In Manar Mervat al Shouha’s studio overlooking the Liffey, in Dublin, we are looking at a bright canvas – oil paint and pastels – featuring a view of the lobby outside, the river view, her artist’s trolley and a seated figure. “That’s me,” she says and smiles.

The painting is beautiful and hopeful and huge. When Shouha was chosen as an artist-in-residence here at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios she was so eager to get her feelings out that she didn’t wait to get a prestretched canvas but stapled it to the wall directly, reinforcing it with tape.

She’s not sure how she’ll get it out of the studio. She smiles again. “It’s a conversation with the place,” she says. “It’s called Transformations.”

I first wrote about Shouha in 2022, when, because of a backlog in the system, she and other non-Ukrainian asylum seekers were waiting to even be registered.

She had come to Ireland from Syria and was living in a hotel by a motorway without a residency card or even the €38.80 asylum seekers were then granted each week. She was isolated and alone, painting in her hotel room. At the time she was 27 years old and had very little English – her words were translated by an interpreter provided by the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland, or Masi – but it was clear she had a lot to say.

Lucky Khambule of Masi subsequently invited her to be involved in an exhibition at Rathfarnham Castle. This led to her being offered an artist’s residency at Common Ground in Inchicore.