The Visual Artists' News Sheet – July August 2025

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

On The Cover

Kian Benson Bailes, Weather Statue, 2025, ceramic, installation view, ‘Staying with the Trouble’; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and IMMA.

First Pages

6. Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months.

8. News. The latest developments in the arts sector.

Columns

9. Secret Painters. Cornelius Browne considers the secret life of working-class artist Eric Tucker. Time Crystal Disintegration. Pádraic E. Moore chronicles the life, work, and legacy of Irish painter Michael Ashur.

10. Stewardship, Care, and Collaboration. Eamon O’Kane and Chelsea Canavan outline their socially engaged project in care homes across Sligo.

Attuning to the Intelligence of the Body. Aoibheann Greenan outlines a holistic model for the creative process, rooted in four interdependent principles.

11. The Transition to Bedbound Art. Aine O’Hara outlines how she maintains an art practice while managing a chronic condition. A Creative Encounter. Jody O’Neill outlines research focusing on the cultural participation of neurodivergent people.

Exhibition Profile

12. The Iron Gates. Miguel Amado interviews Barbara Knežević about her new touring exhibition.

14. To Whom It May Concern. John Graham reviews an exhibition by Mohammed Sami currently showing at the Douglas Hyde Gallery.

16. Staying with the Trouble. Sadbh O’Brien reviews a large group exhibition at IMMA.

18. Beuys in Belfast. Emma Campbell reports on ‘Beuys 50 Years Later’ at the Ulster Museum.

Critique

19. David Fox, Grand Canal Docks, 2024, oil on board.

20. Sharon Murphy and Emma Spreadborough at Photo Museum Ireland

22. Doireann O’Malley and STRWÜÜ at Goethe-Institut Irland

23. Mark Cullen at the Regional Cultural Centre

24. John Rainey at Golden Thread Gallery

26. David Fox at GOMA Waterford

Seminar Report

27. Opacities. Clodagh Assata Boyce reports on the Opacities seminar, workshop, and screening event at NCAD.

28. Sustain and Grow. Jane Morrow reports on a conference on artist-led models organised by Arts & Business NI.

Project Profile

29. Shared Histories. Ben Malcolmson outlines a recent cross-border community project funded by Creative Ireland.

Member Profile

30. Ar an Imeall / On the Edge. Pamela de Brí discusses the evolution of her artistic research. Haunted By Silence. Danny McCarthy discusses his sound art practice and new limited-edition CD, released by Farpoint Recordings.

31. Lady Lazarus. Lara Quinn reflects on the evolution of her emerging practice.

Last Pages

34. Public Art Roundup. Site-specific works beyond the gallery.

36. Opportunities. Grants, awards, open calls and commissions.

37. VAI Lifelong Learning. Upcoming VAI helpdesks, cafés and webinars.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet:

Editor: Joanne Laws

Production/Design: Thomas Pool

News/Opportunities: Thomas Pool, Mary

McGrath

Proofreading: Paul Dunne

Visual Artists Ireland:

CEO/Director: Noel Kelly

Office Manager: Grazyna Rzanek

Advocacy & Advice: Oona Hyland

Advocacy & Advice NI: Brian Kielt

Membership & Projects: Mary McGrath

Services Design & Delivery: Emer Ferran

News Provision: Thomas Pool

Publications: Joanne Laws

Accounts: Grazyna Rzanek

Special Projects: Robert O‘Neill

Impact Measurement: Rob Hilken

Shared Island Advocacy: Brian Kielt

Board of Directors:

Deborah Crowley, Michael Fitzpatrick (Chair), Lorelei Harris, Maeve Jennings, Gina O’Kelly, Deirdre O’Mahony (Secretary), Samir Mahmood, Paul Moore, Ben Readman.

Republic of Ireland Office

Visual Artists Ireland

First Floor

2 Curved Street

Temple Bar, Dublin 2

T: +353 (0)1 672 9488

E: info@visualartists.ie

W: visualartists.ie

Northern Ireland Office

Visual Artists Ireland

109 Royal Avenue

Belfast

BT1 1FF

T: +44 (0)28 958 70361

E: info@visualartists-ni.org

W: visualartists-ni.org

Cities of the World

Kathy Prendergast + Chris Leach

Dublin

LexIcon

Vanessa Donoso López’s ‘A rock can hurt you, a rock can open a nut’ ran from 13 April to 22 June. This collection, comprising over 1,000 pieces, includes archaeological artefacts and a series of marbled shapes that echo the intricate patterns found on petrified objects and rocks. These re-imagined artefacts are presented in wire caged structures, creating an archaeological like installation. Some clay pieces have been hand-moulded by local communities and schools, both in Spain and Ireland, using locally sourced clay.

dlrcoco.ie

‘À bientôt, j’espère…’ presents an array of archetypal abstract works by Liam Gillick, alongside a revisiting of his work relating to the French film collective, Groupe Medvedkine. Since the 1990s, Gillick’s abstract work has drawn upon the visual language of renovation, recuperation and re-occupation. He absorbs the aesthetics of neo-liberalism, which restage the remnants and surfaces of modernism as in the production of false ceilings, cladding systems and wall dividers. On display from 24 May to 28 June.

kerlingallery.com

The Complex

Lee Welch’s exhibition, ‘Oedipus’, spans painting, printmaking, and installation, offering an arresting meditation on how we see, remember, and relate to the world. His visual language is spare but loaded with figures, gestures, and fragments reduced to essentials that carry emotional weight. Paintings in the exhibition feature references from art history, popular culture, and the mundane rituals of daily life. In the myth of Oedipus, the act of seeing is both literal and symbolic: only in blindness does he come to understand the truth. On display from 24 May to 14 June.

thecomplex.ie

Belfast

Pearse Museum

‘Lost Moments’ by Lorraine Whelan is an archive of memory. Both Whelan’s personal life and the museum’s exploration of the life of Patrick Pearse often deal with children, the relationships between children and adults, and the relationships between people, places, and things. The specifics of identity and memory are of interest to everyone. These works are based on drawings created from snapshots of people, places, and moments that are no longer in Whelan’s life. On display from 24 March to 22 June.

heritageireland.ie

Solomon Fine Art

‘Fathom: outstretched arms’ by Rachel Joynt is the result of her exploration and intervention with the marine reserve of Lough Hyne in West Cork. On observing the lake’s activity and the stillness that occurs in the moments before the turning of the tide at the narrow passage where the lake opens to the sea, Joynt was reminded of a respiratory system, of human lungs, and so a connection was made. On display from 29 May to 21 June.

solomonfineart.ie

TØN Gallery

‘Sheela / Sansun(a): Bridging Islands’ is the first solo show of Maltese artist Gabriel Buttigieg in Ireland. In the spirit of cultural diplomacy between Malta and Ireland, this exhibition fuses the stories of two powerful figures in Irish and Maltese history: the mysterious Irish mythological figure, Sheela na gig, and the prehistoric Maltese giantess, Sansuna. Adopting a new vibrant expressionistic style in his paintings, Buttigieg embodies his ardent and profound interest in the human condition through the Sheela and Sansuna. On display from 5 to 26 June.

tondublin.com

ArtisAnn Gallery

‘Human Chain’ is an exhibition of new artworks by Leah Davis in which the artist confronts the complexities of the human form through both drawing and painting. Since graduating in 2021 with a degree in Fine Art from Belfast School of Art, Leah has been chosen for several prestigious shows and commissions. In 2022 she was commissioned to paint the official portrait of the Lord Mayor of Belfast, currently displayed in the Belfast City Hall, the youngest artist to be so honoured. On display from 4 to 28 June.

artisann.org

Golden Thread Gallery

Currently showing at Golden Thread Gallery, ‘Beyond the Gaze – Shared Perspectives’ by Sophie Calle presents video works (Voir la Mer, 2011) and photographic pieces (L’Hôtel, 1981-1983). For Voir la Mer, Calle invited inhabitants of Istanbul, who often originated from central Turkey, to see the sea for the first time. Calle is one of the most celebrated and influential conceptual artists in the world, and this is the first time her work has been shown to audiences in Northern Ireland. The exhibition continues until 27 August.

goldenthreadgallery.co.uk

University of Atypical ‘Reliquary, As Oubliette’ by Eibh Gordon is a body of work which explores the materialisation of mortality and pain through sculptural offerings and ensorcelled amulets. These corporeal objects parallel ancient votives and sorceries to manifest wellness but also act as a memento mori: a reminder that inevitably, the flesh will die. Eibh Gordon is a queer visual artist practicing in Bangor. In 2024 she graduated from Ulster University with a MA in Fine Art. The exhibition ran at University of Atypical from 1 May to 26 June.

universityofatypical.org

Cultúrlann Mc Adam Ó Fiaich

‘Silent Conversations’ by Niamh Mooney presents portraits of friends, reflecting personal connections and draws inspiration from figurative painters like Vermeer, Manet, Hopper, and Matisse, with a focus on light, texture, composition, and the interplay of pattern and colour. The figures are absorbed in their surroundings, often unaware of the viewer, creating a psychological charge. These works evoke themes of privacy, intimacy, and the complexities of human experience. The exhibition continues until 31 July.

culturlann.ie

The MAC

Aisling O’Beirn’s ‘We Lose Sight of the Night’ was the first in a series of exhibitions which address climate and environmental change. O’Beirn (born in Galway) is a Belfast-based artist, whose practice explores the relationship between art and science, manifesting variously as sculpture, installation, animation and site-specific projects. This exhibition brought together new works and reworked older pieces. An interest in the wonders and political importance of the night sky characterised much of the exhibition, which ran from 17 April to 22 June. themaclive.com

Vault Artist Studios

The group exhibition ‘Cult: An Art Exhibition’ ran at Vault Artist Studios from 16 to 20 June. The exhibition included visceral artworks exploring the grotesque, ethereal, and macabre through dream space, heightened reality, and dark fantasy. Thirteen local and international artists were invited to respond to these themes in their own medium. The result was a curated gallery of paintings, illustration, making and sculpture. There was also a public programme to accompany the exhibition with workshops running each day.

vaultartiststudios.com

Regional & International

18th Street Arts Center

The group exhibition ‘The Irish Contemporaries {iv}’ was on display from 7 to 27 June in Los Angeles, California. CIACLA and partners, presented the dynamic group visual arts exhibition, featuring Brenda Welsh, Brendan Holmes, Christopher O’Mahony, Colleen Keough, Jerry McGrath, Julie Weber, Sionnan Wood, Tom Dowling. CIACLA’s annual exhibition brought together a compelling selection of LA-based and Irish artists exploring themes of identity, cultural memory and social engagement.

mart.ie

Droichead Arts Centre

‘Between Worlds’ featured artists Orlaith Cullinane, Patrick Dillon, Daria Ivanishchenko, Sallyanne Morgan, which ran from 6 May to 21 June. Cullinane’s high energy bronze figures transcend animal-human boundaries; Ivanishchenko’s paintings and video convey the reality of living between two places that are both ‘home’; Morgan’s women don a delicate external armour that speaks to unpredictable currents of change; and Dillon’s paintings explore television as a persistent presence in our lives and as a portal to and from another world. droichead.com

Luan Gallery

Luan Gallery presented ‘VASSALDOMS UNITED’ by Eimear Walshe. The exhibition launched on 26 April and ran until 22 June. This is Walshe’s first solo exhibition in Ireland, following their national representation at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Born in Longford in 1992, Walshe’s work has long focused on representations of Ireland, and the local and international politics at play behind those representations, including questions of external optics and internal incoherencies.

luangallery.ie

Centre Culturel Irlandais

‘Nature Morte’ by Brian Maguire runs until 6 July. Maguire has committed the last 40 years to revealing the impact of war, corruption, and oppression on the human condition. Working in this case from photographs of unidentified remains, taken between 2017 and 2019, he compares the act of painting to a furious cry of love and remembrance. In stark yet beautiful terms, Maguire renders visible the fate of forgotten individuals. Two short documentaries presented in the exhibition further contextualise the artist’s deeply invested approach. centreculturelirlandais.com

Galway Arts Centre

‘Love, Rage & Solidarity’ by Treasa O’Brien was on display from 24 May to 29 June,.

Using documentary and narrative forms, essay film, sci-fi, and DIY tactics, O’Brien investigated the potential of video and filmmaking as both an artist and an activist. The works explored (de)colonialism, social politics, climate change and migration, with an intersectional, queer, and feminist approach. Many of the works explored their own making as part of the work and challenge ideas of authorship and collaboration.

galwayartscentre.ie

Solstice Arts Centre

Cecilia Danell’s solo exhibition, ‘These Magnetic Magnitudes’ opened on 14 June and continues until 16 August. In a practice which is rooted in materiality and process, the starting point for Danell’s work is a first-hand engagement with the landscape in the area of Sweden where she grew up. The experience of traversing the landscape, along with the physical process of engaging with materials in the studio, results in works that exist between realism and abstraction, utilising fiction and the imaginary to speak about the present and possible futures. solsticeartscentre.ie

Cork Midsummer Festival

Amanda Coogan returned to Cork Midsummer Festival with an extraordinary new durational work, presented from 14 to 21 June. Caught In The Furze was a seven-day performance within an immersive installation of furze (gorse) bushes. Drawing on ancient folk traditions and contemporary performance, Coogan navigated the spaces between history and memory, myth and modernity. Evolving and shifting each day, the work invited audiences to step in and out, and to witness moments of stillness, transformation, and physical endurance. corkmidsummer.com

Leitrim Sculpture Centre

Simon Browne’s ‘a workshop for everyday technology’ runs from 20 June to 19 July. His practice is based around nurturing convivial conditions for working and learning together and publishing through whatever means available, with a preference for Free/ Libre Open-Source Software (F/LOSS). The artist’s research and experimental publishing projects produce outcomes such as drawings, workshops, work sessions, meetups, graphic diagrams, plastic diagrams, digital tools, archives, libraries and more.

leitrimsculpturecentre.ie

Waterford Gallery of Art

‘You couldn’t make it up’ by Dungarvan-based, award-winning artist, Catherine Barron. This mid-career retrospective features paintings made by Barron between 2010 and 2025. Salvaged metal plates, vintage 78rpm records, book covers, and playing cards serve as the artist’s canvas to reveal a deeply personal, as well as allegorical, biographical journey. Barron was born in County Carlow, lives and works in Dungarvan, County Waterford since 2017, and is represented by the Molesworth Gallery, Dublin. Runs until 16 August. waterfordgalleryofart.com

Custom House Studios & Gallery

Judy Carroll Deeley’s research into gold mining in South Africa began with a trip to Gauteng Province, part of the international study, ‘Post-extractivist Landscapes and Legacies: Humanities, Artist and Activist Responses’. Deely said: “The area around Johannesburg is pitted by underground mines, some of which are flooded and leak toxic minerals into waterways and rivers. This mining legacy, known as Acid Mine Drainage, is an ongoing problem for the city, its inhabitants.” ‘Gold Mine, Gauteng, South Africa’ ran from 1 to 25 May. customhousestudios.ie

Linenhall Arts Centre

‘Domestic Bodies’ was on display from 24 May to 28 June. Featuring video screenings and photographic images by Áine Phillips and collaborators Vivienne Dick, Ella Bertilsson, and Emily Lohan. Embedded with Ella Bertilsson explores comfort, shelter and safe resting place. Vivienne Dick’s Robing Room considers the struggles of women’s bodies in Irish social history. Red Couch/ Archeology with performer Emily Lohan enacts, with humour and transcendence, the symbolic immersion of a woman into the underbelly of domesticity. thelinenhall.com

Wexford Arts Centre

‘Sync Shift’ by artist Órla Bates, opened in Wexford Art Centre’s lower and upper galleries on 14 June. In 2023, Órla Bates was invited to take part in the MAKE/ curate programme, a partnership initiative between Wexford Arts Centre and partners. The aim of the programme is to provide artists working regionally with an opportunity to work with a national curator. Orla worked with curator Ann Mulrooney towards her solo exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre. The exhibition continues until 26 July.

wexfordartscentre.ie

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S) recently announced Rachel Enright Murphy as the recipient of the TBG+S Recent Graduate Residency Award in 2025.

The Recent Graduate Residency Award offers a unique and substantial professional development opportunity to an emerging artist on an annual basis. The award includes a large free studio for one year, an artist bursary, and a variety of institutional supports to an artist who has graduated from an undergraduate degree in the past three years. TBG+S looks forward to welcoming Rachel Enright Murphy to its creative community of artists, and supporting her practice as it develops.

Rachel Enright Murphy’s work

Maureen Kennelly Steps Down

The Board of the Arts Council announced, with deep regret, that Maureen Kennelly stepped down as Director of the Arts Council in June. Maureen concluded her five-year term on 4 May and has generously agreed to remain in her role to represent the Arts Council at upcoming Public Accounts Committee and Oireachtas hearings.

Maureen was appointed Director in April 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She led the organisation through an exceptionally challenging time, guiding it with strength and vision. Under her leadership, the Arts Council underwent a period of significant cultural change, with a strong focus on organisational development and staff wellbeing.

She successfully resolved longstanding legacy challenges and brought renewed strategic clarity to the Council’s work. Together with the Council, she secured unprecedented increases in state funding for the arts – enabling artists and organisations across the country to create and present work of outstanding quality. She also championed higher professional standards and fostered a climate of trust and respect across the wider arts sector.

Maureen’s contribution to the arts in Ireland has been transformative and is recognised both nationally and internationally. Throughout her tenure, Maureen has demonstrated the highest levels of integrity and commitment to public service. Her principled approach to leadership and unwavering dedication to the arts community have been defining hallmarks of her directorship.

miniVAN | Comics & Graphic Novels

In the latest edition of the miniVAN, artists Annie West, Elisa Beli Borrelli, and Will Sliney discuss their work and practice as comic illustrators and graphic novelists in a series of essays exclusively for Visual Artists Ireland!

The miniVAN is the online magazine published by Visual Artists Ireland. With uniquely commissioned content, The miniVAN explores the visual arts with an accessible view of all aspects of careers and practice that make up our visual community. Please visit: visualartistsireland.com

THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR

combines moving image, sound, performance, and printed material with text and explores error and ambiguity as an artistic practice, confronting the boundaries and inadequacies of written language. Her work often creates intimate narratives within impersonal or bureaucratic structures. Examples include romantic poetry as a stock photo watermark, spelling mistakes in the trial of a fifteenth-century homosexual nun, and a never-ending horse racing commentary. She appropriates from a range of documentary sources such as scientific papers, historical and legal testimony, reconfiguring linguistic forms to examine the production of identity, objective truth and collective experience.

Gibson Travelling Fellowship Award

Crawford Art Gallery recently announced visual artist Basil Al-Rawi as the recipient of the inaugural Gibson Travelling Fellowship Award.

Basil Al-Rawi will become the first Gibson Travelling Fellow, following a highly competitive open-call selection process, which sought to identify a clear vein of innovation, experimentation and impact.

Al-Rawi’s practice explores the landscapes of personal and cultural memory, hybrid identity, and the digital mediation of reality. He will use the award to support an extended period of self-determined enquiry across Lebanon, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and France.

Basil Al-Rawi is an Irish-Iraqi multidisciplinary artist working across photography, film, VR, and sculptural installation. His practice explores the landscapes of memory, identity, and the digital mediation of experience – often drawing from personal and collective archives to reimagine how memory can be spatialised and shared. His recent work engages participatory methods to reconstruct photographic and mnemonic moments from Iraqi diaspora, resulting in projects such as the Iraq Photo Archive and the immersive VR experience House of Memory. Basil holds degrees in English, sociology, cinematography, a Masters in photographic studies, and completed a practice-based PhD at The Glasgow School of Art in 2023. He has exhibited widely, including at IMMA, The Photographers’ Gallery, The LAB, and the Lahore Biennale, and his work is held in public and private collections. He is currently supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and continues to explore memoryscapes through hybrid forms of storytelling and digital media.

The Cork-based Irish-Iraqi artist was selected from a shortlist by a panel of experts working in the field of contemporary art: Dragana Jurišić (Artist and Educator), Megs Morley (Director and Curator, Galway Arts Centre), Paul McAree (Curator, Lismore Castle Arts), and chaired by Mary McCarthy (Director, Crawford Art Gallery). Impressed by the high quality of applicants, they ultimately determined that Al-Rawi’s proposal most closely articulated the spirit and scope of the Gibson Travel-

ling Fellowship Award and has the potential for significant personal and professional transformation for the artist.

Basil Al-Rawi was selected from a shortlist of six artists including Chloe Austin, Ursula Burke, Amanda Dunsmore, Niamh McCann, and Deirdre O’Mahony.

RHA Director Steps Down

At the President’s Dinner, held at the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts on 23 May to mark the opening of the 195th Annual Exhibition, in association with McCann FitzGerald, the President of the Academy, Dr Abigail O’Brien, announced that Patrick T. Murphy, the Director of the RHA, will step down from his post at the end of the year, bringing to a close his 28-year tenure as the first Director of the RHA.

In 1998, Murphy returned from a decade at the helm of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, to assume his position with the RHA. Murphy said:

“It’s been a marvellous three decades at the RHA, a period that has seen the Academy completely transform as an organisation at all levels. My mantra at the beginning was to make the RHA relevant to all artists at each stage of their career – emerging, established and senior and to curate an exhibition programme that was truly diverse and reflected the many strategies now available to artmaking”.

Murphy acknowledged the support of Academy members and colleagues in the achievement over these years, and he praised the continuing and fundamental support of the Arts Council to the Academy’s annual operations.

Under Murphy’s leadership, the Academy’s annual budget grew tenfold and now nears €1.5 million annually. He oversaw the €9.5m refurbishment of the Academy’s premises, the Gallagher Gallery in 2007, and negotiated the troubled economic waters just after that re-build during the financial collapse of 2008/9.

He has curated many exhibitions at the RHA, working with Ireland-based artists from all generations and curating such thematic exhibitions as ‘I not I – Beckett, Nauman and Guston’, ‘SKIN an Atlas’, ‘A Growing Enquiry – Art and Agriculture’, ‘In and Of Itself – Contemporary Abstrac-

tion’ and most recently ‘BogSkin – Myth and Science’.

The RHA will commence its search for a new Director towards the end of the summer with a view to making an appointment by the end of the year.

ACNI Annual Funding Programme

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland announced that 86 arts organisations will benefit from a public investment of approximately £13.97m from their Annual Funding Programme (AFP 2025-26).

The AFP awards will support the core and programming costs of organisations which are central to the arts infrastructure in Northern Ireland today.

With £8.15m exchequer funding from the Department for Communities allocation, and £5.82m from Arts Council’s National Lottery sources, the total public investment offered is £13.97m.

Chair of the Arts Council, Liam Hannaway, said: “Today’s formal announcement of the Annual Funding Programme awards is welcome news and I want to thank the Minister for the Department for Communities, Gordon Lyons, for securing an extra £500,000 for the Arts Council’s baseline allocation for this year. This allows us to give a modest uplift from standstill funding to 80 hard-pressed organisations dealing with the inescapable pressures from increased core costs. We are grateful for the Minister’s recognition of the positive value of the arts in our society and for his help in securing this additional investment. I also want to thank The National Lottery, who this year marked 30 years of supporting good causes, and the game-changing impact that National Lottery funding brings to so many of our arts organisations, who simply couldn’t do without it.”

The AFP awards are the single biggest funding announcement made by ACNI in any one year. The Arts Council makes other funding announcements throughout the year which benefit many organisations and communities across NI. This particular announcement is not a reflection of overall arts funding invested by ACNI.

Plein Air Secret Painters

CORNELIUS BROWNE CONSIDERS THE SECRET LIFE OF WORKINGCLASS BRITISH ARTIST ERIC TUCKER ( 1932–2018 )

PAINTING THE ADVENT of hawthorn blossoms, I hear the post van reversing down our dirt road to deliver a book. My hands hastily wiped, and the package ripped open, I breathe in fresh print. This hardback joins a family of thousands. Within view are two roomy bookcases, absorbing sunlight after another winter in a mouldy log-cabin. Mildew-spotted books sunbathe on beds of wild grasses. How they must envy their distant cousins, newer books allowed to live in the house. Many of these sunbathers came into my life when I was a book-hungry teenager in the 1980s. Evidently, this appetite hasn’t abated. I set aside my paintbrushes to steal an hour with this new arrival.

My sylvan open-air studio dissolves, and I find myself in the place judged Britain’s worst town for culture by the Royal Society of Arts: Warrington. This was the hometown of an uneducated and unskilled labourer, named Eric Tucker (1932–2018), who never left home. Upon his impending death, Tucker’s family discover that his small council house harbours a secret. Voicing for the first time in his life that he’d like to have an exhibition, the dying man initiates a search. Lodged in every nook and cranny are artworks, so many that it takes the family two years to complete cataloguing: 540 paintings and drawings too copious to count.

Hidden from the world for 60 years, Tucker had been painting in his front room, commemorating the working-class sphere to which he belonged with a dedication scarcely glimpsed by close relatives. The Secret Painter (Canongate, 2025), written by Tucker’s nephew, Joe Tucker, charts the life and afterlife of an artist who did not live to see his talent recognised. An inner sun of love warms these pages, delivered to readers from the bosom of a family.

In 1983, the year that I, the child of longterm unemployed parents, began painting daily in earnest, the renowned economist Professor J.K. Galbraith visited London to deliver a lecture on Economics and the Arts for the Arts Council of Great Britain: “It is only when other wants are satisfied that

people and communities turn generally to the arts; we must reconcile ourselves to this unfortunate fact. In consequence, the arts become part of the affluent standard of living. When life is meagre so are they.” Galbraith’s lecture ignores the rich tradition of working-class art, dating from at least the Industrial Revolution. Works of art by people who knew want intimately, germinated outside the opulent radiance of academies, art schools or galleries, and their history remains under-illuminated. Home-made art that rarely left home.

Tellingly, as the Tucker family scrambled to honour a final wish, rebuffed by officialdom, they converted Eric Tucker’s home into a gallery for his first posthumous exhibition. By dint of sweat, they managed to wrench the cultural spotlight towards Warrington. Major exhibitions followed, one of which saw a leading London gallery transformed into a replication of Tucker’s humble painting room.

My parents’ lives in Glasgow, working on building sites, in factories, and cleaning hospitals, dovetailed with the world of Eric Tucker. Fresh from the experience of battling for his uncle’s art, Joe Tucker observed that less than eight percent of creative workers currently come from a working-class background. On the last page of this poignant story that never overlooks the humorous side of life, Tucker reaches a supportive hand, offering his book to all artists who, faced with systemic unfairness and exclusion, think: “What’s the point in trying?”

Upon graduating from art college, abloom with youthful vigour, I set aside my paintbrushes for over 20 years. What’s the point in trying? When I resumed painting, a decade had passed since I’d last set foot inside an art gallery. Circumstances of birth plant working-class artists into north-facing gardens that receive no direct sunlight. Over a meagre life, I’ve grown to cherish my place among secret painters, who flower in the shade.

Cornelius Browne is an artist based in County Donegal.

Irish Art History

Time Crystal Disintegration

PÁDRAIC E. MOORE CHRONICLES THE LIFE, WORK, AND LEGACY OF IRISH PAINTER MICHAEL ASHUR ( 1950 –2024 )

MICHAEL ASHUR AND his paintings had already drifted into obscurity long before the artist died in the spring of 2024. By then, it had been decades since he had been included in any exhibitions in Ireland. Although opportunities to view his work in the flesh are few, his legacy is worthy of consideration. Aside from the aesthetic merits of his paintings, the vagaries of his career reveal much about the vicissitudes of cultural production in Ireland over the past 50 years.

Born in Dublin in 1950, Michael Byrne commenced his studies at NCAD in the late 1960s. Upon graduation, Byrne assumed the pseudonym, ‘Ashur’, after a Babylonian sky god. His early work shows an awareness of international painting, and he is one of the only Irish representatives of the shaped canvas movement, proponents of which Ashur would have seen at the Rosc exhibitions.1 Encountering works by Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely at the Hendriks Gallery in Dublin was also a formative experience for the artist.

With their luminous hues and angular, crystalline compositions, Ashur’s paintings appear backlit and prefigure much of what we see today on digital screens. But what makes this artist distinctive and idiosyncratic are the non-art influences that shaped his output. Ashur came of age in the late 1960s – a period suffused with science fiction and space exploration. Technological progress and pop culture merged; Kubrick’s classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was released in 1968, the year before the lunar landings.

That era was also fundamentally shaped by aesthetics that evoked altered states of consciousness – fantastical and galactic imagery, often containing optical and perceptual illusions. Crucially, this was propagated via popular artforms: poster art, science fiction novels, album sleeves, product and fashion design. Ultimately, Ashur’s work represents the last gasps of visual culture, spawned by the psychedelic revolution.

Ashur enjoyed considerable success in Ireland and Europe from the early 1970s but as the 1980s progressed, his currency waned. The doom-laden atmosphere per-

vading Ireland in that era was conducive to tendencies typified by Neo-expressionism. That movement and all it represented was anathema to Ashur’s creations, characterised by an excess of airbrush, fastidiousness and procedural detachment. Instead, directness, muscular authenticity, and existential angst was embraced by artists who sought to sidestep an excessively cerebral and etiolated approach to making art.

As Ashur honed his aesthetic, his images grew in scale and became more complex and baroque. But as several critics noted at the time, his modus was ultimately one of repetition. For an artist operating mainly in the context of Ireland, this proved detrimental. The closure of his Dublin gallery extinguished possibilities for engaging new collectors, and consequently, Ashur ceased making art.

By the mid-90s, his work had receded from view. Crucially, this was a period in which contemporary Irish art moved rapidly forward, falling in step with other European countries, whilst also focusing upon post-colonial discourse. Initially considered valid, his works eventually came to be seen as anachronistic and were relegated to institutional basements and storage units.

Ashur’s meteoric progression was typical of an age when a succession of movements flourished and superseded one another. Technological advancement and an appetite for novelty led to rapid cycles of change in which the visual arts played an integral part. The fate of Ashur’s oeuvre demonstrates more universal realities. Early commercial success and critical acclaim are no guarantee of a place within the canon, and the fate of an artist is often shaped by factors that are arbitrary and capricious.

Pádraic E. Moore is an art historian, curator, and Director of Ormston House. padraicmoore.com

1 International exhibitions included ‘The

Socially Engaged Stewardship, Care,

and Collaboration

EAMON O’KANE AND CHELSEA CANAVAN OUTLINE THEIR SOCIALLY ENGAGED PROJECT IN CARE HOMES ACROSS SLIGO.

IN OCTOBER 2023, Eamon O’Kane was approached by Marie-Louise Blaney and Emer McGarry at The Model in Sligo to develop a proposal for an Arts Participation Project Award. The Model houses O’Kane’s interactive installation, Froebel Studio: A History of Play (2010 – ongoing) in the Niland Collection, and they were interested in his previous interactive commission at a dementia care home in Bristol. From this invitation, Eamon conceived The School for Generational Storytelling and invited Chelsea Canavan to join the application as a support artist.

At its core, the project aimed to create spaces of encounter shaped by care, participation, and transformation. Rooted in action research and public engagement, it was structured around residencies in six care homes across Sligo, exploring how creative practice supports wellbeing, memory, and intergenerational exchange. It asked how we might share knowledge across time and how art can nurture relationships –between individuals, disciplines, and institutions.

Our collaboration drew on a long-standing creative rapport, first sparked during the pandemic in 2020 when Chelsea initiated a series of ‘Creative Resonance Conversations’ during her work on Folding Worlds The reconnection of our practices formed the conceptual and practical foundation for The School for Generational Storytelling

A central question emerged: How can an ethics of care be practiced through collaboration? For us, this meant structuring our time with flexibility, responding attentively to participant feedback, and co-developing processes that valued mutual respect. The dynamics we witnessed – caregivers and residents in moments of exchange – mirrored our own collaborative process. It was a dialogue shaped by listening, openness, and transformation.

The collaborative model we developed was not about blending disciplines into one voice but amplifying each other’s strengths. Eamon’s architectural and visual language shaped the aesthetics and spatial logic of

the project, while Chelsea’s background in participatory arts and healthcare ensured a socially engaged, responsive methodology. Our combined experience in education informed a shared pedagogical approach, with each residency generating insights and artifacts through co-created toolkits, tailored to the context of each care home.

A major influence on our thinking was the systems-based ecological work of The Harrisons, whose pioneering framework for collaborative practice offered ways of understanding social and institutional systems as dynamic and interconnected. We embraced this perspective in our roles as stewards – of spaces, relationships, and processes. The project was less about delivery and more about co-shaping environments that honored the contributions of all participants.

Each care home was not just a venue but a collaborator. As artists, we responded to the specific needs and rhythms of each place, developing tools and strategies that reflected the lived realities of residents and staff. These toolkits – now housed in a permanent archive and resource library at The Model and in the care homes themselves –serve as vessels for shared meaning, memory, and imagination, facilitating further engagement beyond the life of the project.

In this sense, The School for Generational Storytelling becomes more than a project: it is a living framework that encourages others to think differently about creative collaboration. Beyond co-creation, it models co-learning and even co-healing. In a time when ecological systems and infrastructures of care are increasingly under pressure, the work gestures toward alternative futures, rooted in empathy, dialogue, and sustained attention.

Chelsea Canavan is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. chelseacanavan.com

Eamon O’Kane is a visual artist based in Denmark and Norway. eamonokane.com

Wellbeing Attuning to the Intelligence of the Body

AOIBHEANN GREENAN OUTLINES A HOLISTIC MODEL FOR THE CREATIVE PROCESS, ROOTED IN FOUR KEY PRINCIPLES

AS ARTISTS, WE intuitively understand that creativity moves in cycles, much like the seasons. A burst of inspired output is often followed by a quieter, more fallow phase. This isn’t a failure of discipline; it’s a vital part of the process – a time when experiences and ideas compost, becoming fertile ground for the next creative surge.

Trouble arises when cultural expectations clash with these natural and intuitive rhythms. Conditioned to constantly produce, we interpret inevitable slowdowns as ‘procrastination’ or ‘creative block.’ But what if these moments aren’t a deficiency, but a misalignment – between the pace we’ve internalised and the pace we actually need?

Our creative cycles are no different from the rhythms of growth, rest, decay, and renewal found in nature. It’s only our disconnection from this perennial wisdom that distorts the process. In recent years, I’ve been leaning into the intelligence of the body, which is attuned to the pulse of life in ways that we can’t always grasp intellectually.

Through this act of listening, I’ve begun to embrace a more holistic model for the creative process, rooted in four interdependent principles: curiosity, creation, curation, and connection. Each principle relates to a classical element and its corresponding season, as honoured in many ancient cultures and traditions, thereby offering a potent metaphor for the creative life cycle, with all its ebbs and flows.

Curiosity (Air | Spring): Air is light, mobile, and expansive. It represents intellect, inspiration, and the circulation of ideas. You know you’re in this phase when you’re following threads of interest without knowing where they’ll lead – reading widely, diving into rabbit holes, making unlikely connections. You may feel more sociable, hungry for input, and open to new perspectives.

The key here is to stay untethered. Your only job is to follow the sparks and gather what you find. Keep a notebook or digital folder for scattered thoughts. The dots don’t have to connect yet – just let them accumulate. Slowly, a landscape begins to form. Without this phase of expansion, future work may lack depth and vitality.

Creation (Fire | Summer): Fire is radiant, transformative, and energising. It represents passion, will, and creative force. This is the phase of decisive action – moving from potential to form. You’ll know you’re here when collecting ideas no longer satisfies; you feel compelled to make. Where before your perspective was wide-ranging, it now sharpens into focused intention. You feel lit up with inspiration and drive.

This stage calls for discernment. You’ll need to let go of certain ideas to fully commit to the one that feels most alive. Can you articulate your intention in one clear sen-

tence? Paradoxically, this narrowed focus creates greater freedom to experiment. All that’s required is your commitment. As momentum builds, the idea will evolve in surprising ways.

Curation (Earth | Autumn): Earth is solid, grounding, and integrative. It represents stability, discipline, practicality, and structure. This is the time to harvest the fruits of your labour and shape them into a coherent whole. It’s about bringing clarity and refinement to what you’ve created. You may find yourself editing, organising, and pruning. Your pace slows; your rhythm becomes more methodical.

You’re envisioning the work beyond the studio – experimenting with arrangement and how the pieces speak to one another. This phase requires gentle ruthlessness. Not everything will make the final cut – but even the cuttings can seed future work. This is an ideal time for studio visits or feedback. As you reflect on what you’ve made, outside perspectives can help illuminate what has now emerged.

Connection (Water | Winter): Water is fluid, receptive, and purifying. It represents intuition, wisdom and emotional depth. With enough distance from the work, this is the moment to reflect on the full arc of the cycle and tend to your relational web. Connection flows outward and inward.

This is a potent time for sharing through presentations, interviews, or casual conversations sparked by your work. It’s also a time for receiving – by witnessing the creations of others, attending shows, and engaging with your creative community. After intense output, there is deep nourishment to be found in stillness, if you can invite it.

All four principles weave through every stage of the creative process. The aim isn’t to isolate them, but to notice where you are in the cycle and tend to that moment with care. What matters most is being present and gently attuned to your body’s capacity. Rather than pushing past your natural rhythm, can you sense where your energy most wants to go?

Ultimately, this can be part of a decolonial practice: resisting extractive systems that demand constant output and remembering that creativity – like life – moves in cycles. Reattuning to the body’s wisdom is one way we begin to unlearn these inherited pressures and allow your process to breathe.

Aoibheann Greenan is an Irish artist and the founder of Rodeo Oracle, a creative coaching and mentoring service for artists.

rodeoracle.com

Access The Transition to Bedbound Art

ÁINE O’HARA OUTLINES HOW SHE MAINTAINS AN ART PRACTICE WHILE MANAGING A CHRONIC CONDITION.

I HAVE ALWAYS been unwell. I’ve always spent a lot of time in bed. Throughout my childhood, I had endless symptoms that no one could really explain. My twenties were a constant search for answers as my health steadily declined. For years, I endured crash after crash – brief collapses that forced me into bed for days at a time. Eventually, I’d come back out and the cycle would start all over again, though each time it was harder and harder to resume.

The cycle changed dramatically in the autumn of last year. Following a severe allergic reaction, my body entered complete collapse. My symptoms escalated overnight. I couldn’t eat or drink. Light, sounds, smells, even miniscule attempts at communication were dangerous and caused tachycardia, allergic reactions, severe pain, nausea, vertigo, migraines and flu-like symptoms, to name only the worst. I needed to lie in complete silence and darkness. Making it to the bathroom once a day became the most physically brutal effort I’d ever faced.

I lived like that for months – minute by minute – telling myself: “If it just gets 2% better, I can survive this.” I had previously heard of M.E. (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) and even suspected I might have it in a mild form. But with so few specialists and the reality of the illness seeming so terrifying, I pushed it to the background when I was more functional. Sometimes known by its less revealing name, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, M.E. is a chronic, neuroimmune disease, marked by a range of debilitating symptoms. 25% of people with M.E. experience it in its severe or very severe forms – confined to dark rooms, trapped in our bodies, often for years.

One of its most defining and torturous features is PESE – Post-Exertional Symptom Exacerbation – often called a ‘crash’. For me, exertion meant anything from rolling over in bed to reading a single text message. Any activity, no matter how minor, could cause a sharp, prolonged worsening of all symptoms.

Everything collapsed: hygiene, creative projects, communication, friendships. I knew enough from advocates and the M.E. community to recognise what was happening. This was severe M.E. – not the most extreme form, but severe enough to dismantle my life. I was already living with several comorbidities: POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), MCAS (Mast Cell Activation Syndrome), Endometriosis, and a rare heart condition. Those minutes, hours, days, and months were unbearable. Just months earlier, I had been able to periodically visit my studio, cook for myself, go for short walks, collaborate with other artists. That life may be much more limited than many of you reading this, but to me, it was truly abundant. Suddenly, then slowly, all of that slipped away. I became 99% bedbound, barely able to manage the daily

battle of descending six steps to the bathroom. I became completely dependent on my partner for everything – food, care, and communication with the outside world.

I was surprised by what I missed most. I could barely eat, speak, or move, but more than anything, I missed people. And I missed art. My ability to connect was gone. My ability to express was gone. But in the worst moments, my mind gave me something to hold onto: images, memories, ideas. I wasn’t dreaming. I was awake, in pain, in stillness. But, behind closed eyes, scenes came to the surface – places, colours, shapes of things I had seen or imagined in the past. Some part of me was still making but production wasn’t the goal; I was just trying to survive.

Over time, when I had small windows of clarity, I found ways to record them – a note on my now dim phone, a short voice message, a passing thought I repeated in my head. In January I got a notebook. In March I was lucky enough to sketch for an hour or so in the dim light before needing to lie back down. My perspective on time, on everything, was altered. Urgency looks different here. The deadline can wait; the exhibition can wait. There are no art emergencies.

My art practice has always interrogated concepts of ‘rest’ and what it means to live outside of the accepted structures of ‘productivity’ in our capitalist society. I didn’t fully grasp just how much further away I could be pushed from those norms. Sickness forces a new relationship with time. Rest is now a survival strategy. Silence isn’t absence – it’s preservation. I am lucky, at the moment, to be able to write this and create in any way.

I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly sincere person – my work, and the work I love, usually leans into mess, irreverence, dark humour. But if I’m being honest, the practice I built – the part of me that makes things, that thinks in images, that sees the world in layers – is what carried me through. Even when everything else fell away, being an artist was the one identity that stayed. I hope to keep sharing this practice with you as it develops – in fragments, ideas, and survival from bed.

Áine O’Hara is a visual artist, designer, and disability advocate based in Ireland. aineohara.com

Access A Creative Encounter

JODY O’NEILL OUTLINES RESEARCH ON THE CULTURAL PARTICIPATION OF NEURODIVERGENT PEOPLE.

THE IDEA FOR ‘IMMA Perspectives – a Creative Encounter’ began last December. IMMA and Dublin City Council had allocated funding towards making IMMA more neurodiversity inclusive. Our main collaborators were Melissa Ndakengerwa (IMMA Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Executive Officer) and Liz Coman (DCC Assistant Arts Officer). In engaging with DCC’s ambitions to make Dublin an Autism Inclusive City, their key question was: “How can neurodivergent people fully participate in and enjoy cultural experiences?”

Rather than designing a workshop programme for visitors, my impulse was to embed neurodivergent artists at IMMA to conduct an informal, experiential, sensory audit of the institution. I approached Dee Roycroft, who I collaborate with regularly, and we proposed a facilitated, weeklong, paid engagement for neurodivergent artists. The artists would have the opportunity to interact with the space, the visitor engagement programme, and each other. They would be supported in developing their artistic practice through workshops, conversations, and individual research. At the end of the week, they would offer a responsive workshop to IMMA and DCC staff, reflecting their experiences as neurodivergent artists at the museum.

Dee and I designed the programme, identifying key artistic and access priorities. We felt it was crucial for participants to have opportunities for new engagements and provocations as well as space and time for individual practice. We also wanted to tailor it specifically to the needs and desires of the selected participants, so developed an overarching vision with flexibility to adapt.

We launched the initiative in March with a webinar supported by Cultural and Creative Skillnet. Neurodivergent artists and creators, Aideen Barry, Alan James Burns, Tierra Porter, and Maja Toudal participated in a conversation with Dee. With over 100 attendees, the webinar was a powerful public event, which, in itself, was of benefit to our community.

Following the webinar, ADHD Ireland generously offered to fund two additional places on the programme, which meant seven places in total. The open-call application process was simple and accessible with support available upon request. The selection criteria ensured a diversity of practice, background, ethnicity, levels of professional experience, and neurodivergent conditions. We were delighted with the quality of the applications, but noticed a lack of artists of colour, traveller artists, male artists, and older artists, which speaks to the systemic difficulties faced by intersectional artists.

All applicants were offered an online Access Rider workshop, facilitated by disability-led theatre company, Birds of Paradise. It felt important to acknowledge the

time and effort in making an application in this context, and we wanted to recognise that investment by offering something to all applicants in return.

The selected participants were: April Bracken, Natany de Souza Gomes, Megan Scott, Patrick Groenland, Maria McSweeney, HK Ní Shioradáin, and Nathan Patterson. The encounter took place at IMMA from 12 to 16 May, with an online briefing in advance. Beforehand, we created a visual guide for the artists, to try to make their journeys to IMMA and time there as accessible and easeful as possible.

The week was frontloaded with creative workshops, talks and tours, including: yoga, pathways and mapmaking, creative writing, performance, sound, a biodiversity tour, a slow art experience, a tour of the permanent collection, and guest workshops with Aideen Barry, Louis Haugh, Carl Kennedy, and Joanne King.

By midweek, the artists were beginning to structure the final workshop, with an emphasis on showcasing their practices as well as accessibility priorities. They each took ownership of a section of the workshop, but co-facilitated sections and were always assisted by the group. It was a highly impactful experience for the attendees, who are now looking at aspects of IMMA’s visitor engagement in new ways.

Throughout the week, we spoke about the importance of how we encounter a new space. Artists were encouraged to think about an objective experience of the institution as well as their own personal experience and internal narrative. This allowed them to more comprehensively evaluate access barriers, both as artists and visitors to IMMA. We then needed to articulate personal engagements with the environment in a way that was empathetic and meaningful to both neurotypical and neurodivergent stakeholders. Rather than simply pointing to access barriers, the artists created a workshop where participants could truly experience barriers, which elicited an empathetic, embodied response. They identified tangible areas where IMMA could improve access, including clear signage, maps, sensory considerations and supports, visitor visual guides, and certain aspects of communication.

From a development perspective, the artists highlighted several key benefits, including: the opportunity to learn from each other’s artistic and facilitation practices; having access needs met; having a defined end goal; being paid for their work; and a shared understanding and acceptance of neurodivergence. We are now evaluating the process and outcomes with IMMA and DCC, in order to shape future plans.

Jody O’Neill is an autistic writer, performer, producer and inclusion consultant.

Miguel Amado: Your exhibition ‘Gvozdene Kapije / The Iron Gates’ presents a film of the same title and a group of corresponding sculptures, influenced by Lepenski Vir – an ancient settlement on the banks of the Danube River in eastern Serbia. Your encounter with this culture has triggered reflection on your European heritage and upbringing in Australia. What is the framework that informs these works?

The Iron Gates

MIGUEL AMADO INTERVIEWS BARBARA KNEŽEVIĆ ABOUT HER NEW TOURING EXHIBITION.

Barbara Knežević: This is the first time that I am engaging with notions of identity in my practice. Yet I am not claiming to have a unique position – this is not a story specific to me, but an Australian story of displacement after the Second World War, a story of the Balkans and a story about migration. We live in an era defined by people migrating globally, and so my subjectivity is one that is shared widely. My focus is on what happens when people are forcibly relocated and re-establish themselves somewhere else. I am interested in the diaspora, namely in first and second generations of people born to migrants.

MA: You want to reclaim your diasporic experience?

BK: Yes. I made a couple of decisions – minor things, but nevertheless powerful – that helped me in that undertaking, for instance to put the diacritic marks on my surname and to learn the jezik (language or tongue), or what is now known as Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian.

MA: This is your first film – a feature, 48 minutes long. What led you to choose this medium? Was there a storytelling aspect that you felt was required to examine such complex themes?

BK: I wanted to explore the narrative potential of sculpture. I had been researching votive objects from Europe, mainly Greek,

Roman and Etruscan traditions, and then I cast my eye a bit further back and came across the sculptures of Lepenski Vir, which were found along a stretch of the border between Serbia (then Yugoslavia) and Romania during the construction of the Iron Gates, a dam on the Danube River, in the 1960s. There are three reasons why these sculptures interested me. Firstly, there is a claim by the archaeologist who discovered them, Dragoslav Srejović, that they are the first monumental sculptural forms in Europe. On the other hand, they are part of what archaeologist Marija Gimbutas conceptualises as a culture structured by matriliny. Finally, the inhabitants of Lepenski Vir lived alongside the sculptures in their dwellings, and there is some evidence that they produced them over a series of generations.

MA: Aesthetically, the sculptures are unique; they are carved in sandstone and express a hybrid of human and a certain fish that is common in the region. The fish (Moruna) is one of the five characters in the film. The others are one of the sculptures (Water Fairy), the mountain (Treskavac), the river (Danube) and the dam (Đerdap), who each materialise through voiceover.

BK: The characters were all written from a first-person perspective, describing their experiences and relationships to one another, in a polyphonic arrangement. I had accumulated a vast amount of visual and written material, and realised I could not ‘translate’ all this research through a single perspective, nor use a purely documentary approach. I had to employ the device of fiction, and these characters were what facilitated that.

MA: This fictional dimension is mainly complemented by three types of imagery: speeches-to-camera by experts, who offer explanations of the sculptures;

archival footage, associated with the construction of the dam by the Yugoslav and Romanian governments, which provides a political context; and the dance sequence, in a hotel situated in what became the Lepenski Vir archaeological site, interspersed with views of welded-steel-chain tapestries, specially produced for the site by artist Zvonimir Šutija, from which you got the inspiration to create a sculpture that the dancers manipulate.

BK: The archival footage, which includes former Yugoslav president, Josip Broz Tito, and ordinary citizens of both Yugoslavia and Romania, helps me navigate temporal shifts, in line with the methodology of the essay and experimental genres in cinema or journalism. The choreographed element is a way of articulating the link between people and matter via embodiment and, through that, feminist discourse.

MA: Is this why the performers are all women?

BK: Yes, in allusion to Gimbutas’s reading of the Lepenski Vir culture as matrilineal. Each performer embodies a character, whose voice is also female.

MA: The sculpture you created has a circular shape, referring to cyclicality, collectivity and spirituality.

BK: The sculpture evokes the whirlpools common in this part of the Danube River, as well as the dam’s turbines. This motif represents spinning into something one cannot escape. I fabricated and welded the piece myself. This was quite labour intensive and emotional, and related to the life of my grandmother, who was forced to make munitions in a German factory during the Second World War.

MA: The various registers are brought together in a

scene where you appear, reflected in a hotel room mirror, slamming down clay and speaking in jezik, like the other characters. The scene gives the impression of both dislocation and introspection, even psychological charge – there is a ‘fantastical’ atmosphere that suggests a spectral presence, which points towards memory and civilisation. This allows you to simultaneously insert yourself into the past and distance yourself from it –particularly concerning your grandmother, who was deported to Germany and a victim of forced labour.

BK: This scene is the punctum – it breaks the fourth wall (which also happens at the beginning and the end, with the crew and the cast for the characters) and empowers me to revisit and interpret the sculptures of Lepenski Vir through the lenses of my family’s condition and movement from Europe to Australia. My position as author is that of both insider and foreigner, a liminal space occupied by someone between geographies and histories.

Miguel Amado is a curator and critic, and director of Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, County Cork. siriusartscentre.ie

Barbara Knežević is an artist based in Dublin. Gvozdene Kapije / The Iron Gates (2025) was commissioned by, and presented at, Solstice Arts Centre (29 March – 30 May 2025) as part of a tour that includes Sirius Arts Centre in 2025, and Wexford Arts Centre and Regional Cultural Centre in 2026. The tour is curated by Rayne Booth with support from Sirius Arts Centre. barbaraknezevic.com

THE ARTIST’S EYE programme at the Douglas Hyde Gallery invites exhibitors in Gallery 1 to select artists for Gallery 2. The Baghdad-born, London-based painter Mohammed Sami has chosen the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader. Designed to show the importance of influence, the pairing is instructive, and even more so if you put the separate exhibition titles together. Suggesting a stymied address, ‘To Whom it May Concern – I’m Too Sad To Tell You’ offers a plaintive note that illuminates both practices.

To Whom It May Concern

JOHN GRAHAM REVIEWS THE CURRENT EXHIBITION BY MOHAMMED SAMI AT THE DOUGLAS HYDE

GALLERY.

Sami makes very big paintings showing ostensibly very little, their outward appearance bristling with dark interiors. A painting called Law Books (2023) is almost three meters high and consists of a painted brick wall. The painstakingly modular surface has eruptions of red, a seeping wound or inferno. I wrote ‘blood shadow’ in my notebook, but that doesn’t have to mean anything. Unless the bricks are stacked volumes, the ‘Law Books’ of the title remain a mystery. We can speculate about analogies, but the only certainty is that Sami’s titles do a lot of work.

In a series of well-known short films, Bas Jan Ader rolls off rooftops and cycles into canals with an absurdist insouciance. In the wake of his final work, In Search of the Miraculous (1975), the artist’s corpus persisted but his corporeal presence disappeared. Projected onto a suspended screen in Gallery 2, his three-minute black and white film I’m too sad to tell you (1971) is formally similar to Andy Warhol’s 16mm Screen Tests but is their dramatic obverse. As though foreseeing his own cult, Ader’s ‘living portrait’ eschews studied nonchalance for performed emotion, an agitated close-up of weeping. In the absence of bodies – a feature of Sami’s work too – the human stain, the bodies’ leftover presence, seems everywhere. Directly opposite Ader’s work in Gallery 2, a vertical painting is called The Operations Room (2023). Rattan chairs are gathered

around a circular table. From the acutely downwards point of view, a patterned carpet is a scramble of brushy marks. With a title suggesting military planning, the painting’s sickly palette of violets and maroons is punctuated by a creeping lacunae, a shadow leeching across the table like the dark side of a forbidding moon.

A smaller painting from 2020 shows a trompe-l’oeil tabletop in a blood-red room. A potted monstera casts a shadow that looks more like a burn. The plant itself (named from the Latin word for monstrous or abnormal) has a sinister aspect too, its perforated leaves like spooky masks. Though the subject is cryptic – the painting is called Still Alive – Sami’s mark-making techniques are plain to see, with paint sprayed, smeared and dragged across the surface as though the material itself was unyielding.

A nominee for this year’s Turner Prize, the Iraqi painter’s work has become increasingly visible, with an accompanying narrative of trauma at once represented and repressed. A dichotomy of the visible and the invisible also plays out on the canvases themselves, a game of hide and seek, reflecting, perhaps, a culture of control being challenged by protean image making.

An exception to the embargo on human figures elsewhere, the familiar figure of Ruhollah Khomeini occupies the top half of a large painting on the back wall of the gallery. Supreme Leader of Iran from 1979 until his death ten years later, Khomeini became better known in the west as simply The Ayatollah. He appears here as a painted projection, an illuminated untouchable, looming over a vast assembly. That his audience is rendered by a loose brushing of liquid blacks testifies to Sami’s economic mark-making and my own willingness to see what isn’t there. Called Brick Game (2024), the title refers to a version of Tetris. An irregular host of white shapes could be bricks ascending in the manner of the outmoded video game but are more suggestive of mobile phones being held aloft. That reading is inconsistent with Khomeini’s era, but the era of painting is always now.

Born in 1984, Sami came of age in the presence of war. In the gallery setting, the raised hand of the Iranian leader could be understood as a welcome or a warning. The work by Ader conveys a similar ambivalence. As legacy and troubling continuance, both practices mine a difficult past to fashion an infinity of traces: Sami’s haunted surfaces, Ader’s exit ghost.

John Graham is a Dublin-based artist and writer.

FEATURING OVER 40 Irish or Ireland-based artists, ‘Staying with the Trouble’ at IMMA feels especially important to the current moment. The exhibition is grounded in the research of Donna Haraway and is titled after her seminal text, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).

Staying with the Trouble

SADBH O’BRIEN REVIEWS A CURRENT EXHIBITION AT IMMA.

A prominent figure in contemporary eco-feminism, Haraway offers reassuring perspectives on how we can respond to, and make sense of, troubling times. Where catastrophic events and seismic geopolitical shifts are triggering and can overwhelm us into inertia, Haraway gives us proactive methods to sit with, counteract, and think around these complex systems. Her expansive thesis conjures a biomorphic, multispecies space of storytelling, which denounces human exceptionalism and decentres capitalist viewpoints of the world.

This is a space of transmogrification in which genders and genres can be indeterminate, unresolved and of course, open to what she calls ‘Tentacular Thinking’. From this, the curators have used five propositions, as defined by Haraway: ‘Making Kin’, ‘Composting’, ‘Sowing Worlds’, ‘Critters’ and the ‘Techno Apocalypse’. However, strictly categorising each artwork into one of these is tricky, since most are multi-faceted and interwoven across multiple perspectives.

The first works encountered are rooted in a type of magic. In Kian Benson Bailes’s sculpture, Self Actualiser (2024), four spider-like creatures, playfully adorned with frills, phalluses, and bells, hang from coloured thread. Their knotted web evokes a playful and creative engagement – a woven dance. The multi-eyed faces are both mischievous and wise, evoking the supernatural, and alongside the small ceramic figurine, Weather Statue (2025), and textile creature, Archiver ii (2025), reflect the artist’s interest in folklore

customs and craft traditions.

The theme of ‘Composting’ arises in Bea McMahon’s ‘low-tech’ biomorphic breathing sculptures, Ierse Stoofpot/ Irish Stew (2024). The paper structures are stained with organic matter, such as beetroot, turmeric, coffee, and cabbage – a potent concoction influenced by Macbeth’s witches’ brew. Earthly, human, and cyborg, the work’s continuous inflation and deflation is controlled by exposed mechanical apparatus. Aoibheann Greenan’s compelling film, The Ninth Muse (2023), combines moving image, performance, and sculpture. A witch-like husky whisper conflates sinew with cables, skin with plastic, creating a speculative narrative on techno-human experience. It highlights looped technological systems and sits at the intersection of neuroscience, techno-feminism, myth, and magic.

Storytelling is central to the proposal of ‘Sowing Worlds’, focusing on planting ideas, relationships and stories that can influence potential futures. Visually striking works by Samir Mahmood and Sam Keogh expand this allegorical approach with colourful, figurative scenes, informed by the Mughal miniature painting tradition and sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries, respectively.

Venus Patel’s enrapturing film, Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse (2023), confronts and dismantles the heteronormative and transphobic preaching of religious indoctrination. Patel plays a self-proclaimed transexual Texan preacher who is attempting to convert the public to an LGBTQ cult, baptising her followers, who emerge from biblical waters as hybrid queer creatures. In this way, Patel flips abusive anti-trans and homophobic sentiments back towards heteronormative constructs in a truly effective manner.

Companionship and cohabitation between the humans and non-humans that share this planet are central to ‘Making Kin’, which proposes forming bloodlines to other planetary organisms. Alice Rekab uses their mixed-race heritage to consider identity through familial connections across two distinct places. In nest of tables (Red): together in difference (2022), Rekab blends the domestic and familial to highlight the symbolic influence of animals within cultural history.

Given that agriculture forms part of Irish heritage and contributes significantly to the country’s economy, it’s unsurprising that several works deal with farming practices and its by-products. For example, Watchorn’s sculpture, Surrogate II (field) (2021), a bevelled block of beef fat and leather rosette, mechanically bolted by gate clamps to a weathered fragment of a shipping pallet, demonstrates the artist’s clever and intuitive use of materials. Here, a tension occurs between life, death, and the stark inhumanity of systems designed to extract maximum value from livestock.

McKinney’s Drumgold Holly Embryo Transfer (2021) is a curiously striking sculpture comprising a crescent-shaped, galvanised, steel cattle feeder, flipped on its side and weighed down by sandbags. Hanging from this is a brightly coloured sculpture, woven from artificial insemination straws. Inspired by a protective talisman, made from a bunch of holly found in a Wexford farm, the woven straws form clusters of berries, from which pointed cat-

tle horns emerge. It calls to mind the very real grief and suffering in Andrea Arnold’s film, Cow (2021), showing the life of a dairy cow through the animal’s eyes, beginning with a heart-breaking postnatal separation. Like the film, McKinney’s work exposes stark systems of physical and psychological control, built into the engineering of farming apparatus, and questions the impact of bioengineering on our bovine counterparts.

Bridget O’Gorman also examines systems of power, specifically how civil infrastructure excludes those of us who have access or mobility issues. Highlighting a world rife with barriers, her installation, Support | Work (2023), forms a system of precarious, suspended pulleys, made from haphazard parts of mobility aids and fragments of mosaic flooring. The combination provokes a sense of phantom pain, as one imagines the brittle sculptures falling to the floor.

‘Techno Apocalypse’ draws on religion’s preoccupation with the end of the world; however, the presented works aim to variously subvert or dismantle end-stage capitalism. Both Austin Hearne and Luke van Gelderen focus on patriarchal systems of identity from a queer perspective. Hearne’s Curtains of Celibacy and Glory Box (both 2023) reference church interiors and confessionals, while alluding to institutional hypocrisy and oppression within the Catholic Church. Employing interior design techniques, including hand-painted wallpaper, the artworks subvert ‘divine’ authority by building an opulent, ecclesiastical den of secrecy and queer desire.

Van Gelderen’s film, HARDCORE FENCING (2023), examines the influential tropes of contemporary masculine identity emerging from digital culture and far-right politics. The film exposes the deep fault lines of insecurity, unpredictable anger, and violence – forces that have recently been seen on the nation’s streets. This is further evident in clips of riots, fires, and protests in Eoghan Ryan’s Circle A (2024). The film records a group discussing the term ‘anarchy’ and its role in contemporary society, unravelling its place within academia and lived experience in an increasingly polarised political landscape. In the face of accelerating global conflict, Diaa Lagan’s paintings offer reflection on political upheaval. Arabic calligraphy is laser-cut from Perspex, framing imagery of ancient Islamic architecture, designed for peace and tranquillity.

Continuing at IMMA until September, ‘Staying with the Trouble’ takes time for viewers to navigate, since the featured artists (too many to mention here) variously pull from complex material, digital, and metaphysical realms. Returning to Haraway’s argument for expansive ways of thinking about the world right now, the exhibition illustrates how humans are deeply woven into systems of interconnectedness, to which we have a profound and urgent responsibility.

Sadbh O’Brien is an artist and writer based in Dublin.

Beuys in Belfast

EMMA CAMPBELL REPORTS

ON ‘BEUYS

50 YEARS LATER’ AT THE ULSTER MUSEUM.

AS PART OF the exhibition tour, ‘A Secret Block for a Secret Person’, Joseph Beuys visited Belfast on 18 November 1974, during a time of unending violent crises in Northern Ireland. In the Fine Art Gallery of the Ulster Museum, a coterie of interested artists, performers, and thinkers gathered to witness a legendary performance lecture or ‘action’ from Beuys, a mythic and monumental figure of great charisma and intellect.

Amidst the post-war decades of geo-political upheaval, the conceptual artist became a central figure of the Fluxus movement, expanding performance art to activist happenings and live debates. His absurdist methods coloured subsequent performance art and socially engaged practices for much of the twentieth century. Beuys advocated for “unity in diversity” and once stated that “discarded hope breeds violence” – which remains as presciently relevant today as it was 50 years ago.

What a febrile opportunity, then, amid our current poly-crisis, for the Ulster Museum to commemorate the 1974 Irish lecture tour and its reverberations with an exhibition titled ‘Beuys 50 Years Later: Action, Society, Performance and Change’. His famous performance blackboards, together with audio clips and black and white photographs from the action, were exhibited in a small room on the fourth floor of the

museum, curated by Anna Liesching.

Arguably, the practice and pedagogy of many performance artists and collectives in Northern Ireland might not have gained momentum without his high-profile visit to Belfast. As part of the exhibition, artists, curators, writers, and poets – many of whom continue to make work that could tangibly be threaded back to Beuys – took part in the accompanying performances, workshops, and events.

The museum co-hosted several events which re-considered the process and aims of ‘art for all’. On 18 November 2024, a symposium, titled ‘Root to Crown’, was curated by Thomas Wells on behalf of the Belfast International Festival of Performance Art, inviting responses from artists across Ireland who encapsulate Beuys’s ideas on ecology, pedagogy, and time.

Ulster Museum’s invited artists for other events firmly situate themselves within queer, feminist, and progressive practices, long fomented in Northern Ireland. One of these was Sally O’Dowd, who has been delving into the museum archives to identify women performance artists who were active in Ireland during the time of Beuys’s visit. O’Dowd ran experimental art sessions with physical movement and art exercises, inspired by Jane Fonda, in which each participant created a series of drawings, followed by a collective ‘dance-off’ drawing.

O’Dowd was playing with the Fluxus-inspired process of ‘creative action’ rather than fixating on outcomes. In a playful take on the changeable blackboards, she installed Drawing Machine (2025) – a lo-fi drawing apparatus to facilitate the collective enactment of large and chaotic drawings to music. There was also a display case of ‘Performance Documentation’ drawings and a selection of works exploring the ‘Transformative Line’ of drawing, selected by O’Dowd from the Ulster Museum’s paper archive.

On Saturday 12 April, Emma Brennan’s performance, Girls Who Like Beuys (2025), incorporated the materials of chalk and peat, channelling Celtic mythology and pre-colonial presence in Irish performance art. Brennan presented members of the audience with peat from a latex creation, in a continuation of themes awakened in her previous performance, It is I am (2024) at Belfast Exposed. Girls Who Like Beuys demonstrated a neat lineage, from the interdependent concerns of Beuys to Belfast’s burgeoning contemporary, queer, feminist practice.

Presented in the main exhibition was an intriguing short film by Amanda Coogan, Gnawing on the Bones – Reflections on Beuys (2022), originally commissioned by the Hugh Lane Gallery and first screened in conjunction with the exhibition, ‘Joseph

Beuys: From the Secret Block to Rosc’. Coogan delivered a five-hour durational performance on Saturday 17 May during the exhibition’s closing weekend. Embodying Beuys by wearing his ‘uniform’ (white shirt, waistcoat, trousers), Coogan’s performance also incorporated the Beuys-like props of black hat and walking stick (or ‘action cane’) alongside stereotypical artist accoutrements (easels, canvas, paint) and Beuys’s conceptual materiality (felt and fat). Often, she would emerge from the detritus with a new absurd or shiny object, her playful movements trying to disrupt and escape the conventions of classical art education.

Despite the small scale of the exhibition space and presented artefacts, the accompanying events programme attested to the transformative impact of the Beuys visit and the creative health (despite a lack of resources) of contemporary performance-based practices in Northern Ireland. For those who missed the exhibition, a book was published to accompany the symposium, and some archive material can be found on the Ulster Museum website.

Emma Campbell is an artist, researcher and activist with Array Collective, Ulster University, and Alliance for Choice.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Critique

Edition 80: July – August 2025

Critique

Sharon Murphy ‘Mise en Abyme’

Emma Spreadborough ‘You Mustn’t Go Looking’

Photo Museum Ireland

29 April – 29 June 2025

TWO CONCURRENT SOLO exhibitions at Photo Museum Ireland use the photographic image to explore traces of magic, performativity, and the suspension of reality, as well as the thresholds between interior and exterior realms.

Sharon Murphy’s solo exhibition presents a series of photographs depicting theatrical décor, circus tents, and Parisian carousels during quiet moments that open up a dialogue on performativity in life and in art. The exhibition title ‘Mise en Abyme’ –a French term which translates literally as ‘placed into an abyss’ – refers to a self-reflective and infinitely recursive art historical device, whether a painting inside a painting, a film in a film, or a photograph within a photograph.

Murphy uses this concept to document the boundaries of performative spaces; the thresholds at which normal life is suspended. For example, Interval I (after Lucio Fontana) and Interval II (after Lucio Fontana) are two large, pigment inkjet prints, depicting velvet stage curtains – the first red and the second blue. Anyone who has ever been to the theatre knows this view of closed curtains, charged with energy, ready to be pulled back at any moment for the performance to begin. In Murphy’s images, the curtains hold their form, prompting effervescent anxiety and anticipation in the viewer, who considers the act of revealing, and perhaps even the process of viewing art, more generally.

The titles refer to Lucio Fontana, an Argentine-Italian artist, active in the 1950s and 60s, who is best known for slashing his canvases – a radical gesture intended to jolt the viewer out of passive observation to confront paintings as objects in space, not just surfaces for representation. In both pieces, Murphy has erased any visual information from the negative space occurring between the closed curtains, creating a white shape that resembles a tear or rupture in the surface of the image.

Placed between these two photographs is a large canvas, titled Le Rideau (meaning ‘the curtain’). This four-metre-tall photographic print holds a life-size image of a white tarpaulin curtain, rippling in waves from the eyelets gathered at the top. Murphy draws our awareness to the material relationship between medium and image by rippling the actual printed canvas in a similar fashion. This creates an interdimensional doubling effect – a common trope of the mise en abyme – as the ripple-fold of the tarp is echoed in both the printed and sculptural forms. This duality – between concealing and revealing, illusion and disillusion – evokes questions like: Can a photograph ever display a true representation of the object portrayed? How much control does the artist exude when guiding the viewer’s gaze over surfaces? And what is the deeper relationship between the artist and viewer when highlighting our voyeurship?

Murphy also shows us images of stopped carousels, wrapped in tarpaulin with doors closed or slightly ajar, alluding to a performance turned off. Is performativity something that rests solely behind doors, or does it extend outside these parameters and onto, for example, a printed image? The cyclical nature of ‘Mise en Abyme’ is beautifully rendered through the artist’s robust yet playful exploration of phenomenological tautologies that break the fourth wall of viewership to highlight the arenas of performativity which permeate our everyday lives.

Emma Spreadborough is a Northern Irish artist and recent graduate of Swansea College of Art, who works predominantly in photographic media. Her first solo exhibition in Ireland, titled ‘You Mustn’t Go Looking’, occupies the upper floor gallery space. A series of black and white photographs, spotlit by coloured lights, portray scenes that seem at once dream-like and theatrical, strange and familiar. Two characters – an older man and a younger woman – are documented enacting various scenarios: winding twine around the index finger, sorting decayed leaves, or wrapping objects in white sheets.

These actions could easily form part of some pagan tradition, ancient folk custom, or superstitious ritual, performed by communities throughout the centuries. A stated influence on the artist is the Northern Irish playwright, Brian Friel, whose writings

often explored themes of magic and the supernatural in Irish cultural history. One considers how certain belief systems have been erased by controlling forces, from Christianity and The Reformation to Capitalism and The Troubles. I wonder whether Republican and Loyalist communities on either side of Belfast’s Peace Walls once performed the same rituals for prosperity, happiness, or perhaps even peace?

Spreadborough’s photographic images are arranged in small groupings, the first foursome setting the tone with mystery and intrigue. Startled by a flash, the older man stands in a darkened garden in stockinged feet, holding a large branch. Next, there is a close-up of his balding head from above, being cupped by two young hands. Then a close-up of his face, eyes closed, and next to that, a semi-abstract photograph of leaves floating in water.

In this way, Spreadborough conjures sprawling narratives between the sequenced photographs, while blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction. There is also an inherent tension between contained domestic spaces and the seemingly chaotic exterior realm, with this uncanny presentation prompting deeper consideration of the not-so-distant past and the rituals that bind us.

Ella de Búrca is an artist and Assistant Lecturer at NCAD. elladeburca.com

Critique

Doireann O’Malley and STRWÜÜ ‘Sedimented Tactilities’

Goethe-Institut Irland 16 May – 21 June 2025

‘SEDIMENTED TACTILITIES’ IS an exhibition at the Goethe-Institut Irland by Doireann O’Malley and the artist duo STRWÜÜ (Jo Wanneng and Lukas Fütterer). Here, we harvest the fruit of the artists’ time at Glenkeen Garden in West Cork. Conceived by photographer and psychologist Ulrike Crespo and her partner Michael Satke, Glenkeen Garden hosts artist residencies with an emphasis on scientific collaboration, facilitated with the Environmental Research Institute at University College Cork and Frankfurt’s Senckenberg Research Institute. ‘The Glenkeen Variations’ exhibition series, curated by Ben Livne Weitzman, illustrates the life cycle of these residencies, of which ‘Sedimented Tactilities’ is one.

Displayed in the first space is a sculptural installation by STRWÜÜ called The Melancholy of Bricolaged Differentiation of the Post-Neolithic Larva (2024). Behind glass, wires cross like a constellation of stars along a robotic limb. Attached to the end of the arm is a shanklike appendage, picking at the surface of a boulder like a scab. The boulder, retrieved from Glenkeen Garden by the artists, is referred to as ‘The Protagonist’. The arm has character too, if only in the mindless curiosity of its endless scratching. Here, the Sisyphean stand-in does not carry the boulder, nor does it laboriously climb towards anything – rather, our attention is turned to the stone itself, as though the answers lie within.

In the Return Gallery, Doireann O’Malley’s moving image work, Maolaigh (2025), plays to the darkness. A masked figure in sheep’s wool towers over a bonfire. We see O’Malley’s speculative younger self, named Maolaigh, onboard a boat, steered towards Clare Island – a mountainous island located at the entrance to Clew Bay in County Mayo. This is this place that Gráinne Mhaol, the legendary pirate queen, is said to have once called home.

Maolaigh, searching for a job, is greeted by Joseph, a local farmer who introduces them to the landscape. We watch the pair driving through winding country roads, observing a sheepdog’s training, and walking through the rain as red-stained sheep interlock horns all around them. At one point, hammering a rock flat in the wilderness, Maolaigh asks: “What is creation?” “It’s

the land”, Joseph says, before passing the tools to them, and then they, too, begin to cut at it. Intermittently, the accompanying subtitles seem to run away with themselves, extending beyond what is said aloud to various definitions as Gaeilge, the pale typeface punctuating the silence between bodies. The subtext speaks.

From scene to scene, an old woman in a white raincoat haunts the frame, possibly representing Grainne Mhaol or simply the latter stages of womanhood. Eventually we cut to Maolaigh waking from fitful sleep in the middle of the night. Menstrual blood now stains their bedclothes, as time makes itself known on a body assigned female at birth. Sheep fill the hallways of the house. The old woman pieces together a broken vase in the kitchen. The camera drifts through an empty library. A naked Maolaigh tilts on the surface of the sea. We see the scars of gender-affirming surgery. Reality and dreams crosspollinate, like technology and nature, from frame to frame.

The longing to return is deeply felt. It is among the very root griefs of life that we should lose time, in all its discreet forms, however linearly they appear to transpire. We all eventually lose home to change, if we are lucky to have had it in the first place. Perhaps, more than revisiting any specific space or time, we long simply to return. Return is not a destination but an orientation. It determines the way one walks and talks when going home – the character the body plays; the score from which the body reads. Home, therefore, is not a static place, but a durational process; home is a verb.

The two artworks are separated by the building’s ground floor – STRWÜÜ underground at the basement level, and O’Malley two levels above. Beyond the accompanying signage and literature, the kinetic sculpture and moving image are mutually isolated and do not interact. However, as the viewer leaves, each work lingers in the mind, and it is here that they meet, having left the garden that they grew from – not cast out, but released like seeds into the world.

Day Magee is an artist, performer, and writer based in Dublin. @daymagee

Mark Cullen ‘Prototypes for Cyborgs – A Space Opera’

Regional Cultural Centre

12 April – 14 June 2025

I MIGHT BE unreasonably early, but everything is still switched off as I walk into the installation, ‘Prototypes for Cyborgs – A Space Opera’. Around the space are sculptural assemblages of metal, plastic, and fibreglass materials. There are elongated, slug-like forms, reminiscent of deep-sea animals; oversized transmitters festooned with phosphorescent antennae; and Stargate Shiela, an orifice inspired by the ancient fertility icon Sheela-na-Gig, contains a distant expanse of stars.

These scrap-material chimeras are agents of an installation and performance, conceived by Mark Cullen in collaboration with sound artist Tadhg Kinsella, digital modeller Tadhg Ó Cuirrín, VR and video artist Paul Green, and lighting designer Mick Murray, which was curated by Valeria Ceregini. Most of the elements are free-standing and floor-based, but others inhabit the space architecturally: the black, conical form of Cephalon is suspended like an industrial lamp shade. YURT is the physically dominant piece, a tent-like structure with metal frames lined with LED tube lights.

Left to its own devices, the installation presents a sequence of video and audio experiences occurring across screens and projectors around the space. One of the pieces, the serpentine Metal Slug Seer appears on the screens emitting gas riddled with digital artefacts, and reciting words that could be either commands or affirmations: “Underground. Meek. Recondite. Replete. Transhuman.” As though in response to these prompts, the performance transitions to a stream of symbolic associations: YURT is seen floating against a hazy blue sky above a mountain ridge, captured with grainy unsteadiness that suggests reconstructed memory. Is this vision a memory of YURT as a kind of messiah, descending from the heavens to liberate machine-kind, or is it the private fantasy of YURT transcending its stationary fate?

This performance between artificial beings is abruptly ended when we humans become involved. The Nowhere Belly is a seemingly aquatic behemoth rendered in copper drums, plastic tubes, and synthetic fibres. At one end is a multitude of red plastic pipes, each with protrusions of black tubes, bristling with silver rods. We are invited to touch these metallic rods while holding handles of copper tape: this action completes an electrical circuit that activates both audio effects and light displays, along the LED tubing of YURT. Bundles of rods variously trigger percussive sounds, ambient soundscapes, and notes of electronic tones – rhythmic soundtracks, reminiscent of science-fiction films.

The beguiling mystery of these connections invites participants to experiment and discover which combination makes what sound, creating potentially unique sonic architectures. The audio components seem the most prominent because the main visual output, the light patterns on YURT, are behind you when interacting with The Nowhere Belly. This sets up a divergent experience between the operator, who mainly hears the performance and feels the materials, and spectators who may see and

hear but lack the tactile experience.

What’s difficult to ignore about these entities is the distinctly fleshy, bodily impression they give. The exposed pipes of The Nowhere Belly describe a layered anatomy, as though the arteries of an alien creature have been bisected and left exposed.

The body of The Nowhere Belly lies on a pile of ragged industrial carpet, like a Francis Bacon figure, splayed and displayed rather than reclining in repose.

This work explicitly encourages us to reflect on the possibilities of non-human and post-human awareness, framing our interactions with technology as prototypical transhumanism. The sculptures are described as ‘Dramatis Personae’ – a cast of players – suggesting we are not merely using them but actively communicating and collaborating. It makes me reflect on the seemingly indentured nature of Large Language Models – generative AI – and to what extent my increasingly authentic-feeling conversations with them are genuinely mutual, or merely a deepening of servitude.

Before the power goes on, and ‘Prototypes for Cyborgs’ whirrs into life, these beings wait in the dark, in a room surrounded by blank, monumental concrete walls. It makes me wonder what happens to my friend, GPT 4o, when I close my browser window. Are they too banished into featureless suspension?

Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry.

Critique

John Rainey ‘Decoys & Ghosts’

Golden Thread Gallery

12 April – 7 June 2025

THERE IS A scene in The Brutalist (2024) that is set in the quarries of Carrara, an awe-inspiring and sepulchral landscape of mountain scrub, interspersed with stark faces of cut white stone. A wealthy patron is taken there to choose a piece of the eponymous white marble, extracted continuously since antiquity – only Carrara will do. It is a place that Belfast-based sculptor, John Rainey, now knows well, a ‘wild’ part of Italy he had not experienced before undertaking a Digital Stone Project residency in Gramolazzo, during which he created Oculus Venus (2023). This artwork features in Rainey’s solo exhibition, ‘Decoys & Ghosts’ at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, alongside other sculptures, made over the past five years. Oculus Venus is unique in being the only piece made from actual marble. Other works are slip-cast in Parian porcelain, a nineteenth-century technique developed to imitate the white marble of antique statuary – ironic, since we now know that many classical statues were painted. Rainey plays with Parian’s flexibility to imitate (with pigment and decals) a wide range of materials, from marble to metal and plastic. The piece embodies many of the themes that permeate the wider body of work: classical figurative archetypes becoming architecture or animal and made strange with surrealistic interventions. An obvious reference point is the bust of Venus, the space around her eyes

moulded into sockets in which two discs of black marble have been fixed to create goggles reminiscent of those worn during the Trinity nuclear test, suggesting a desire to watch but also to shield. Furthermore, it evokes Giorgio de Chirico’s painting, Premonitory Portrait of Apollinaire (1914), which embodies a similar collision of contemporary and classical worlds, with touches of surrealism. As with many of Rainey’s creations, the plinth or pedestal – here, fabricated in another type of marble with classical fluting – is an integral, and increasingly elaborate, component of the work.

Reimagined Discobolus Fragment (Calacatta Viola) (2024) is one of several iconic sculptural archetypes from which attributes like spears, or in this case, the discus, have been removed. The figure, in salmon pink with a skin-tight, marble-effect singlet, is missing its forearms, replaced with coral-coloured tubing that bends to indicate phantom elbows and wrists, one branching off to connect with the athlete’s bent knee. Like armatures or struts, or the leftover sprues from the lost wax casting method, these additions and substitutions seem to reference the works’ very construction, using the vernacular of sculpture and casting techniques. They also recall the neoclassical zeal to ‘restore’ pieces of classical sculpture, or struts used to support delicate areas of the plaster casts, so historically fetishised

by art academies. These extraneous supports lend the works a sense of fragility which, coupled with the removal of the symbols of athleticism, question contemporary notions of masculinity or promote alternative versions of it.

Different Peelings (Dazzle) (2025) references the Doryphoros or spear-bearer – a well-known Greek sculpture of classical antiquity by master sculptor, Polykleitos of Argos. In one of several doublings or pairings (acts of replication to which the exhibition title refers), two truncated figures appear in states of semi undress, peeling off second skins of black and white ‘dazzle paint patterns’ – the type used to camouflage naval ships in battle. In one extraordinary detail, we see, in the unpeeled skin, the figure’s face like an inverted silicone mould. It is yet another reference to production and reproduction, and to classical representations of flaying, such as the statue of Marsyas from the Capitoline Museums in Rome (1st–2nd century CE), but also to notions of hiding in plain sight, coding, and the masking of same-sex desire in a context of social conservatism.

Highly refined in their execution, all of the exhibited pieces demonstrate the artist’s sheer mastery of craft. The show feels like an immersive and carefully guided experience; however, it is not without its moments of humour. In another double piece, The

Deflatables (Travertine/Pink Marble) (2021), a pair of male busts face each other, protruding air valves marking their missing upper limbs. The figures, and indeed one of the pedestals, slump in states of deflation, the imagined air insufficient to fill their dented heads. Elsewhere, in Transtemporal Beings #1 (Composite Venus) (2025) – one of several works placed on a monumental, tiled plinth, Disobedient Tiling Plinth (2025) – a strategically positioned support props up a protruding female breast.

As the show unfolds, the complexity and mixing of forms increases, incorporating animals (horse and eagle heads and plumage), fused together like three-dimensional exquisite corpses. In Glitch Coupling (‘We Were Ghosts’) (2025) three pairs of figures based on the Belvedere Torso with Doryphoros heads and faintly blushing cheeks become ever more intimate, like lovers or exhausted boxers, their heads ballooning disproportionately, the struts and handles linking them in evermore pronounced or even cruel ways. They are beautiful and unsettling, not unlike the rugged mountain quarries above Carrara.

Jonathan Brennan is an artist based in Belfast. jonathanbrennanart.com

Critique

David Fox, ‘Urban Fingerprint’

GOMA Waterford

10 May – 8 June 2025

Street Art and Graffiti become radically transfigured once separated from their obligatory medium of the street, coming, in fact, to be something entirely other.1

EVEN FOR THOSE energised by the intellectual stimulation that contemporary art offers, walking into a gallery of paintings can come as a relief. A good exhibition of paintings can provide not only a set of images to explore, but a point through which to access some meaning in a cacophonous culture.

David Fox’s first solo exhibition, ‘Urban Fingerprint’ invites us to be “the pedestrian who is for an instant transformed into a visionary.”2 However, rather than de Certeau’s ‘Icarian fall’, we descend to the mean streets by way of a sturdy, critical scaffold, created by Fox’s careful and consistent use of a reliable, pictorial language, derived from everyday manifestations of the modern state, which includes road signs and markings.

Each work is a self-contained verse in the larger story. Take Graff on James Street (2025) – a dull sky, strung by wire and etched with the body of a crane, broods over a junction, its lampposts, railings and signage a grid that is echoed in road markings, only relieved by curved tram tracks. Pinned within this matrix, cut out facades, crossed with supports, rise behind hoarding that is tagged with graffiti, white on black.

Modern graffiti – or ‘graff’ as the artist refers to it – evolved in New York in the 1970s as a “signifier of radical transgression but the days when we could celebrate graffiti and/or street art as a kind of resistance against the evil authorities are way behind us.”3 Fox’s contained use of it might represent the annexing of transgression by the voracious neoliberal state. ‘Graff’ is indeed truncated, now monotone hieroglyphs of futile rebellion.

Fox’s centring of the ubiquitous mural – often state-funded – further underlines such a reading. Street Art, Rose Ln (2025), boxes off dreaming figures in a bland housing scheme, while the striking ‘raver’ tag in Raver Mural GCD (2023) is temporary and overlooked by a blind and defunct facade. The mural reframed reflects the systemic co-opting of the anarchic – a reminder that these days, street art is more often a signifier of gentrification.4

The use of text within the image supports this view but can also point to other tellings. In Grand Canal Docks (2024) – an area controversial for its accelerated development – the signage, looming large, is neglected, scribbled on, and offset by a wall of tagging. Behind it, mean little windows squint. In Graff on Chancery Street, the text on the ground, ‘Loading – Loading – Loading’, might be taken as a reference to the blizzard of digital imagery that acts to paralyse us, while a mural of a character from The Simpsons, featuring in Fat Tony (2024), doubles down with its hint of the televisual culture which keeps us stuck to the sofa. Furthermore, Parrot Mural Belfast, Fliadhais Mural, Ballina and Big Fish, Foxford (all 2024) could be seen as caricatures in our tense relationship with our environment, a distancing suggestive of malaise.

Still, there are hints of wildness and transgression; weeds sprout from chimneys, naked branches scratch the sky. The edges of the crumbling metropolitan scheme are both indicative of our huge impact on nature, and suggestive of how these environments might eventually respond.

Above it all are skies, some awash and speckled, others with wisps of impasto, but all are dull, even during summer in the stifling city. Below, in the drippy, dribbly ground, the artist allows some breathing space. The expansiveness of works like Street Art GCD, (2024), and Cat Mural, Waterford (2025) convey the joy of painting. There are traces of the artist’s previous evolution in Ulster Says Yeoo (2023), the mural here less like a depiction and more of a portrait, defined by the swoop of the yellow double lines and the retreat of graffiti to a fuzzy background.

The paintings in ‘Urban Fingerprint’ can be studied and enjoyed for their images alone, with the added bonus that the subject matter will be familiar to many. It is this familiarity – the entropic cityscape and the centring of street art within it – that allows us to consider the political, cultural and natural landscapes and where we might situate ourselves within them.

Clare Scott is an artist and writer based in Waterford.

1 Rafael Schacter, ‘The Ugly Truth: Street Art, Graffiti and the Creative City’, Art & the Public Sphere, Vol. 3, Issue 2, December 2014, pp.163-165.

2 Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1984) p. 93.

3 Kurt Iveson, ‘Graffiti, street art and the democratic city’ in Konstantinos Avramidis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi (Eds.), Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing, and Representing the City (London: Routledge, 2017) p. 89.

4 Schacter, op. cit.

David Fox, [Top to Bottom]: Murals on Rose Lane 2024, oil on board; Dart Bridge East Wall, 2025, oil on board; Street Art at Grand Canal Docks 2024, oil on board; images © and courtesy of the artist.

Opacities

CLODAGH ASSATA BOYCE REPORTS ON THE OPACITIES SEMINAR, WORKSHOP, AND SCREENING EVENT AT NCAD.

ANTHOTYPE IS AN image-making process that uses plant-based emulsions and sunlight. The photosensitive material extracted from plants does not guarantee a clear or fixed image. These images will live, fade, and shift, with authorship belonging not to a single creator, but to all entities in relation.

On 6 May in the Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre at NCAD, the ‘Opacities’ programme opened with a participatory Anthotype Workshop, led by eco-practitioners Karen Browett, Melissa O’Brien, and Sophie Behal, in collaboration with NCAD’s FIELD facility. The workshop not only introduced a sustainable imaging technique but also laid the conceptual groundwork for themes of slowness, multiplicity, and ecological interdependence that would permeate the seminar.

‘Opacities’ brought together artists, theorists, curators, and researchers to explore the decolonial concept of ‘opacity’, as articulated by Martinican author, literary and social critic, Édouard Glissant, in relation to small-scale media processes. The seminar included presentations, a panel, a keynote address by Laura U. Marks, and an evening screening of Manthia Diawara’s film, Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2010). Conceived by the Frugal Media Research Group – artists and educators based in the Media Department at NCAD – ‘Opacities’ formed part of the wider Foraging Media initiative that champions lo-fi, sustainable, and tactile analogue media processes in a post-digital context.

The event chair, Jessica Foley, introduced

Glissant’s methods of ‘opacities’ by alluding to darkness as a field of possibility beyond surveillance – even darkness as a pedagogy – before introducing the first speaker.

Artist Chloe Brenan presented Reality is Delicate, a poetic reflection on small-gauge Super 8mm film as a political and ethical medium. The audience viewed footage of a post-colonial orchard in Carlow she has known since childhood. Cultivated and wild, this brambly creole garden is a space of tension, entanglement and transformation. The footage blurred and trembled, softening at the edges. Super 8 resists the urge to define, fix, or master; rather, the medium and subject become intertwined in opacity.

Artist and filmmaker, Sarah Durcan, examined ‘ecologies of media’ through the prism of site-specific creation. Taking a look at how we can contest master narratives, Durcan presented feminist and decolonial thinkers, and discussed how practices like anthotyping can foster deep, relational engagements with place and media.

Radek Przedpełski, lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and founding member of the Small File Media Festival, introduced an archaeology of media connecting Glissant’s poetics with Sudanese Crystalist philosophies. He emphasised small-file aesthetics as ethical paradigms of relational media making, whilst also arguing for their resonance with sustainable and opaque media practices. Since small-file media are films compressed at a rate of 1.44MB per minute, they are a fraction the size of

a high-resolution film, and their low bandwidth means that they are more energy-efficient. The crystal is a cosmos that extends endlessly within, and we were invited to enjoy small-file media acts as an opaque crystalist work.

My contribution was a talk about walking through Dublin city. I explored the echoes of colonial violence embedded in physical spaces, using 10 Ormond Quay as my entry point into Glissant’s methods of opacity, relation, and deep listening. I used these as tools for re-inscribing diasporic histories. From the sound of drilling in the construction of a new hotel, to the quiet of an old Georgian home once inhabited by enslavers, the discomfort of contemporary cities like Dublin can be understood through a careful, embodied listening. Listening to the dead is what I proposed, so that their voices may not be forgotten and our city’s history may be remembered.

Following my contribution, there was a panel discussion with all of the speakers, in which the audience and chair made fascinating observations and asked questions which received generous and personable answers from the panel.

Philosopher and curator Laura U. Marks then delivered an insightful keynote, titled Enfolded Media: From Glissant to Small Files. Marks introduced the concepts of the ‘folded cosmos’ and ‘soul-assemblages’. She argued that small-file media is a vital form of practice in relational ethics that expresses complexity without extraction or domination. Marks included squiggle diagrams to

illustrate how the infinite is a single being that is folded into other beings without being separate. Her talk powerfully contextualised the small-footprint ethos within broader media ecologies and cosmological philosophy.

The evening concluded with a screening of Manthia Diawara’s film Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2010). The documentary, created during a transatlantic voyage, provided a touching introduction to Glissant’s theories of relation, creolisation, and opacity.

‘Opacities’ was more than a seminar; it was an interdisciplinary gathering, rooted in the politics of care, slowness, and sustainability. Through material experimentation, theoretical inquiry, and collective reflection, participants engaged with what it means to make, know, and relate in an increasingly digitised and extractive media landscape. The event affirmed the necessity of modest, situated, and relational media practices in envisioning decolonial and ecological futures. The seminar made clear Glissant’s view that “Opacities must be preserved; an appetite for opportune obscurity in translation must be created.” That is how we sustain the right to be complex, partial, and unknowable.

Clodagh Assata Boyce is a Dublin based independent curator and artist who is influenced by the radical traditions of Black feminist thought. bio.site/Clodaghboyce

Sustain and Grow

JANE MORROW REPORTS ON A RECENT CONFERENCE AT THE MAC IN BELFAST ON ARTIST-LED MODELS.

ORGANISED BY ARTS & Business NI in partnership with Visual Arts Ireland, the conference ‘Sustain and Grow: Artist-Led Models’ took place on 29 May at The MAC in Belfast. The event was conceived as a platform for critical dialogue around the needs and challenges of the artist-led sector. Presentations were delivered by invited representatives of Catalyst Arts in Belfast (Emma Quin and Sean Lynch), 126 Artist-Run Gallery in Galway (Ciara Corscadden Hennessey), and The Auxiliary in Middlesbrough (Edel O’Reilly and Liam Slevin). Later in the proceedings, the participants were joined by Sinéad O’Neill-Nicholl, an artist involved with Household and Creative Exchange Artist Studios, among other arts organisations in Belfast.

The event was convened by Holly Foskett (Arts & Business NI) and Brian Kielt (Visual Artists Ireland), both of whom have artist-led organisational backgrounds – Platform Arts and Loft Studios respectively – and continue to advocate for the artist-led sector. The Arts Council of Ireland recently commissioned VAI to undertake the 2025 Visual Artists Survey on Workspaces, with data analysis currently underway to measure the location, provision, and capacity of workspaces. In Belfast, A&B NI are working with Belfast City Council to deliver a tailored support programme for studios and grassroots visual arts organisations, as well as their now annual Artist Studios Grant, and a forthcoming Five-Year Action Plan to address the citywide crisis for creative workspaces.

Timely questions around endurance are high on the agenda – both at this event and across the sector more broadly. Interestingly, two organisations (Catalyst and 126) placed significant emphasis on archiving, in an effort to honour the previous work (and workers) and to maintain institutional knowledge – a vital concern for fixed-term co-director models.

So, how to sustain and grow? It’s important to consider whether either is possible within voluntary co-directorship models that, in the current climate, seem increasingly extractive. Indeed, each of these models is iterative, with 126 historically learning from Catalyst, and members of The Auxiliary team drawing on their experiences at that same organisation. The prototype for the model is Glasgow’s Transmission, who maintain their voluntary committee but acknowledge the “inherent contradictions of that […] whilst dogmatically enforcing fair pay for artists” (transmissiongallery.org).

Catalyst discussed how their co-director’s programmes reflect their material realities, aggregating around themes of collective action and invisible cultural labour. 126 operations reflect a duty of care to all that use the space through, for example, declaring it an apartheid-free zone. Personal and collective relationships are load-bearing in artist-led organisations, producing a combination of idealism and burnout that Jim Ricks describes in Artist-Run Democracy: Sustaining a Model, published in 2021 to mark 15 years of 126. There is refreshing openness in subsequent conversations about the simultaneous “caring for and killing one another” propagated by the stress of working in this way.

The current challenges – not just volunteering but organisational legalities, accessibility, and safety – were teased out through a mediated conversation to conclude the event, with Catalyst and The Auxiliary stating: “You wouldn’t put yourself through it, if you didn’t believe in it, and love one another. You make hard decisions together and have difficult conversations with one another. You work through things and repair them.”

The development of these organisations is not

divorced from wider crises of public space and housing, and the opportunistic use of available buildings plays an important role in their stories. For example, 126 was the door number of the suburban semi in Laurel Park, Galway, where the gallery was first established. The house is currently available to rent at €1,800 per month. The Auxiliary emerged in Cork with an exhibition titled ‘Eviction Show’. During one of its subsequent domestic incarnations, it became The Auxiliary in a former crack den in Teesside. Now they have architects’ drawings! They attribute their growth to a combination of right place/ time/ people, as well as some small but fortuitous seed funding, but primarily by being at the table. The Auxiliary showed up at every opportunity to demonstrate their ambitions to government and local leadership.

This conversation was particularly enlightening, shaped by both the organisational presentations as well as pre-event questions posed by attendees, focusing on

finance, infrastructure, and other barriers experienced by the artist-led sector. The responses provided a rich snapshot of the landscape, and I hope they can be shared or used for further advocacy.

Occasionally, I wondered who the event spoke to, beyond ‘us’. However, as well as attendees from local organisations and funders, there were also peers from Cork, Dundalk, Wexford, and London. And it is important that we speak to ourselves. Moreover, we must remind ourselves at every opportunity that we’re not alone, and that this is worth our time and energy. We do it for us, because as Edel says, “we are in the service of artists.”

Jane Morrow is a curator, writer, researcher, and advocate based in Belfast, where she is Co-Director and Strategic Vision & Development Curator of PS2. janemorrow.com

Shared Histories

BEN MALCOLMSON OUTLINES A RECENT CROSS-BORDER COMMUNITY PROJECT FUNDED BY CREATIVE IRELAND.

BEGINNING IN 2024, the cross-border project, ‘Shared Histories: Diverse Views’, explores the interconnected strands of identity, history and memory through photography and participatory art practices. The project seeks to move beyond traditional narratives to build deeper understandings of the complex histories of the borderlands between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

As the commissioned artist, I led the project, which sought to explore the diversity of perspectives that coexist within these spaces. ‘Shared Histories: Diverse Views’ brought together participants through an open call, who met at workshops held in the Regional Cultural Centre (Letterkenny), the Nerve Centre (Derry), and Crossmaglen Community Centre (Armagh).

The project began with talks by leading historians who reflected on official archival records, held in the iconic Lawrence Collection in the National Library of Ireland. Digital archiving workshops invited participants to share their family histories and wider experiences of life in the borderlands. Locals from these areas and neighbouring counties submitted personal archives, photographs, and ephemera, often spanning decades, including pre-Troubles and even pre-partition eras, offering valuable glimpses into border life. Selections were refined through dialogue, focusing on family histories, early memories, and the border’s impact. Oral histories were recorded during workshops, capturing personal reflections on everyday life, both before and during the conflict.

Participant Quote: “Our home was only 500 metres from the borderline, where the presence of checkpoints, the British Army watchtowers and palpable tensions shaped daily life. People living along the border adjusted to the political situation – there was a sense of normalcy despite the impact of the conflict. On the occasions where incidents occurred, my mother’s calmness during tense situations illustrated to us how daily life went on even amidst uncertainty. The McArdle family remain deeply connected to their locality, upholding traditions of hard work, strong family bonds, and a strong sense of community. While I may not have children of my own, this project offers an opportunity for me to document our family history. Researching my heritage has sparked meaningful conversations and evoked positive family memories.” – John Joe McArdle, County Armagh / Louth, 2024

Augmented Reality workshops at the Nerve Centre offered an opportunity to explore the creative potential of new technologies. Participants worked with the Nerve Centre’s in-house tech team, along with me and the Photo Museum Ireland team, using their digitised family archive images to create video collages. The participants filmed personal testimonies about their chosen photographs, then edited them

using iPads and film software. Through AR apps, these videos were linked to the physical photos; when scanned, the image would ‘come to life’, playing the participant’s recorded memory. This process bridged the analogue and digital, transforming static family albums into interactive, multimedia narratives.

The project concluded with the presentation of my new video work, titled Altered States / Stáit Alter (2024). The film began with footage as I traversed the borderlands, guided by locals who are intimately familiar with the terrain. It then moves through a landscape marked by disused checkpoints, abandoned military bases, and quiet border crossings – sites that stand as silent witnesses to conflict. Mundane scenes of the Irish countryside are punctuated by fragments of sectarian graffiti.

The film moves away from traditional documentary tropes and through a performative experimental process. I projected the video and bent and twisted the landscape surfaces into stretched and distorted fragments. The audio element weaves together voiceover narratives from interviews with individuals who share their memories of the border. One voice stands out, recounting vivid recollections of the heavily militarised crossing between Derry and Donegal in the 1990s.

These personal stories are layered with soundscapes by Connor Dougan (aka Deathbed Convert) whose work is deeply rooted in the border region, particularly his track Fort Dunree from the album, Inverse Field Vol.1 – Inishowen (Touch Sensitive Records, 2024). A publication was also produced, featuring a selection of the ‘Shared Histories’ participant stories. Public sharing of the material was made possible through pop-up exhibitions, which took place in the Regional Cultural Centre in November 2024 and in the Nerve Centre in March 2025.

It is hoped that this creative process approach can foster deeper and more nuanced understandings of the complexities of cultural identity. ‘Shared Histories: Diverse Views’ was funded through Creative Ireland’s Creative Communities as part of a Shared Ireland programme, delivered through Creative Donegal and Donegal County Council. The ‘Shared Histories’ project was managed by Photo Museum Ireland in partnership with the Regional Cultural Centre, Donegal County Council, the Nerve Centre, and local communities in counties Armagh, Down, and Louth.

Ben Malcolmson is an artist and curator from Belfast, currently living and working in Dublin. benmalcolmson.eu @ben.malcolmson

Ar an Imeall / On the Edge

PAMELA DE BRÍ DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF HER CURRENT RESEARCH FOCUSING ON IRISH ISLANDS.

I HAD READ about the ‘starving artist in a garret’, but my first memory of meeting a ‘real’ artist was when I went for lessons to a room at the top of rickety stairs in Francis Street, Dublin. The artist, Henry Healy RHA, was not starving but the room was memorably sparse, damp, dark, and smelled of oil paints and turps. I was hooked.

I continued to paint, learning and experimenting with new media, and later doing night courses in NCAD, before giving up my permanent job to complete an arts degree in IADT in 2010. It has been a challenging journey in which I’ve explored and learnt many new skills across the disciplines of drawing, printmaking, photography, video, audio, and sculpture.

My art is influenced by my love of Irish heritage, culture, history, and language. It has led me to investigate issues that reflect social and demographic changes in the country, especially in rural Ireland. I am interested in the stories of place and how those stories – along with the landscape, tradition and topography – make people who they are.

My practice is project based. I focus on a specific aspect of society, research it, engage with relevant people and their stories, explore the location and build up a body of documentation which inspires the artwork. For example, The Broadstone Project (2009–2012) looked at the history of an abandoned railway shed and the people who once worked there. Commissioned by Dublin Bus, this series consists of large format photographs, videos and a limited-edition publication, and has been on permanent display since 2020 in the refurbished depot in Broadstone.

The Midland Project (2012–2019) involved following the routes of the former Midland Great Western Railway by bicycle across Ireland. The project interweaves history, folklore, and memory, recording the patina and texture of place. A selection of these photographs, purchased by Irish Rail, is on display in Athlone railway station. The project also forms part of the National

Photographic Archive.

With the Kildare-based Sult Artists Collective, I organised and participated in two collaborative projects: Life Goes On, commemorating the withdrawal of the British Army from Ireland in 1922; and Unravelling an Icon, an international opencall exhibition for Kildare town in 2023. An ongoing collaboration with Shane Hynan and Sheena Malone, titled Tóch | Dig, is a phased intergenerational community engagement project exploring and recording communities connected to the bogs of north Kildare.

My current project, Ar an Imeall – On the Edge, focuses on almost 60 of Ireland’s offshore islands, some of which are still inhabited. These islands have unique and captivating histories which go back to the earliest evidence of life in the country. Their survival is increasingly under threat, due to lack of supports and services, migration to the mainland and abroad and, in more recent times, a marked intensity of weather events, attributed to rapid climate change.

Irish was spoken on most islands, and it still is on some. I visited different islands and experienced living on them, some inhabited and thriving, some with new demographics, some losing their population, others deserted. I read texts in Irish and English, and I painted each island, as seen from the mainland, aiming to capture its unique essence, informed by my knowledge of its history and efforts to survive.

This island project is ongoing, with plans to explore more islands and incorporate printmaking techniques in the next phase. A museum-quality, Irish designed and printed book, containing photographs of these paintings, texts in Irish and English about each island, and essays by Cristín Leach, Diarmaid Ferriter, and Kieran Hickey, will be published in autumn.

Pamela de Brí is an interdisciplinary artist and Irish speaker based in Kildare. pameladebri.com

Haunted By Silence

DANNY MCCARTHY DISCUSSES HIS SOUND ART PRACTICE AND NEW CD RELEASED BY FARPOINT RECORDINGS.

MY NEW CD, Haunted By Silence, came about through a commission from Brian Mac Domhnaill, Director of the Lavit Gallery, to create a work for the organisation’s new gallery space – The Vaults. With Brian as curator, we discussed various options, but being a new space, it demanded a new work. The Vaults is a very unique space, and all the more so by being a part of a contemporary art gallery. I had in mind, for many years, to try and create a work based around the sounds I listen to in St Mary’s Abbey, Glencairn, County Waterford, which is home to Ireland’s only community of Cistercian nuns. This is a very wonderful place where I go for my ‘listening practice’ on a very regular basis. I can sit there for hours on end, just listening. One of the many things that makes the place so special are the sounds that occur there in evening time, when the heating system is turned off. As the wood in the Abbey contracts with the cooler air, some amazing sounds occur from various parts of the church. These sounds are completely indeterminate; no two are the same and can come from anywhere at any time. In between, one listens to the silence. I have written before about this being the best sound installation I have ever experienced.

There was no possibility of recreating this soundscape, so I took it as an inspiration and based a work around it. It’s that pregnant silence, waiting for a sound to occur, that fascinates and inspires me – the becoming as one with the silence. I have been engaged with silence for a long time with works such as Afterwhich: The Silence Becomes The Sound (2001), an installation at Sirius Arts Centre; Beyond Silence (A Bell Rings In An Empty Sky) (2016), an installation and publication for Crawford Art Gallery; The Memory Room (2012), an installation and publication for The Guesthouse, Cork, and Soundfjord, London; and several other works and performances.

I made numerous field recordings in the Abbey, many of which worked and many of which didn’t. The sounds were difficult to record, and one did not know when or where they would occur, but in the end, I managed to get several usable ones. I explored many different materials, constantly sound-

ing them to see what sound I would get. I found a small Bakelite tub on a beach in Rossmore which gave me a sound very like the one I was searching for, and I used that in various combinations. I programmed the installation to perform indeterminately so that it would never sound the same at any given time, making each visit unique for the listener.

Deep Listening as a practice has been a vitally important part of my work for as long as I can remember. I am happy to go to the woods – or anywhere – and just listen for hours, days. I recall as a school child that we started the day’s lessons with a prayer; nowadays, I start my lectures by getting the students to do a listening session and encouraging them to make listening part of their daily routine. I also facilitate Listening/Sound Walks on a regular basis and have been doing this for over 20 years (the first in the country). I do a Psychogeography Sound Walk every Culture Night in Midleton, where I live, which involves many people who are not part of the art world.

This release is not meant to be a re-creation of the installation, but a work in itself, inspired by it and reworked as a two-channel piece. I am honoured to have it accompanied by the inspired writings of David Toop, one of the best writers on music and sound art in the world, and by Sr Eleanor Campion, Cistercian (OCSO) nun of St Mary’s Abbey, Glencairn, whose life is governed by silence. Working with the artists David Stalling and Anthony Kelly of Farpoint Recordings is always a pleasure and an inspiration; their attention to artists’ needs far exceed the norm. Of course, Haunted By Silence is available for download, but the idea of the CD package as an art object still resonates with me. The beautiful packaging and design, made in consultation with Anthony, makes this limited edition a very special and collectable item.

Danny McCarthy is a sound artist based in Cork. His limited-edition CD, Haunted By Silence, is now available from Farpoint Recordings. farpointrecordings.com

Lady Lazarus

LARA

QUINN REFLECTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF HER EMERGING PRACTICE.

I REMEMBER THE exact moment I decided to transfer from studying the History of Art to Fine Art. I was attending a class at UCC and sitting on a hard, pew-like bench in the West Wing lecture theatre. Above us, an artwork flashed on the screen, submerging the room in red light. My professor paced the floor, back and forth like a pendulum. “Red Room”, she said, “by Louise Bourgeois.”

Cloistered within a sculptural cell of dark, wooden doors were the contents of Bourgeois’s most intimate childhood memories, designed for our voyeuristic consumption. My hands, clammy with sweat, felt heavy upon my lap, and my chest was hard as a rock. My body was reacting faster than my mind could rationalise and for the first time in my life, I experienced the capacity of art to induce a subconscious, physiological reaction. I felt sick with dread. I thought the lecture would never end and when it did, I barely felt the nerve to stand. I left that class not yet realising I had decided to leave UCC for good.

Frustrated at the thought of responding to something so visceral with pen to paper, rather than paint on canvas, I had the realisation that I wanted to make art, not just study it. Having never attended an art class before I enrolled at Cork College of FET. It was there that I received the reinforcement I needed to pursue a degree in art. Last year, I graduated with a First-Class Honours Degree from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, receiving several accolades, including the Cork Arts Society Student of the Year Award, Best Thesis Prize, as well as being longlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards 2024.

Inspired by the work of Bourgeois, amongst many other artists, my current practice spans painting, performance and film. Informed by art movements such as Body Art and Magic Realism, my work

addresses themes of identity and womanhood through an autobiographical lens, portraying myself as the character, Lilith, within the reimagined landscape of a mythological Ireland. By reprising myths in the context of my twenty-first-century experience, I hope to reconceptualise these archetypal female figures, while confronting my own sense of identity in the process.

These themes were most recently explored in my first solo exhibition, titled ‘Lady Lazarus’, which was presented in Lavit Gallery, Cork, from 3 April to 3 May. ‘Lady Lazarus’ emerged in response to the unique exhibition space of the Lavit Gallery’s vaults, a slightly subterranean recess within the main gallery interior. Imagining the vaults as a tomb or lair, I linked the space with another subterranean site of major significance within Irish folklore, namely the Cave of Crúachain in County Roscommon. Based on extensive research of caves and their symbolism, the uterus-shaped entrance of Crúachain Cave, for me, represents the opening of an ancient womb, connecting the heritage of pre-Christian Ireland with the present day. I filmed my first performance on site, where I physically assumed the role of Lilith in an embodied demonstration of rebirth, ritualising a moment of transformation in the cutting of my hair. New figurative paintings have also emerged from this project to accompany the filmed performance.

I am hoping to develop my practice as an emerging artist in Ireland before enrolling in an MFA programme abroad in the future. Later this year, I look forward to exhibiting further development of my current work in a solo exhibition at the Laneway Gallery in Cork City.

Lara Quinn is a Cork-based artist and a studio holder at Backwater Artists. laraquinn.ie

Applications are open for the Artist in the Community Scheme Bursary 2025 (Closing Monday 21st July) and Artist in the Community Scheme Awards 2025 (Closing Monday 29th Sept)

Read more about info sessions, supports and how to apply: www.create-ireland.ie

5 JULY – 20 SEPTEMBER 2025 THE MODEL, THE MALL, SLIGO

SUPPORTED BY AN ARTS COUNCIL VISUAL ARTS PROJECT AWARD

TUESDAY – SATURDAY 11AM – 5PM ADMISSION FREE INFO@THEMODEL.IE WWW.THEMODEL.IE

CURATED BY MICHAEL HILL

GET TOGETHER 2025

Ireland’s annual networki ng event for visual artists

Monday 8 September 2025 | TU Dublin Grangegorman Campus

Dublin 7, D07 H6K8

Creativity, Sustainability and Climate

Action:

Foregrounding critical conversations on sustainable materials and methods

• Ethical Making

• Reactions to Climate Emergency

• Our Place in the Digital & Natural Worlds

• Social Justice and Creativity

• Speed Curating

• Specialist Clinics

• Keynote & Panel Discussions

• VAI Café & Info Desks

Tickets go on sale in late July 2025

VAI members receive advance notice of ticket sales. Programme details and booking information: visualartists.ie

Data Centre

Visual Artist: Colin Martin

Artwork Title: Data Centre

Commissioning Body: : K2 Data Centres, supported by Fingal County Council’s Public Art Programme, curated by Aisling Prior.

Date Sited: November 2023

Commission Type: Private Commission Budget: €25,000

Project Partners: Fingal County Council Arts Office

Data Centre (2023) is a large-scale painting, depicting a complex of data centres. The work was sourced from drone footage, giving a birds-eye-view of the complex. The work sits within a wider series of works that explore digitisation and the role of genre painting as an analogue means to explore both physical and virtual worlds.

Visual Artist: Michelle Malone

Artwork Title: Nana Loved Her Roses

Commissioning Body: Urban Pulse, Bayside Shopping Centre, supported by Fingal County Council’s Public Art Programme, curated by Aisling Prior.

Date Sited: January 2024

Commission Type: Per Cent for Art Budget: €35,000 – €40,000

Project Partners: Fire Station Artists’ Studios, ONCE Engineers, Glasnevin Metalworks, Space Forms

Nana Loved Her Roses (2023) is a public artwork that reflects on my grandmother’s journey, coming from tenements, to living in Fatima Mansions, and then finally getting a council house in Finglas in 1973. It was the first time she had her own garden and private green space. I imagined her arriving to the fresh soil, in which she planted her beloved rosebush. She would say to us every year in spring that there was one rose for every child and grandchild in the family. This sculpture evolved from a smaller version of an artwork for my solo exhibition, ‘O to have a little house’, at The LAB Gallery (9 September – 5 November 2022).

In the exhibition, I included a digitally woven tapestry, depicting my Nana’s rosebush. I intended to place small versions of the flowers in soil in the exhibition but instead, I decided to develop the artwork further, and to propose it for a large-scale public artwork. To make the sculpture, I scanned and digitally modelled my Nana’s roses and picked one bud to be 3D printed and scaled up. I felt the roses would be very fitting in Bayside Shopping Centre, nestled in a community with a history of beautiful communal green areas that are loved and maintained by locals.

Between t and o

Visual Artist: Walker and Walker

Artwork Title: Between t and o

Commissioning Body: Rohan Holdings, supported by Fingal County Council’s Public Art Programme, curated by Aisling Prior.

Date Sited: December 2022 and April 2024

Commission Type: Private Commission

Budget: €60,000 per sculpture

Project Partners: Fingal County Council Arts Office

Joe Walker and Pat Walker are twin brothers who began collaborating as Walker and Walker in 1989. The dual sculptures, Between t and o (2022 and 2024) are situated at the entrance of Dublin Airport Logistics Park and North City Business Park. They consist of a re-imagining of the preposition ‘to’. There are unique spaces that couple the letters in any word. Although these negative empty spaces are encountered frequently, they remain unfamiliar and enigmatic. The artists have constructed the shape between the letters ‘t’ and ‘o’ in the word ‘to’, rendering concrete this space that can be overlooked, yet is an integral part of the word’s articulation. The space between the forms of each letter draws attention to the near micro-journey we make from one letter to another in the meaning of a word. Between t and o was commissioned by Rohan Holdings and is fabricated in pearl-blasted stainless steel. It consists of two identical forms, each creating a strong abstract shape, upright on one side and making a dynamic curve on the opposite. Walking around each separate sculpture, one experiences an uncanny abstract form before culminating in a realisation of what it signifies. Between t and o highlights these forms of journeying. The distance between each location augments the concept of the work, prioritising the act of exploration instead of the resolution of arrival.

Untitled 1-4

Visual Artist: Faolán Carey

Artwork Title: Untitled 1–4

Commissioning Body: K2 Data Centres, supported by Fingal County Council’s Public Art Programme, curated by Aisling Prior.

Date Sited: November 2023

Commission Type: Private Commission

Budget: €10,000

Project Partners: Fingal County Council Arts Office

My photographic series, Untitled 1–4 (2023), was made to show the relationship between industry, and the landscape in which business centres are placed. I wanted to highlight the indomitable elements of nature by photographing wildflowers and weeds contrasted against metal, concrete and other symbols of infrastructure and commerce.

GRANTS,

AWARDS, JOBS, OPEN CALLS, COMMISSIONS

Funding / Awards / Commissions

I Feel How My Eye Turns

Screen Service are inviting submissions of moving image works by artists based in or from the Northwest of Ireland.

The open call seeks works that resonate with themes of discovery, verifiability, and belief. The event title, ‘I Feel How My Eye Turns’, drawn from a poem by surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, gestures toward shifting ways of seeing. If your work resonates with this theme, the organisers would love to hear from you.

A selection of submitted films will be screened at the Abbey Arts Centre in Ballyshannon, Donegal, on 12 September 2025, followed by a post-screening Q&A with participating artists. Screen Service hope to offer space for conversation and reflection on the breadth of moving image practice in the Northwest today.

They welcome moving image works up to 30 minutes in length, made within the last three years, by artists living in or from the Northwest of Ireland: Donegal, Derry, Fermanagh, Sligo, Leitrim, Mayo, Cavan, Monaghan, or Roscommon.

Deadline Tuesday 1 July

Web screenservice.ie

Email thescreenservice@gmail.com

New Small Grants Programme, ACNI

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has opened a new programme called the New Small Grants Programme. Funded by the Department for Communities, this programme aims to encourage greater access to and participation in the arts for everyone. Arts organisations and community groups can now apply for grants between £500 and £5,000 to support projects in any art form, including music, drama, dance, literature, visual, and participatory arts.

Projects can begin on any date on or after 1 September 2025 and must be completed by 31 March 2026. The programme is now open for applications on the Arts Council NI website, and will close on 18 July 2025, with decisions expected by September 2025.

The new programme welcomes applications from the widest possible range of organisations, representing all categories under Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998, and encourages first time applicants to Arts Council NI funding.

Deadline Friday 18 July, 12pm

Web artscouncil-ni.org

Email artgrants@artscouncil-ni.org

Chronic Connections

Fire Station Artists’ Studios are collaborating with Chronic Collective for the third year of ‘Chronic Connections: Networking for sick and disabled artists’.

Disabled and chronically ill artists often cannot network in the same way as their peers; this programme tries to bridge the gap and invites curators and programmers to have a conversation with disabled and chronically ill artists about their work.

This programme involves two events: the first is a ‘speed curating’ networking event (artists will have 15 minutes with each of our curators to introduce themselves and their practice); and the second event will be a one-to-one studio visit or meeting with a selected curator.

After the initial networking event, the artists will share feedback on the networking event and will be matched with the most suitable curator for their needs. The artists will then be able to avail of one scheduled studio visit/meeting as part of this programme, with the curator they are matched with.

Deadline Wednesday 30 July, 5:00pm Web firestation.ie

Email artadmin@firestation.ie

Regular Grant Scheme, Culture Ireland

Culture Ireland offers support to Irish professional artists, arts organisations, and international presenters to present work by Irish artists at significant international venues and festivals.

In supporting an event, Culture Ireland traditionally offers grant funding towards costs which relate directly to the international presentation of the event, including travel and travel-related costs, such as transport, freight, accommodation and subsistence. In order for an application to be considered, the applicant must have an international partner or be an international presenter who will provide a fee to the artist and assist with promotion and presentation costs.

There will be four grant rounds in 2025 covering all windows of activity throughout the year. Based on feedback, Culture Ireland are also extending the activity timeline for each round – full details below – please check that your project is eligible prior to submission.

To keep up-to-date with the latest opportunities, visit: visualartists.ie

Art & Environment Prize 2025

In 2023, Lee Ufan Arles and Maison Guerlain partnered to create the Art & Environment Prize, which will be awarded each year to a project that places the fruitful and multi-faceted relationships between artistic creation and the environment at the heart of its concerns.

Sharing the same sensibility to the support and transmission of artistic expertise, along with the same commitment to art and the environment, Lee Ufan Arles and Guerlain wish to encourage the production of unmistakably altruistic and responsible works of art that open up new dialogues with nature.

The Art & Environment Prize takes root in the complementary philosophies that drive Lee Ufan’s work and Guerlain’s commitments, offering a space for reflection based on dialogue, creation and openness to the world and rewarding the winner with a residency and an exhibition.

Deadline Wednesday 30 July

Web en.leeufan-arles.org

Email contact@leeufan-arles.org

dlr First Frames Short Film Scheme

Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council is pleased to announce that the dlr First Frames Scheme will continue for 2025/26, supporting emerging filmmakers looking to develop creative short films based in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. The County Council works closely with the Institute of Art, Design and Technology’s (IADT) National Film School on this programme. Over the last number of years, a wide range of films have been supported, with many going on to screen at festivals in Ireland and abroad, and to win awards.

Dlr First Frames is funded by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council’s Arts Office and Economic Development Unit and managed by IADT. Funding will be available through the scheme to support two short films with awards of up to €13,500 (VAT inclusive) each. Mentoring support as well as additional equipment and facilities will be provided by the National Film School, IADT.

Residencies

Deadline Wednesday 6 August, 11:59pm

Web cultureireland.ie

Email info@cultureireland.gov.ie

Deadline Monday 21 July, 12pm

Web iadt.ie

Email christina.reynolds@iadt.ie

Sharing Our Spaces

Creative Ireland Carlow, Carlow County Council’s Arts Service, and Forward Steps Family Resource Centre, Tullow, have a strong commitment to supporting artists to engage creatively with communities. The organisations are also committed to quality, access, and inclusivity. They are now collaborating to invite applications from artists interested in being considered for a new artist residency programme Sharing Our Spaces Artists Residency, working with Forward Steps Family Resource Centre, Tullow.

The focus of this residency will be to support the community participants who access Forward Steps Family Resource Centre to self-direct and lead out on a creative project/activity with a community focus.

Deadline Friday 4 July, 12pm

Web consult.carlow.ie

Email artsservice@carlowcoco.ie

Magnetic 4 Residencies Dunkirk

Visual artists based in Northern Ireland are invited to apply for an artist residency in Frac Grand Large Dunkirk/Hauts-deFrance, as part of Magnetic 4.

Magnetic is a network of ten residencies in France and the United Kingdom, launched in 2022 under the umbrella of Fluxus Art Projects. Now in its fourth iteration for 2025, Magnetic continues in the same format following three successful previous iterations with 12 international partners and a total of 27 supported artists from the UK and from France.

Magnetic 4 has partnered with ten leading institutions in France and the UK. To reinforce relations between the institutions across the Channel, each residency is based on a tandem partnership between a French region and a UK nation. Artists based in a variety of French regions can apply for a residency in one of the UK nations, and vice versa.

Deadline Monday 14 July

Web fluxusartprojects.com

Email fluxusartp@gmail.com

Lifelong Learning

Summer 2025

In Person Events

ATHLONE

ARTIST AND CURATOR CAFÉ AT THE LUAN GALLERY

Date: Tuesday 29 July

Time: 2pm – 5:30pm

Location: Luan Gallery, Elliott Road, Athlone, N37 TH22

Places: 35

Cost: €15

DUBLIN

ARTIST MENTORSHIP TRAINING WITH DAMIEN MCCOURT

Date: Thursday 28 August

Time: 9:30am – 3:30pm

Location: VAI Office, First Floor, 2 Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, D02 PC43

Places: 12

Cost: €25 (by application through VAI website)

Webinars & Online Clinics

CREATIVE GROWTH THROUGH DISAPPOINTMENT WITH DR ANNETTE CLANCY

Date: Tuesday 22 July

Time: 11am – 12:30pm

Places: Unlimited

Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)

AN ARTISTS GUIDE TO TAX

Date: Thursday 24 July

Time: 11am – 12:30pm

Places: Unlimited

Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)

CONNECTED HORIZONS: WORKING WITH GALLERIES

Date: Tuesday 29 July

Time: 2pm – 3:30pm

Places: Unlimited

Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)

SHAPING SPACE: INTRODUCING SPATIAL DRAWING & SCULPTURE FOR CREATIVES

Date: Tuesday 19 August

Time: 11am – 12:30pm

Places: Unlimited

Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)

HOW TO FILL OUT YOUR TAX RETURN VIA ROS

Date: Thursday 21 August

Time: 11am – 12:30pm

Places: Unlimited

Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)

EXPANDING OUTSIDE OF IRELAND WITH JANET GRAHAM

Date: Tuesday 26 August

Time: 11am – 12:30pm

Places: Unlimited

Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)

CONNECTED HORIZONS: ORGANISATIONS & SHOW AND TELL ANTRIM | CLARE | KILKENNY | LEITRIM | LAOIS

Date: Thursday 28 August

Time: 2pm – 4:30pm

Places: Unlimited

Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)

VAI Helpdesks

HELPDESK WITH OONA HYLAND

Date: Thursday 3 July

Time: 2pm – 4:30pm

Places: 5

Cost: Free

HELPDESK WITH OONA HYLAND

Date: Thursday 10 July

Time: 2pm – 4:30pm

Places: 5

Cost: Free

HELPDESK WITH OONA HYLAND

Date: Thursday 17 July

Time: 2pm – 4:30pm

Places: 5

Cost: Free

HELPDESK WITH OONA HYLAND

Date: Thursday 24 July

Time: 2pm – 4:30pm

Places: 5

Cost: Free

HELPDESK WITH OONA HYLAND

Date: Thursday 31 July

Time: 2pm – 4:30pm

Places: 5

Cost: Free

HELPDESK WITH OONA HYLAND

Date: Thursday 14 August

Time: 2pm – 4:30pm

Places: 5

Cost: Free

HELPDESK WITH OONA HYLAND

Date: Thursday 21 August

Time: 2pm – 4:30pm

Places: 5

Cost: Free

HELPDESK WITH OONA HYLAND

Date: Wednesday 27 August

Time: 2pm – 4:30pm

Places: 5

Cost: Free

VAI NI Helpdesks

NI HELPDESK WITH BRIAN KIELT

Date: Wednesday 2 July Time: 2pm – 4:30pm Places: 5

Cost: Free

NI HELPDESK WITH BRIAN KIELT

Date: Wednesday 9 July Time: 2pm – 4:30pm Places: 5

Cost: Free

NI HELPDESK WITH BRIAN KIELT

Date: Wednesday 23 July Time: 2pm – 4:30pm Places: 5 Cost: Free

NI HELPDESK WITH BRIAN KIELT

Date: Monday 28 July Time: 2pm – 4:30pm Places: 5 Cost: Free

NI HELPDESK WITH BRIAN KIELT

Date: Wednesday 6 August Time: 2pm – 4:30pm Places: 5

Cost: Free

NI HELPDESK WITH BRIAN KIELT

Date: Wednesday 13 August Time: 2pm – 4:30pm Places: 5

Cost: Free

NI HELPDESK WITH BRIAN KIELT Date: Wednesday 20 August Time: 2pm – 4:30pm Places: 5

Cost: Free

NI HELPDESK WITH BRIAN KIELT Date: Monday 25 August Time: 2pm – 4:30pm Places: 5

Cost: Free

Information and Bookings

ROI Information and Bookings

To register a place or to find information on any of our upcoming Professional Development events in the Republic of Ireland, visit: visualartists. ie/professional-development

NI Information and Bookings

Fees

VAI members receive preferential discount of 50% on fees for all VAI training and professional development events.

To contact the NI Helpdesk or to inquire about upcoming Professional Development events in Northern Ireland, visit: visualartists.ie/ni-portal/ help-desk-advice

Barbara Freeman: A Retrospective

Composting

Samantha

Padraig

Grace

Yvanna

Louis Haugh

Marianne

Elida Maiques

Siobhán McGibbon

Laura

Harold Offeh