouraging the circulation of engaging and historically accurate narratives.
This reconciliation with Celtic history and culture, arrives alongside a new generation of Irish artists who, thanks to the likes of Kneecap and Blindboy, for example, have thrown themselves into recovering their identity from the tight grasp of commodified collectables. “Creating art is such a natural thing…it got taken away from a lot of cultures, a lot of creation was outlawed.” For Lulu, “Graff and street art is a modern way of bringing that back.”
Considering graffiti as an artform fused with the materiality and vulnerability of counter-cultural production, it is by no means surprising that the medium has grown to welcome the immediacy, sensitivity, and excitement of Ireland’s artistic resurgence.
Making Your Mark
The mural begs recognition, indeed commanding attention and refusing passivity.
Straddling the delicate dialectic between urban decay and development, intervention and innovation, street art grants permission to voices that would otherwise go unheard, to those too often left behind. To mark, trace, or decorate one’s surroundings is to be more assertive than ever.
In Ireland, as young people are increasingly looking inwards, questioning their space, language, and sense of self in the modern age, the spray-can speaks with a renewed sensitivity. Lulu’s murals lead the hunt for visibility at a local and global level.
Offering an alternative approach to injecting “a bit of beauty, a bit of colour to the world”, their pieces retain both the instability and the brilliance that frames the evolving inquiry into Irish identity. In the unwavering command of urban space, the murals encapsulate the destabilising power of street art as a medium at once communal and profoundly personal.
Moreover, it is through their work as a tattoo artist that Lulu charges the act of mark making with an imbued sense of individuality.
Moreover, it is through their work as a tattoo artist that Lulu charges the act of mark making with an imbued sense of individuality. Here, the ethos of urban inscription shifts from the street and unto the body, placing rather interpersonal connection at the forefront of their artistic process.
As both a mural and tattoo artist, Lulu probes not only one’s relationship to the urban landscape, to art as a practice not to be defined solely by its proximity to museum institutions, but also one’s relationship to the self. Indeed, the tattoo moves as the mural cannot. The tattoo embraces the body as both the artistic subject and object, and hence, by transcending the ephemerality of street art, attributes a certain stability to leaving one’s mark that the contemporary city, as a site under constant renewal, simply cannot.
Lulu’s burgeoning interest for tattooing and urban art speaks to the broader, and perhaps more intimate relationship to archiving the human existence that runs parallel to their art. Be it displayed over street furnishings, or the body itself, their practice draws on the ever-changing framework by which one’s socio-cultural and/or political context is moulded.
With each piece, Lulu continually unsettles the stable order governing the present moment, offering spectators a rich fusion of traditional and current cultural practices. Defying linear chronology and fixed positioning, painting summons a vivid reading of collective memory.
Their callback to historical forms, folklore, and figures, swears to the longevity and proud persistence of Celtic customs, intertwining art with the performance of time’s passing. As they continue to showcase the richness of Ireland’s cultural landscape, travelling the globe armed with an array of Celtic emblems, myths, and legends they ask of us merely to pay attention. They ask that we see, and embrace – as they do so proudly – the beauty in this contemporary Celtic revival.
Erin Palmer, originally from the UK, is a student and writer who has recently moved to France to pursue a masters degree in Cinema Studies. Alongside her studies, Erin is passionate about art and technology as forces for countercultural expression. Her love in street art and graffiti speaks to her broader interest in the ever-changing dynamics of artistic prestige, in art’s capacity to engage with, dismantle, and innovate cultural notions of social and personal value.