CRITIQUE: SOFT SURGE
INTERVIEW: MAUD COTTER
ARCHIVES: MICHAEL WARREN MOVING IMAGE: GRENFELL MEMBER: BREDA BURNS
The Visual Artists’ News Sheet
September – October 2025
On The Cover
Alice Rekab, Bunchlann, Buncharraig, 2025, installation at Liverpool ONE; photograph by Rob Battersby, courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Biennial 2025.
First Pages
6. Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months.
Columns
9. Drift Days. Cornelius Browne chronicles his use of driftwood as supports for his plein air paintings. The Ban, The Voice, And Nothing More. Roisin Agnew outlines the research underpinning her bafta-longlisted film.
From The Archives
10. Attention as Fulcrum. Jason Oakley’s interview with Michael Warren was first published in the SSI Newsletter in 1996.
Moving Image
12. Grenfell. Grace O’Boyle gauges the impact of Steve McQueen’s film, currently showing at the MAC in Belfast.
Career Development
14. Maelstrom. Aengus Woods interviews Maud Cotter about the evolution of her sculpture practice.
Residency
16. Leaking Light. John Gayer interviews Clíodhna Timoney during her residency at Helsinki International Artist Programme.
17. How the Heart Sees. Eslam Abd El Salam reflects on his recent residency at Kunstverein Aughrim.
Critique
19. Noel Hensey, Rejection Rejection, 2021
20. ‘Soft Surge’ at Luan Gallery
22. Rachel Doolin at glór
23. ‘Together in Commune’ at Rua Red
24. ‘Foreword’ at The International Centre for the Image
26. ‘Encounters with Failure’ at South Tipperary Arts Centre
Exhibition Profile
28. Beirt le Chéile. Catherine Marshall interviews Bernadette Cotter and Áine Ryan about their show at Grilse Gallery.
29. The Home that Held Us. Clara McSweeney outlines a recent exhibition at Fire Station Artists’ Studios.
30. Out of the Strong. Aisling Clark reflects on a recent group exhibition commemorating 30 years of Gay Health Network.
Festival / Biennial
34. Bedrock. Miguel Amado reviews the Liverpool Biennial.
36. It Takes a Village. El Reid-Buckley interviews the curatorial team for the 41st EVA International.
38. Shelter: Below and Beyond. Maeve Mulrennan reviews the third edition of the Helsinki Biennial.
40. Ireland Invites. Joanne Laws reports on an initiative conceived to enhance the international exposure of Ireland-based artists.
Member Profile
42. Between Real and Shadow. Áine Phillips interviews Breda Burns about her show at Custom House Studios and Gallery.
44. Uisce Salach Agus Dríodar. Anna Maria Savage outlines the research underpinning her recent paintings. First-person. Isabel English discusses her forthcoming Exhibitions at LHQ Gallery and GOMA Waterford.
45. Diagonal Acts. Marie Farrington chronicles several exhibitions emerging from her unfolding cross-site project.
Last Pages
46. VAI Lifelong Learning. Upcoming VAI helpdesks, cafés and webinars.
The Visual Artists’ News Sheet:
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Fingal County Council and MART Gallery & Studios Graduate Award 2026
Fingal County Council Arts Office in partnership with MART Gallery & Studios, are offering a funded studio space to support the professional development of recent graduates. The award offers space to develop creative projects and practice, connect with artists and take part in MART’S Annual Exhibition Award show in 2026.
To be eligible to apply, applicants must: have been born, have studied, or currently reside in the Fingal administrative area.
Closing date for applications is Monday 29th September 2025 at 4.00pm
To apply and find out more, visit: www.mart.ie
For further information email: ciara@mart.ie
Fingal, A Place for Art
Professional artists working in all artforms are welcome to apply.
OPEN CALL
Deadline:
26th September 2025 at 5pm. Applications will be accepted online. www.mayo.ie/arts/public-art/current-projects
Contact:
Aoife O’Toole, Public Art Coordinator, E: aotoole@mayococo.ie T: 094 9064 376
NADIA J. ARMSTRONG, KENNEDY BROWNE COLIN MARTIN, AISLING PHELAN
LUAN GALLERY
Dublin
Kerlin Gallery
‘Pictures of You’, curated by Miles Thurlow, brought together 16 international and multigenerational artists, whose images, objects and actions evoke specific, often fleeting, moments. Artists included Eve Ackroyd, Simeon Barclay, James Cabaniuk, Samuel Laurence Cunnane, Hollis Frampton, Ryan Gander, Nan Goldin, Merlin James, Sooim Jeong, Laura Lancaster, Rachel Lancaster, William McKeown, Robin Megannity, Wang Pei, Hannah Perry, and Ki Yoong. On display from 4 July to 23 August.
kerlingallery.com
The Summer Group Exhibition ran from 24 July to 23 August, presented a mix of works by artists including John Behan RHA, Margo Banks, Leah Beggs, Comhghall Casey, Tom Climent, Clifford Collie, Eamon Colman, Julie Cusack, Orla de Brí, Ana Duncan, Margaret Egan, Bridget Flinn, Carol Hodder, Stephanie Hess, Bernadette Madden, Maggie Morrisson, Eilis O’Connell RHA, Helen O’Connell, Helen O’Sullivan-Tyrrell, Michael Quane RHA, Bob Quinn, John Short, Corban Walker, Michael Wann, and more. solomonfineart.ie
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios
‘Faigh Amach’ is an initiative by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in partnership with Culture Ireland and Southwark Park Galleries, London, to support an artist in presenting their first solo exhibition outside Ireland. Roughly translating as ‘discover’, ‘Faigh Amach’ takes place as a group exhibition at TBG+S in late summer, bringing together three artists selected through an open-call process: Ella Bertilsson, Kathy Tynan, and Emily Waszak. The exhibition continues until 21 September.
templebargallery.com
LexIcon
‘Returning / Heritage’, was an exhibition of new artworks by Maeve McCarthy. The exhibition opened at the Municipal Gallery, dlr LexIcon in Dún Laoghaire on 6 July and ran until 3 September. The exhibition featured new paintings, charcoal drawings, objects and a film. Through her work, McCarthy explores her mother’s family story, from their roots in County Down to her grandparents’ move from Kilmainham to Sandycove in the 1930s. ‘Returning / Heritage’ is the result of McCarthy being awarded a dlr Visual Art Commission.
dlrcoco.ie
Taylor Galleries
Garrett Cormican’s latest exhibition, ‘Trading Places’, explored cities, cultures, time, and identity. His paintings of Istanbul, a city where past and present collide, capture the pulse of its architecture, markets, and bustling trade routes. Vibrant still-life works, echoing both modernist and classical styles, celebrate the vitality of food, movement, and cultural exchange. Cormican, a self-taught painter, curator, and author, has exhibited widely across Ireland and Northern Ireland. ‘Trading Places’ was on display from 1 to 23 August.
taylorgalleries.ie
TØN Gallery
‘Radical Acts’ presented the work of five Brooklyn-based painters, exhibiting together in Dublin for the first time: Jared Deery, Judi Keeshan, Paz Mallea, Rachel Ostrow and Til Will. Each artist creates their work in moments of stillness amidst the intensity of New York, transforming quiet reflection into bold expression on canvas. Their practices signal a radical gesture of presence and creativity, emerging from the city’s industrial corners yet resonating far beyond, offering viewers powerful glimpses into contemporary painting. On display from 7 to 31 August.
tondublin.com
Belfast
ArtisAnn Gallery
‘Representing Nature’ by Colin Watson RUA was on display from 2 July to 30 August. Alongside studies towards fully realised paintings, this exhibition also presented standalone, spontaneous, intuitive works that directly respond to observed natural phenomena. This selection of artworks represented a cross section of the artist’s working methods beyond the finished paintings. Watson lives and works in Belfast, and has held seven solo exhibitions in London, as well as in Dublin, Northern Ireland, and Morocco.
artisann.org
Belfast Exposed
‘Frits de Ridder: Staring at the Sun’ marks the first exhibition by the Dutch photographer in over 30 years. ‘Staring at the Sun’ presents an unflinching portrait of life, illness, and resistance during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This landmark exhibition, realised with the full support of de Ridder’s family and unprecedented access to his archive, marks the first public presentation of his photographic estate since his passing in 1994. The exhibition continues at Belfast Exposed until 20 September.
belfastexposed.org
Golden Thread Gallery
‘Beyond the Gaze – Shared Perspectives’, by Sophie Calle, was presented from 21 June to 27 August at Golden Thread Gallery. The exhibition brought the work of Calle, one of the most celebrated and influential conceptual artists in the world, to audiences in Northern Ireland for the first time. ‘Beyond the Gaze – Shared Perspectives’ presented video works (Voir la Mer, 2011) and photographic pieces (L’Hôtel, 1981–1983). The work presented in the exhibition was loaned from the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and supported by Galerie Perrotin. goldenthreadgallery.co.uk
Atypical Gallery
University of Atypical partnered with Dublin-based Connections Arts Centre (CAC) to bring their group exhibition to Northern Ireland. Connections Arts Centre is a not-for-profit social enterprise that supports neurodivergent adults, including adults with learning disabilities, in Ireland. CAC exists to enhance inclusivity and empowerment by tackling inequalities faced by disabled people, by providing accessible and innovative training, arts, and community education programmes. On display from 7 to 27 August.
universityofatypical.org
Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich
Rónán Ó Raghallaigh is an artist from Kildare working with painting, writing and performance. His practice engages with pre-Christian Ireland as a means for contemporary postcolonial action. Folklore, history and archaeology rooted in the Irish landscape form a foundation for research. His exhibition ‘Turais Taibhsí’ is the result of a personal pilgrimage to a sacred place in the Irish landscape. He researched the folklore imbued in these places, their logainmneacha (Irish place names) and archaeology. On display from 7 August to 11 September. culturlann.ie
Shankill Road Library
‘All in Colour’ was an exhibition of new paintings by Louise French at Shankill Road Library. It was the eleventh of Flax Art Studios’ annual exhibitions in partnership with the library – an opportunity for an artist to present their work in a community setting. ‘All in Colour’ presented a new series of paintings made on surfaces with pre-existing imagery. Through experimentation with materials and processes, the paintings explore colour and form. On display from 14 July to 31 August.
flaxartstudios.org
[Left]: Hannah Perry, Rage Fluids, 2018, metal sound sculpture, 140 x 780 cm; photograph courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery. [Middle]: Mairead O’hEocha, December Cloud 2023, oil on board; image courtesy of the artist and The Model. [Right]: Samir Mahmood, ‘Symplegmatic Portals’, installation view, Sirius Art Centre, July 2025; photograph courtesy of the artist and Sirius Art Centre.
Solomon Fine Art
Regional & International
Alley Theatre
‘Strange Enlightenments – Responses to the work of Brian O’Nolan’ is a group exhibition at the Alley Theatre in Strabane.
Curated by Dr Marianne O’Kane Boal, the show features painting, drawing, sculpture and photography, selected in response to a quote from The Third Policeman. It points to each artists’ journey in interpreting the writings of Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien, the experience of creating their responses, and the aesthetic outputs that provide strange enlightenments for the viewer. On display from 23 June to 30 September. alley-theatre.com
Galway Arts Centre
‘Fissure’ features the work of eight Master of Arts in Creative Practice students from the School of Design and Creative Arts (SDCA), Atlantic Technological University (ATU), Galway. Curated by Soňa Šmédková, the featured artists are: Dina AbuSehmoud, Mohamed Alkurdi, Carine Berger, Rocío Romero Grau, Kate Hodmon, Laurence Hynes, Cheryl Kelly Murphy & Evan Murray. The title of this exhibition draws on notions of gaps, marks, pauses, boundaries, and margins. The exhibition is on display from 8 to 23 September. galwayartscentre.ie
Leitrim
Sculpture Centre
‘Matters of Process’ is a new series of exhibitions that explores the work of artists who completed a Technical Development Research Residency (TDR) last year at Leitrim Sculpture Centre. During their research phase, the artists (Niamh Fahy, Lucy Mulholland, Blaine O’Donnell, Kate Oram, and Sonya Swarte) conducted experiments with diverse materials and objects. ‘Matters of Process’ highlights these processes and showcases how they influenced the generation of new work and ideas. On display from 8 August to 6 September. leitrimsculpturecentre.ie
Backwater Artists Group
‘A Deeper Well’ by Róisín O’Sullivan was on display from 3 July to 1 August. The exhibition consisted of new and existing work spanning painting and wood carving, exploring the emotional and spiritual dimensions of the natural world and our place within it. Inspired by her surroundings, Róisín uses abstraction to communicate the indescribable qualities of being in the natural environment, referring to experience and memory, and an innate elemental connection.
backwaterartists.ie
GOMA Waterford
‘To be spat back out’, by Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Jennifer Mehigan and Caoimhín Gaffney, ran from 26 July to 23 August at GOMA Waterford. The exhibition revelled in waste and excess, examining the expressions of excessive emotions as a queer strategy of resistance. Through storytelling, images and texts, reality bends to a breaking point; mirroring how trauma distorts, remakes and retells lived experience in its own image. The exhibition employed non-linear storytelling, poetry, surreality, virtual reality, and daydreaming. gomawaterford.ie
Sirius Arts Centre
‘Symplegmatic Portals’ by Samir Mahmood featured newly created works, including a series of large-scale scrolls, alongside an extensive selection of works made between 2017 and 2024. These works explore what the artist calls ‘queerscapes’ – transcendental spaces of liberation where bodies, on their own or in dialogue with nature, are interacting, mutating, coalescing. The term ‘symplegma’ carries multiple meanings related to sexuality and connectedness. The exhibition continues at Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh until 13 September. siriusartscentre.ie
Custom House Studios + Gallery
‘Caught in Blue’, a solo exhibition by Sarah Wren Wilson, was on display from 24 July to 17 August. This exhibition invited the viewer into a liminal space – a deep blue space within another space. Blue, with its associations of depth, vastness, and the unknown, creates an atmosphere of openness and quiet immersion. By entering, the viewer becomes more than a passive observer; they become part of the artwork. This immersive encounter opens a dialogue between the inner and outer worlds; between what is seen and what is felt. customhousestudios.ie
Hamilton Gallery
‘Seeing is Believing’ by Charles Harper RHA ran from 2 to 23 August at the Hamilton Gallery in Sligo. For Harper, the act of painting is what matters, as he sees the actual process as one of exploration and discovery, stating that: “The process, the making excites me more than any end product.” He uses recognisable images to convey his ideas, and his work always illustrates a structure and organisation. Harper works in series, and his preoccupations have focused on the human figure, with a brief expansion into landscape paintings. hamiltongallery.ie
The Model
Curated by Michael Hill, ‘Extra Alphabets’ is the largest exhibition of Mairead O’hEocha’s work to date. New large-scale paintings depict tabletop arrangements, birds invading a garden lunch, an octopus in a trophy room, and a blizzard observed from indoors. Also included are paintings of animals behind glass in museums, thereby illuminating art-historical ideas of containment, timelessness, and display. In addition, painted interventions charge the gallery walls. The exhibition continues until 20 September.
themodel.ie
Esker Arts
‘As One Leans Into Another’, by Naomi Draper, was presented at Esker Arts in Tullamore from 5 July to 30 August. Draper’s work references a diverse range of research sources centring around botany and botanical activity throughout history. Her practice investigates processes of collecting, preserving, and archiving natural particles, fragments and found objects, harvested from our landscape. The artist is interested in the role of production processes and making in the negotiation of relationships between humans and other matter.
eskerarts.ie
Highlanes Gallery
‘Dysphoric Euphoria’, by Peter Bradley and Stephen Doyle, was on display from 28 June to 10 August at the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda. The exhibition presented the polarising extremes of queer existence, with Bradley and Doyle explored the joys and the hardships of queer experiences through painting. The exhibition also tackled themes of societal exclusion, religious power, and identity in a contemporary Irish society. Accompanying the paintings within the show were texts by El Reid-Buckley, FELISPEAKS, and William Keohane. highlanes.ie
Uillinn
‘Grá’ is an exhibition drawn from Crawford Art Gallery Collection, selected by the Salt & Pepper group (West Cork’s elder LGBTQI+ arts collective) with artist Toma McCullim. Accompanying this curated selection are responses to individual artworks in the exhibition made by artists from the Collective. Featured works from the collection include Victoria Russell’s Portrait of Fiona Shaw (2002), The Red Rose (1923) by John Lavery, and Patrick Hennessy’s Self Portrait and Cat (1978). The exhibition continues until 20 September. westcorkartscentre.com
[Left]: Stephen Doyle, Anathema 2025, oil on canvas, installation view, Highlanes Gallery, July 2025; photograph courtesy of the artist and Highlanes Gallery. [Middle]: Edward O’Kane, Macasamhail (The Double), 2019, acrylic on canvas; image courtesy of the artist and Alley Theatre Strabane. [Right]: Naomi Draper, ‘As One Leans Into Another’, installation view, Esker Arts centre, July 2025; photograph courtesy of the artist and Esker Arts centre.
Plein Air Drift Days
CORNELIUS BROWNE CHRONICLES HIS USE OF DRIFTWOOD AS SUPPORTS FOR HIS PLEIN AIR PAINTINGS.
AFTER STORM ÉOWYN, our local beach lay strewn with sea-worn treasure. Before those tempestuous hours, we had fallen into the habit of beachcombing. In the wake of her brain haemorrhage, collecting littoral odds and ends became part of my wife’s rehabilitation. Slow walks along the sands in the shadow of mortality, one hand gripping her walking stick, the other hand clutching mine, gradually improved Paula’s balance. In winter light, unable to turn her head sideways, she developed an eye for mermaid’s tears – tiny pieces of sea glass, winking at the low sun.
Trodden underfoot, to healthy walkers, these scatterings of colour seem invisible. I’d bend and raise each find towards Paula’s gaze. Perhaps a century in the Atlantic for bottles or ink wells or whatnot to metamorphose into frosted jewels of turquoise, green, white, brown, or array of blues. Unbeknown to Paula, my heart panged every time a teardrop resembled the shade of her eyes.
Rougher gifts were torn from the waves by Éowyn. Little did we know, as we devoted short gloomy days to gathering driftwood, that my painting was about to undergo a transformation. Our lives have played out far from the world of art galleries and museums, and batches of years without seeing a single exhibition are common. The beauty of the wood we found, half wedged into sand or partly hidden among rocks, had us all but bowing to the sea. Astonishing show! Breathtaking artist! Saltwater, time and violent forces had sculpted segments of old ships or broken piers into pieces of startling expressive power. Paula floated the idea of an artistic collaboration, between me and the ocean. As electricity was painstakingly restored across the country, the prospect grew from a glimmer on the horizon.
This light had climbed to the zenith by the time our first mini heatwave arrived. Having checked that the driftwood was uninhabited (shipworms live in networks of burrows), drying out the wood on hillslopes familiarised my hands with each piece, performing turns as the hot sun crawled
overhead. At the priming stage, Paula and I decided not to coat to the edges, leaving a rough border of surface exposed. Rusty nails were left protruding; holes and gashes remained unfilled. The past bestirred, much as Éowyn had stirred up the sea to drag hidden objects from the ocean floor.
All year, I’ve been reliving pages of a diary kept during 1985, when I painted outdoors almost every day. Materials scarce, my younger self often resorted to using found wood. I’ve been painting in the same places on the same days, recreating lost pictures. These are drift days, pulled ashore by paint from the sea of time. I’m painting on bygone days. The ineptly sawn boards I habitually use are by conventional standards, rough and ready. Yet sometimes the paint yearns for wilder.
Painting on driftwood, the fragile craft of my brushwork launches onto waves of sensuous richness. Calm mornings call for pieces smoothed by the sea and blanched to pale greys. Should the afternoon wind rise, my easel berths gnawed chunks. Into crevices and gouges, I push paint, liberated from the flatness of manners. Enveloped in silvery rain and painting through the thickness of weather, an odd courage reaches me from rough-hewn sections of driftwood. Without decorous framing edges, they chant robustly, having already withstood storms and battering white horses. Peeling layers of ancient boat paint greet my fresh oils. Charred driftwood I leave unprimed, the raw dark meeting my brush on the same beach it was found, as I paint marine nocturnes. To aged scraps that have lived and suffered, I bestow lustrous moons.
Heading out on drift days to paint, I leave behind a house protected by hag stones. They perch on our windowsills to attract good fortune. Old magic. A contemporary enchantment one can light upon by slowing down to make these discoveries. Through each holed stone lies another world.
Moving Image
The Ban, The Voice, And Nothing More
ROISIN AGNEW OUTLINES THE RESEARCH UNDERPINNING HER BAFTA-LONGLISTED FILM, STREAMING FROM NEXT MONTH.
IN HIS TREATISE on the voice, Slovenian theorist Mladen Dolar equates the voice with conscience before casting doubt: “A long tradition of reflections on ethics has taken as its guideline the voice of conscience… And why the voice? Its metaphoricity has uncertain edges. Is the external voice literal and the internal one metaphorical?”1 In 2006, this might have read as more Lacanian pulp, but in hindsight, it seems prescient in anticipating the intensifying assaults on the voice and its external form – speech – we are now witnessing.
In the summer of 2022, I unexpectedly won a pitching competition with a proposal for what ultimately became an unproducible film. The project aimed to examine the Derry Film and Video Workshop (DFVW), a Republican feminist collective, active within the 1980s Workshop Movement. I proposed to explore the transnational solidarities that emerged from Channel 4’s ‘Workshop Declaration’, a radical broadcasting initiative that provided equipment, training, producers, and airtime to communities historically excluded from television. The proposed film would trace how anti-colonial movements of the era found expression on screen and beyond, linking collectives like Sankofa, the Black Audio Film Collective, the DFVW, and figures such as Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, and Pat Murphy, while situating these within political flashpoints like the Brixton Riots and the hunger strikes of 1981. The result would have been a cinematic hagiography of a politically charged period in British and Irish cultural history.
Archival access complications brought the project to a halt. But research led me to materials involving Mairéad Farrell, an IRA volunteer and one of the Gibraltar Three, killed by the British SAS in 1988. Her death prompted Channel 4 to withdraw what would become DFVW’s most recognised work, Mother Ireland (1988), a film directed by Anne Crilly that examined the intersections of nationalism and emerging feminist identities in Ireland. It featured several interviews with Farrell. The withdrawal was due to the Broadcast Ban.
A relatively obscure historical measure, with serious consequences far beyond its remit in Northern Ireland, the Broadcast Ban was so farcical in design that it became an ideal film subject. Introduced by Margaret Thatcher in October 1988 to deprive “terrorists” of “the oxygen of publicity,” the ban used the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the Licensing Bill to prevent the voices of members of proscribed groups “and their supporters” from being broadcast. It was widely understood as targeting Sinn Féin and its then leader Gerry Adams, who had been gaining electoral momentum.
I had been accessing undigitised footage through Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive and approached them
about commissioning a new film, offering both financial support and a treatment. They agreed, and together with producer Sam Howard, I began what became an 18-month process of reviewing 108 hours of archival material to construct The Ban (2024). Some of the more visually compelling sequences came from a film shot in Belfast in the early 1990s by Alison Millar, who was then a student at the National Film & Television School in Beaconsfield, England. We also secured key clips, including a sketch from The Day Today in which Steve Coogan plays a helium-inhaling fictional IRA leader. Northern Ireland Screen generously covered the licensing fees. What emerged most clearly in the research was the British government’s fixation with the voice itself. Politicians referred to “voices in our sitting rooms,” as if the mere sound of republican Irish voices constituted a threat. After initial journalistic opposition was ignored, broadcasters – particularly the BBC – sought creative ways to comply while subtly resisting. Actors were hired to dub censored speakers, but both government officials and BBC executives insisted the dubbing be deliberately poor –out of sync and using mismatched accents – to further diminish credibility. The voice was not simply silenced but twisted for political ends.
The Ban was released in 2024, marking 30 years since the lifting of the Broadcast Ban in September 1994. A year after release, The Ban has had a modest but resonant afterlife, largely due to its relevance in a moment of resurgent censorship. At the time of writing, Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist organisation in the UK, and supporters risk prosecution. Dolar took the title of his book from Plutarch, A Voice and Nothing More, evoking the Greek chorus as a communal and moral force. The Ban reflects on how detaching voice from body was a tactic to discredit a message that nevertheless endured, conveyed through a strange chorus of actors who, in voicing it, became complicit. Today, resistance often requires assuming that same position, bearing the risks of speech as a final act of solidarity.
Roisin Agnew is an Italian-Irish filmmaker and writer based in London, where she is a PhD student at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture and an associate lecturer at London Film School. @roisin_agnew_
The Ban will be available for streaming on The New Yorker website from October.
1 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (MIT Press, 2006).
Cornelius Browne is an artist based in County Donegal.
Driftwood painting by Cornelius Browne; photograph by Paula Corcoran, courtesy of the artist.
IN THE FIRST of a series of interviews with distinguished Irish sculptors, Michael Warren, a maker of dignified and spartan forms, talks about his working disciplines and the self-imposed limits of his practice.
Attention as Fulcrum
JASON OAKLEY’S INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL WARREN WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE SSI NEWSLETTER IN 1996.
Jason Oakley: I’d like you to talk, first of all, about your work in the outdoors, where I think some of your key concerns of rootedness in place and natural forces like gravity, are very apparent. Michael Warren: Yes, I have a great interest in making outdoor works. A characteristic I like is that it’s work for someone – work with an audience in mind. Chances are, someone is inviting the work, be it the mayor, local authority, an architect or a developer. With public money involved there is an obligation on the part of the artist not to be too obscure – to provide entrance points. In addition, there are strict limitations and curtailments which I find very challenging: a given location may dictate horizontal treatment or verticality – the range of appropriate materials will be limited –history of place and function are likely to be considerations. Then there are matters, that depending on one’s temperament, one can find a challenge or hindrance, such as the teamwork, site control and general diplomacy which are part and parcel of any big project. Of course, all of this isn’t worth two hoots if the artist doesn’t instil his or her own creative integrity and personal preoccupations – it’s a multi-levelled process, a dialogue. Too much twentieth-century work is a case of the artists working in a bubble. When so much explanation has to be joined onto artwork, there is something very wrong going on.
J.O: Your piece at the civic offices at Wood Quay is a good example of working to such constraints.
[Left]: Michael Warren, calendar, 1993-95, 244 x 350 x 600cm, fir, lime, beach, oak, sycamore, ash, cedar; [Right]: Michael Warren, Alizes et tortues / Trade Winds and Turtles 1994, Brazilian hardwood on cement, 500 x 1000 x 1000 cm, Lamentin, Guadeloupe, French West Indies; photographs by Michael Warren; courtesy of the SSI/VAI Publishing Archive (1980–2025).
M.W: In that particular instance, I worked in close collaboration with the architect Ronnie Tallon. The verticality and scale of the work was determined by the building. A big consideration was of course the juxtaposition of the sculpture to the strict undercut form of harvested cedar, which was a nice foil to this, while the work’s base, 17 metres of white limestone, was a horizontal that had to be established.
J.O: And there are a number of obvious entry points to the work, such as the shape of the river at that point, a Viking longship...
M.W: If you go to the top floor of the building, where the planning offices are, you can see clearly the echo in the shape of the river, the bridge and the dome of the Four Courts. Much controversy surrounded the site with the Viking excavations: the work had to be a reconciliation of place past and present. As a new and important centre of civic administration, it needed a certain seriousness of intent and dignity. But to mark the full sense of place, it could not be forgotten that historically the Viking longships came right up the Liffey to this point. I took measurements from Scandinavian excavated longboats, the dimensions across the bow are replicated in the width of my sculpture. If you look at the sides of the sculpture, each laminate is uniquely tapered, feathered and fitted like the prow of a longship – tedious work!
J.O: To what degree do you find curtailments stimulating? Is an idea of limit important in your studio practice?
M.W: As I say, I find such public situations a tremendous challenge; I really look upon each new project as an adventure. In fact, I do not find any conflict between my more intimate scaled pieces and the public works. There is a clear common denominator – a common thread throughout. In both cases limit takes the form of a gravitational force. My indoor work could be taken as one continuous meditation on space and gravity. Activity takes place solely towards the bases of the work, with the descending vertical forms suddenly undercut at the last minute: the work has to be read downwards.
J.O: In this respect, I would regard your work as making a fairly significant step in terms of the history of sculpture. Most accounts centre on ideas of the sculpture freeing itself from the plinth, and perhaps gravity, to expand into a wider spatial realm.
M.W: From an art historical angle, I, like many students during the late 60s and early 70s, looked very closely at the discoveries of the Russian Constructivists. I later named my home and studio “Letatlin” after Tatlin’s famous aeroplane, the title combining his name with the Russian verb ‘to fly’. (In retrospect, I would have been better advised to call it Witsend or Taj Micheal!) The whole raison d’etre of Constructivists like Rodchenko and El Lissitzky was to elevate the mass. But we are talking about such brave talents here, such revolutionary understanding and usage of material, that a certain soil aesthetic unintentionally clung on to their spiralling shapes. I consciously combined my enthusiasm for Constructivism with my reading of philosophers such as Simone Weil and systematically set about inverting this thrust, replacing elevation of mass for its contrary. I needed to give anchorage and ‘here – and nowness’ to the work. That sense of ‘nowness’, presence and immediacy are vital issues in my work.
J.O: A lot of sculptors are dealing with this in the very broad sense of uncovering the social and cultural meanings of space; how does your work relate to this?
M.W: There is, I believe, a kind of innocence of perception that has vanished. In Medieval times, ceremonial costumes of heraldry registered like a trumpet call. We on the other hand are saturated with colour, form and sound. These, our very capacity for attention, our sense of place, have all been diminished and trivialised by technology.
J.O: Returning to the question of outdoor work, are natural settings of particular interest?
M.W: Yes, I particularly enjoy natural settings. There is a certain reverence of place which I am very conscious of. I take care not to interfere with trees, rocks or other environmental features. In the 60s space was venerated, whether enclosed or perforated, the attempt was made to make visible the invisible. In the same way, a section of natural landscape can be taken and worked to make that place a little bit more precious, mysterious, if not mystical. Something very good then has been achieved. In our Celtic druidic past, from what little we know, there seems to have been a strong sense and reverence of place. Historically, however, Ireland has suffered from having its chance of putting down roots and ‘rootedness in place’ undercut.
J.O: So, to some extent your work is addressing the post-colonial legacy?
M.W: Well, I don’t know about that – certainly, like it or not, we are all living and working within that framework – we are a young nation still very much trying to define our identity. Until recently there has been a psyche in Ireland of life being elsewhere, be it in Canada, America, England, or indeed in heaven! In Ireland we have become familiar with the anguish of living without putting down roots. I think that until we can really appropriate matter, its presence, and weight, it is idle to talk of spiritual renewal or cultural advance. There simply has been no long tradition of sculpture in Ireland. When I started out, I was part of what was only the second generation of Irish sculpture. There’s little point talking about High Crosses, which after all is the goldsmith’s art transferred to stone. Sculptors like Oisín Kelly and Gerda Frömel really were like ice breakers, and their achievement within the Irish context of sculpture wasn’t a lot short of heroic. I initially apprenticed under Frank Morris who tragically died very young. He had a great influence on me. We had a challenge, in fact, we had a whole psyche that had as yet not been explored in terms of visual art. At a time when a lot of European art was starting to look a little tired, there appeared to be advantage in our historical disadvantage.
I did a work in 1994, Trade Winds and Turtles, the first non-figurative sculpture on Guadeloupe, part of the French West Indies. It’s an island that has experienced horrendous colonialisation and has suffered cultural dislocation and rupture. Also, there is meant to be racial integration, which clearly there isn’t. 6% of the population is white – the others are largely tourists. Anyway, what I did there, working with traditional boat builders – wonderful people – was to take a 5-metre diameter circle shape – a pure form, a complete wholeness – and cut and dislocate it, just as their culture had been broken, but then reassemble the pieces to articulate a new story. The re–arrangement had clear references to things maritime, which made sense to a fishing boat orientated community. The circular base, 10 metres in diameter, partly cantilevers over the quay of a small fisherman’s bay. Then, because it was made from wooden laminates, I secured the structure with pegs of tropical hardwood, which I left protruding from the form. Very interestingly, even the children responded to these pegs (this was totally unplanned on my part) as having something to do with the epoch of slavery. When you get to know these people, they talk about slavery as do say people in County Clare talk about the Famine – as if it just happened yesterday. These pegs seemingly were associated with the locking system of the human yokes slaves were made to wear.
J.O: Could you talk about the significance of your move from constructed work, with obvious bolting and bracing, to your recent Stele works, carved from single pieces of wood?
M.W: Talking of my previous timber constructions, one of the devices evident in say the IMMA work Beneath the bow (1991), that I frequently used, is an elbowing out of plane of the predominant vertical. I have always been interested in parallelism in the arts.
It’s a nice thing, for example, to look at this interruption of the one-line fixation which I have explored in sculpture, in different disciplines.
J.O: Turning to your recent work, the Stele pieces and so on, shown at the Douglas Hyde Gallery last October [‘Simple Measures’, 1995], it might be described as condensing your concerns. The sculptures are rather minimal and free of specific references.
M.W: The reading of references will be governed by the social and cultural background of the people making the perceptions. My current work is not so far removed from – what should I say? – an almost primitive gestural aspect. My earlier sculpture beside these new works looks somewhat fussy. But yes, all in all, accessing these pieces is not easy and that is deliberate. The real subject matter lies between viewer and object – they are contemplative works with contemplation itself being the main issue. Timber as a material: material as matter – these too are important. Side references are severely minimalised if not eliminated, which is not to say this is Minimalist work.
Some critics like to label this work Minimalism. But whilst I have looked long and hard at Minimalism, American Minimalism can be said, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, to assert that “A box is a box is a box is a box.” But for me as a European, a box can never be just that. Paul Klee wrote that forms, however abstract they are, never lose their power of association, a box is a throne, is a chair, is a table...is a tomb...
J.O: So, these pared down forms are open to many symbolic readings and forms of contemplation; is there any particular one you have in mind, when you have been making these works?
M.W: I could describe my Stelae as mandatas of a sort; they are private attention props if you like. Sculpture here is a function of attention. Their making as well as their viewing, to use unfashionable terminology, is a form of prayer. Their contemplation is not dissimilar to the goal of Buddhist ‘one-hand clapping’.
J.O: The Stelae then, are a very precise statement of your concerns that have put boundaries on your practice and defined the significance of its limits?
M.W: Yes, I think so. In an interview with Milan Kundera I once read, he notes, talking about the modern novel, that we live in a society saturated with answers. Art too is looked to for answers, whereas he, Kundera, sees its function lies properly in the domain of questions – not answers – the right questions... I have staked my life’s work on a single belief, namely that when an attention is directed at matter here-and-now, in all its density and intractability and precisely when an attempt is made to express what is always silent, the object is transcended and a reality beyond the immediate is touched.
The fulcrum is attention: gravity has become an upward movement.
This is a streamlined version of an interview between SSI Editor Jason Oakley (1968–2015) and sculptor Michael Warren (1950–2025), first published in the SSI Newsletter, September –October 1996, pp. 17–19. The original full text is now available on The VAN website. visualartistsireland.com
Grenfell
GRACE O’BOYLE GAUGES THE IMPACT OF STEVE MCQUEEN’S FILM, CURRENTLY SHOWING AT THE MAC IN BELFAST.
A SERIES OF self-portraits by Gambian-British photographer, Khadija Saye, was recently presented at the Irish Museum of Modern Art as part of the exhibition, ‘Take a Breath’. The title of the series, Dwelling: In This Space We Breathe, takes on a prophetic poignancy when viewers learn that the works were first shown at the Venice Biennale’s Diaspora Pavilion in May 2017 – just weeks before Saye and her mother, Mary Ajaoi Augustus Mendy, died in the Grenfell Tower fire. The exhibition opened at IMMA on 14 June 2024 in quiet acknowledgment of the seventh anniversary. Saye’s portraits, rendered now as spectral objects, leave the viewer with a deep sense of loss – not only for Grenfell’s 72 victims, but for the art Saye will never make.
In December 2017, six months after the fire, Oscar-winning British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen filmed Grenfell, a 24-minute film, captured from a helicopter. The film was first presented at the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens in April 2023, following private viewings held for survivors and the families of those who died. Without construction hoarding or visual obstruction, Grenfell serves as a record of the building in the direct aftermath of the tragedy. Now showing at the MAC in Belfast, as part of a UK tour coordinated by Tate, Grenfell offers a space for viewers to encounter McQueen’s critical exercise in remembrance.1
A quiet unease hung in the theatre when I attended the MAC in late July. Fellow viewers were subdued, almost solemn, as if gathered at a site of mourning. We shared a space bound by collective silence – one that, in moments, gave way to private introspection and anguish. In these moments, the space became a fertile threshold for intimacy and humanity; although alone, we grappled with the weight of failure and social injustice together.
A glaring blank screen induced a feeling akin to white noise
Steve McQueen, Grenfell 2019; film still courtesy of the artist.
frequency – it purified our sight and the room. The film begins with aerial views of London’s sprawling conurbation. The camera placement produces a simulation-like effect as we hover over the landscape. A moment of birdsong is heard, but there is no narration or soundtrack in this film. As viewers, we occupy the space between land and sky, observing green fields, residential suburbs, and an expanding horizon line. Suddenly, the path re-routes, and London’s skyline appears, enveloped by smog. Buildings are veiled in a gossamer golden light. However, the futuristic cityscape is a deceptive aesthetic; futurism tends to intersect with themes of hope and is often used when reimagining cities towards social progression.
The camera sweeps over London as life is burgeoning below. The urban vernacular is visible: Wembley Stadium, Kensal Green, Willesden, and the Westway motorway. It is a slow passage towards Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, which has been distant and undecipherable up until this point. The camera begins to drop as a loud mechanical noise disorients the senses. The charred remains of the tower become pronounced, visually woven into the everyday fabric of a busy city.
The skeleton of the tower is intact; white panels of hoarding cover the lower floors. Eventually, the entire 24-storey building will be wrapped in panelling that shields it from public view. The gaze is resolute – there are no pauses; this is a single, unedited shot. The cam-
era circles the tower creating a bird’s-eye view. Moving closer, the shot focuses on debris. Failed materials, such as insulation and cladding, have mutated – they appear to have coagulated and foamed. This visual is grotesque and affecting. According to the Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry, the building products firm, Kingspan, based in County Cavan, was found to have demonstrated a “complete disregard for fire safety” in its marketing of the insulation product Kooltherm K15.
The camera continues its orbit around the tower block, scrutinising each angle in methodical detail. Plastic film is tightly wound around the remainder of the shattered windows. Bags pile on the floor, and forensic investigators in white hazmat suits sift through the wreckage. The scale of disaster is demonstrated by McQueen through his quiet, exhaustive exploration of the site – up, down, around and through. He enlists the viewer to investigate the scene. One thought pervades: “How could this happen?”
As a filmmaker, McQueen approaches his subjects with integrity and assertiveness. He rejects the indulgent allure of spectacle and instead makes space for us to quietly witness. His objective is clear in Grenfell – he lays bare institutional failure and corruption by making visible the material and emotional devastation caused by negligence and systemic dysfunction. The film is a call to action and a defiant act, in not allowing this preventable tragedy to fade from the foreground of public
memory.
In his accompanying essay, ‘Never Again Grenfell’, Paul Gilroy, author and professor at University College London, suggests that “there is much to gain in confronting the meanings of the damaged structure and making the shock of our painful contact with it instructive”.2 The Public Inquiry, led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, found in 2024 that the fire was the result of decades of failure across government, the construction industry, architects, and regulators. The inquiry concluded that all 72 deaths were preventable.
Outside the screening, there is a table of small booklets featuring Gilroy’s essay. Flicking through the publication, Khadija Saye’s name appears in a memorial list for those who lost their lives – she is second last from the bottom. The encounter induces a similar feeling of loss to that of witnessing her portraits at IMMA. It engulfs the moment – a thread of grief and remembrance, spanning from then until now. Grenfell screens at the MAC in Belfast until 21 September (themaclive. com).
Grace O’Boyle is a curator, writer, and Collection Officer at the Arts Council of Ireland.
1 Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, ‘Steve McQueen’s ‘Grenfell’ Is a Critical Exercise in Remembrance’, Frieze, 20 April 2023.
2 Paul Gilroy, ‘Never Again Grenfell’, 24 April 2023.
Khadija Saye, in this space we breathe 2017-18, silkscreen print on Somerset Satin White 300gsm paper, 61.3 x 50.2 cm, Edition of 50, © The Estate of Khadija Saye, installation view, ‘Take a Breath’, IMMA, February 2024; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of IMMA, the Estate of Khadija Saye and Nicola Green.
Maelstrom
Aengus Woods: Tell me about your formative years as an artist. Maud Cotter: I went to the Crawford College of Art. John O’Leary taught drawing and was foundational in setting me on the right track. He told me never to take any notice about what anybody thinks of my work. He also said that a drawing itself isn’t of value – it’s what it does in your mind. So, I realised that art was about perceptual capacity and inquiry. I began very quickly to move towards things that were of value to me, and I managed to persuade John Burke to let me into his sculpture department. Around then, I went to America, and I was confronted by Rothko and Roberto Matta. I was very drawn to line, but line having a quality in space.
AW: So, a transition from drawing to sculpture but still a relationship between the two?
MC: Absolutely. I remember I was invited by the staff to be part of an exhibition with them, which was hugely affirming for me. But not long after that, John Burke came into the studio and we had an extreme conversation. He said you can either work with me in the way I am – which was very Caro-esque with plates of steel and an industrial feel – or you can resist me. I realised then that I was interested in this state of resistance. In fact, he was acknowledging that I would be in resistance, which I think was very generous of him.
AW: You also encountered Joseph Beuys around then?
MC: In 1974, I came back from the States and Beuys visited the college. And I had been doing these particular line drawings with a whole system of weights, growth lines and symbols – geologically layered drawings with man as a kind of vertical thing. But I wasn’t sure how one activated the other or how anything worked; it was
AENGUS WOODS INTERVIEWS MAUD COTTER ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF HER SCULPTURE PRACTICE
[Left]: Maud Cotter, afternoon (four), 2023–24, mixed media; image courtesy of the artist and Highlanes Gallery. [Right]: Maud Cotter, afternoon (nine), 2023–24, mixed media; image courtesy of the artist and Highlanes Gallery.
an evolving system of thinking.
Then Beuys came to the Crawford and gave this most incredibly dynamic lecture. He did a drawing of a head and put a line right through the top of the skull. That was it for me; it symbolically created that social space, but also a kind of a level of connection. I continually revisited that drawing by Beuys over a period of a week. As he was so influential, I had to avoid what I used to call the ‘Beuysian Pit’! Beuys’s exhibition, ‘The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland’ at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin (25 September – 27 October 1974), was so integral to his conceptual development. So, you could imagine, I was in heaven… it was amazing!
After college, I felt I had to mature, so I stayed in Ireland. I became involved in glass because of its power to mediate energy beyond itself, which keyed in with my desire for materials to do the same. But I eventually went to London in 1991. Location was a big problem; how to locate oneself culturally within the context of the UK was a heavy influence. I had to find that subjective distance between America, the UK, Ireland, and Europe, and just find my way.
AW: So not just between two competing monolingual frameworks, but within multiple scenarios and the concerns that come with that?
MC: The 70s were such an incredibly intense feminist environment, within which every woman worth her place in the world had to become an activist. I couldn’t do it, because my work addressed humanity and not particularly feminist issues. But exposed to the urbanity and complexity of London, I began to make works like Outer Veil, Inner Shroud (1996) for the Economist Plaza in London. which was a kind of mourning for the self that was dying and the emergence of a new self, and In Absence (1998), my molecular wall I made for Rubicon Gallery, facing the consequence of the body in the city.
Then I began to work with cardboard and so forth. I felt like I was finding my subject in terms of taking on larger scale abstractions and bringing more psychological moments into focus; more intangible moments around being and matter, which, if you think back, were really the context of my early drawings. I then did a lot of work that was somehow in thematic series, akin to [T.S. Eliot’s] Four Quartets. I began to work with this feeling of somehow meaning being drained. Things of No Fixed Meaning (2000) was a piece I made when in residence at IMMA. It explored the idea that meaning is a volatile thing within objects and can bleed away.
AW: A lot of public art is based on a sense of apparent timelessness. You get a commission to make something that is supposed to last a long period of time; however, you use materials that change and deteriorate and have a different temporality to that kind of permanence. MC: Yes, but they also have porousness. I understand objects as having almost an exhalation and inhalation, an oscillation of energy. They project the range of associations in our mind and then they pull back in. I began working with found materials, spending a long time with them until the material almost becomes undressed, shifts, and finds commonality in other things. In a way, this kind of anticipated the New Materialism. I was very interested in the way Agnes Martin made her pieces – she didn’t use a long ruler to get an absolute line, because within the over-described absolute is death. She found her line by hand. So, while they were still within a geometry, they had all these minute inflections and when you stood back, that’s what became the piece. It’s the tissue of thinking. It’s also a lack of possession, allowing things to grieve and be, creating territory into which other people can enter. I don’t bring my pieces to their finish. I did with one piece but it died in front of me, so I brought it back to an earlier stage. Now I never bring things to an ultimate end.
AW: You must have strategies to move against that sense of completion if you see it approaching?
MC: I do. I avoid it. My aluminium piece, all things seem to touch so they are (2025) is a case in point. I was
very fortunate to have Amanda Hunt working with me. We both learned aluminium welding together. For me, that piece is just a bare skin of oxidization; the inside of it is like liquid, so it becomes a kind of neural pathway. It is very much about consciousness, in a way. If you sand and polish aluminium it instantly begins to turn away from the world, since it acquires oxidization almost immediately. It’s a beautiful and very mysterious metal.
AW: Can you discuss your forthcoming show at Highlanes Gallery?
MC: I was very grateful to get the invitation from Highlanes because I knew I could put the spiral piece, maelstrom (2024), in the downstairs space. And the aluminium piece was ready to be made. Sometimes things are just ready to be made. You could intellectualise forever about something, but until it’s ready to be made, you can forget it. Everything just kind of fell into place. There’s also the piece, what was never ours to keep (2022), commissioned by MOCA in Jacksonville, Florida, on the occasion of my first museum show in America. It focuses on ideas of possession and the degree to which corporate interests now possess information.
AW: Tell me about the marbled papers.
MC: Yes, the Suminagashi pieces. The thing about the Suminagashi technique is that it involves compressed soot, floating on water! So, it has that elemental, ancient quality. You dip one brush in the ink and then dip another brush in with a little soap in the water and one repels the other and it creates this kind of duality. It is fascinating in its proprietary power. Jennifer O’Sullivan, print technician at Crawford for years, taught me this and I worked with it over several weeks, just slowly pulling the papers off and drying them. You could never, ever get one to be like the other.
AW: Language is a big part of your work. Not only concerns with meaning but the texture of words themselves and pieces you have done with Coracle Press. MC: The thing is that words are resonances for me, and they take possession of sound and space. I came across the phrase recently, “the breath turned between words,” which is actually very core to the tenacity or the gelling system in all my work.
AW: It’s almost as if you’re most interested in the ‘airy’ aspects of language – the actual speaking of it, the
mutation of it, and by extension in your sculptures, that sense of the visible aspect of the air, the animation of it.
MC: But that’s the embodiment! That’s the part that we’re all going to lose, you know, through this AI idea we are somehow meeting. We’re already meeting it in our mobile phones, where we find out things we don’t know – but then where’s the embodiment to come from? I am wary of AI because it doesn’t carry the complexity, the incredible nuances and differences, and the sheer intelligence and understanding that we are capable of bringing to everything.
AW: It's almost like AI is designed to hide the complexity; that is its very function and virtue.
MC: Well, because it’s an instrument of commodification. I feel everything I come upon has its rootedness in my psyche. AI lacks one major thing for me, and that is this idea of embodiment.
AW: I remember a few years ago, we were getting a little anxious about social media and the preferred ways of engaging with art. I presume that you still want people to come and physically experience your work?
MC: Duchamp did a series of afternoon conversations, and he said an interesting thing: that the Mona Lisa would fade, would dry out, by virtue of being seen too much. It’s a controversial thing to say but an interesting idea because of course, the shifting consciousness and understanding of an artwork will leave it dry or activate it – it’s not a stable thing. So, yes, I like people to see my work. But I quite like the challenge of coming up with an image accompanied by piece of text, that there’s somehow an interactive thing going on. It resonates at a certain frequency, and by virtue of that, has its own little oscillation, that somehow it can enter that world combatively and still generate its own associative connections.
Aengus Woods is a writer and critic based in County Louth.
@aengus_woods
Maud Cotter is an artist based in Cork City. maudcotter.com
Cotter’s solo exhibition, ‘Maelstrom,’ continues at Highlanes Gallery until 1 November. highlanes.ie
Maud Cotter, maelstrom, 2023 – 2024, 7.5 mm birch ply, 340 x 340 x 724 cm, in-process at the National Sculpture Factory; image courtesy of the artist and Highlanes Gallery.
Leaking Light
JOHN GAYER INTERVIEWS CLÍODHNA TIMONEY DURING HER HIAP RESIDENCY IN HELSINKI.
John Gayer: Examining artists’ paths fascinates me, since it can divulge previously unknown links between early and recent works. Your HIAP studio on the island of Suomenlinna includes things that are pictorial, textural, segregated into groups and/ or layered. What’s the background?
Clíodhna Timoney: While doing this work, I recalled the portfolio course I did when I was 17. And though our work develops over time, the crux of things endures.
JG: We can’t escape ourselves, can we?
CT: No, we can’t. But to answer your question, whilst studying for my MFA in London, I was reflecting on the rhythms that places have. The rhythm of County Donegal, for instance, has a certain specificity. When I asked people about this, they said it relates to the sea or the hills, which got me thinking about the human and nonhuman, and our relationships with the site. Going back further, my works have always furnished insights into rhythm, movement and resonance. But when the pandemic happened, I returned to Donegal, realising my works would engage with these ideas in relation to that space’s materiality. So, for my MFA graduate show, I created works out of the metal, car parts, lights and other things left in the garage and sheds at home. One work that stood in a field like a spectre or figure, I photographed at dusk. The timing was important, as I view dusk as a point of transition which can ignite behavioural changes. I titled it Keep ‘er Lit (2021).
JG: Did you say “Keep her lit”?
CT: Yes, it’s a local term in relation to car culture. Another work, also comprised of remnants, intimated it could be drawing energy out of the ground. But after laying
it in a hollow in the ground when it was dark, it became more of a burial and alluded to death and life. Its title is Clean Wired (2020), which is just another…
JG: …Car related term?
CT: Yes, or a colloquialism that describes a sensation of visceral intoxication. Then, in another work, titled P.E.T.R.O.L (2020), I staged the contents of a shed. Its theatrical lighting references dramaturgy and is a meditation on how we perform in spaces, continuing my approach of making proplike sculptures.
JG: Would Pebbledash (2019) be an example?
CT: Yes, the sculptural work, Pebbledash, refers to a wall that fascinated me as a child. The added sound piece addresses the material’s strangeness.
JG: Hearing it impressed me. It accentuates the surface’s pointiness.
CT: I used the TB-303 synthesiser – a seminal sound in acid house music and rave culture – to create it. The sound of this synthesiser interested me as an undergraduate student, and its relation to the idea of ‘becoming’. For my degree show, titled ‘TB303’, I made other prop-like works. Each work in this series was an awkward, in-between thing – like Pebbledash. While I work predominantly in sculpture, for my three-month residency in Helsinki, I’ve focused more on photographic processes and the use of light. And though I’ve used these mediums for years, they still seem new and unfamiliar to me.
JG: The dynamic play of light and darkness in Clean Wired (2020) surprised me. Has
anyone noted that it’s Caravaggesque?
CT: No one has, but I did think that myself. It has this legacy of drama. There is artifice in what I do, and staging interests me greatly. The sites that attract me – such as backroads and crossroads – can be viewed as stages. The performances occurring on that stage can be intimate or violent as well. I reflect on this in the video work, When Crossroads are Empty Give Her Plenty (2020). Crossroads were once places where people would gather to dance, before being outlawed by the Public Dance Halls Act of 1935. Growing up on a farm on the edge of a town, edgelands have always intrigued me. While many differentiate urban and rural, to me they are enmeshed. The title for The Stranger (2021) – which refers to these enmeshments and the stage – derives from ecologist Timothy Morton, who talks about the ‘strange stranger’ and the existence of ‘hyperobjects’. Though the sculpture is wearable, the image of me wearing it became the artwork.
JG: Was it used in a performance?
CT: No. Though performance makes sense, I haven’t reached that threshold yet. The Stranger led to Flashes of Light (2022), a body of work that, by referencing both the farm and rave culture, aims to highlight the edges and permeability of enclosures, and bodies, both human and nonhuman. Then, for EVA International in 2023, I researched the Showband Era, which reaches back to the Rainbow Ballroom of Romance, built in County Leitrim in 1934. The installation, In the Wee Hours (2023), isn’t meant to be nostalgic, but a commentary on people’s desire to connect. It focuses more on the journey to the dancehall, as well as a specific type of light. Where the hand dyed textile
pieces, Lines of Flight, represent gradients of light, Spit on me, a series of glistening ceramics, refers to Dickie Rock, a popular singer in the 1960s. Despite the oppressiveness of the times, women would make a particular gesture by shouting: “Spit on me Dickie.”
While in London in 2024, I visited a friend in Greenwich – the home of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) – which became the catalyst for what I’m doing on this residency in Helsinki, and prospective future works. I am considering how to reflect the absurdity of this hyperobject of time. I visited Finland to experience the light, the seasonal/cyclical temporalities, and their relationship to industrialised time, all of which differ from Ireland. I’ve been researching, visiting archives, going for walks, and taking photographs. My favourite images are those affected by the leaking light.
John Gayer is an artist and writer based in Helsinki.
johngayer.weebly.com
Clíodhna Timoney (she/her) is a visual artist working across imagery, sculpture and sound.
cliodhnatimoney.com
The TBG+S/HIAP International Residency Exchange supports Ireland-based visual artists to spend three months at Helsinki International Artist Programme. The exchange also supports Finnish artists to live in Dublin and work from a studio at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. templebargallery.com
Clíodhna Timoney, Flashes of Light 2023, installation view, VISUAL Carlow, September 2022; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and VISUAL Carlow.
How the Heart Sees
ESLAM ABD EL SALAM REFLECTS ON HIS RECENT RESIDENCY AT KUNSTVEREIN AUGHRIM.
DIRECTOR OF KUNSTVEREIN Aughrim, Kate Strain, got in touch with me last year, through the loveliest email, asking if I was interested in a studio visit, so that she could get to know my practice more. I was filled with excitement, as I find it rare these days that curators would genuinely reach out to artists to have a conversation. It was refreshing to say the least.
Kate mentioned that she was thinking of developing an artist residency programme in Aughrim and asked whether I’d be interested in participating in the pilot programme in summer 2025. In my head, I was already there – in Aughrim and all around County Wicklow. I have only been to the Wicklow Mountains once, back in 2019, and was warned by my friend, Michael, that there was going to be an abundance of light and beauty.
Can you see with your heart? This question sums up my time in Aughrim and is the title of a new body of photographic research, which combines with another ongoing photographic project of mine, called ‘Little Did I Know’. It felt natural and easy to imagine these two projects in communication, almost like a phone call, informing each other about the past and the present.
In ‘Can You See With Your Heart?’ you will find me listening to past conversations that never left me, about the different ways
I’m trying to stay in touch with my heart when it comes to seeing. A verse from the Quran became an anchor: “Have they not journeyed through the land, so their hearts may understand, and their ears may listen? Indeed, it is not the eyes that are blind, but it is the hearts within the chests that grow blind.” (22:46)
Personally, that verse has always stuck in my mind, for many reasons, and the more I age, the more it all makes sense. Eyes can be cloudy, judgemental at times, and confused. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the heart won’t fall for the same tropes, but when understood, guarded and gently protected, seeing can become moral and spiritual sustenance for the soul and body. Would you agree that this is our most precious gift? How the heart sees will lead us to moving as a spiritual process. I have been on the move since last December, not by choice. Five homes, four months; the minute your body settles or tries to recognise the way from your bedroom to the kitchen and other surroundings, it’s time for you to leave. The discomfort, both physical and emotional; the quiet uncertainty that clouds over your days. Those movements – steps in all their metaphorical and literal sense –are a blessing. I saw light I wouldn’t have otherwise had the chance to encounter. The geographical distance at play with each house was so much fun; the way my body
ached from carrying bags and holding, releasing breath. The ways in which I felt held by friends. Moving is required, and the flexibility that comes with it is invaluable, mostly to your heart. It’s a long braid and a dialogue that never ends.
At the start of the residency, Kate mentioned that one of the things she connects with most in my photographs is the depiction of the human element as a body of nature. Sitting with her comment was like an opening for me to ask questions about the ‘nature’ that we develop and acquire with time as living, breathing, mobilised bodies.
In one of these photographs, we see an adult called Marc holding a toy horse. Horses, to me, are graceful, sensitive, and utterly divine creatures; every time I encounter one up close or from a distance, my heart just skips a beat. Marc embodies their nature of immense honesty and purity, strength and fragility that you want to hold and shield. When I saw the toy horse in his cottage, and he told me it was a gift from his mother at the age of nine, I smiled at how it all made sense.
To mark the end of my residency, my exhibition, ‘Can You See With Your Heart?’ launched at Kunstverein Aughrim on 27 June, presenting a series of photographs and objects (found, gifted and collected) in a state of mirroring one another. Small
echoes of an inner shift; gentle reminders of things felt but rarely seen. Through the years, certain themes have never left me. They grow with me, and they reform and change as I get older. Home, foreign and familiar to us all, never ceases to reveal dimensions not previously perceived. Family dynamics. The variety of questions asked and raised about synchronicity, time, and fate. Grief and the colours and stages of it. The main pillar of my practice is walking – more specifically and recently, walking as an act of remembrance and how that relates to grief.
Eslam Abd El Salam is an Egyptian visual artist based in Belfast. Through the mediums of analogue photography, polaroid, text, and mixed media, Eslam considers notions of synchronicity, specifically in relation to friendship and serendipitous encounters with others.
@eslamabdelsalam_
Eslam undertook a month-long residency at Kunstverein Aughrim in June as part of Aughrim’s Craic in the Granite Music & Arts Festival 2025, supported by Wicklow County Council Arts Office festival awards, funded through the Arts Council. kunstverein.ie
Eslam Abd El Salam [L-R]: It had to be you 2025; Two peas in a pod 2025; 35mm film photographs © and courtesy of the artist.
The Visual Artists’ News Sheet
Critique
Edition 81: September – October 2025
Noel Hensey, Rejection Rejection, 2021, framed digital print, 46.7 x 70 x 3cm; image © and courtesy of the artist.
‘Soft Surge’
Luan Gallery
27 June – 7 September 2025
WHEN IS AN experience of an exhibition so resonant that its viewing becomes an act of participation? With ‘Soft Surge’ at Luan Gallery in Athlone, Aoife Banks has curated an evocative and affecting group show featuring works by women artists. Interrogating personal and cultural memory through a distinctly feminist lens, this exhibition is not amenable to passive viewing.
Shirani Bolle’s colourful textile sculptures – Thank You Very Much, Treaty, and Baby Blanket – (all 2025) and photographic installation, The Birthday Party (2024), offer explorations of intergenerational grief and inherited memory, infused with a legacy of traumatic experiences. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Bolle has created a deeply personal set of artworks that pay tribute to her mother, and to all women who experience loss and displacement.
The memorialisation of grief and loss is further explored in Emily Waszak’s newly commissioned work, Obaachan I (2025) – a large-scale, handwoven, textile sculpture, made from waste yarn, and suspended from the ceiling. With references to her Japanese heritage, the artist draws on ancestral weaving practices to reclaim the importance of ritual for processing of grief. Like all of the presented works, there is much to engage with, both aesthetically and conceptually.
As one moves through the exhibition, the ideological depth of the artworks becomes increasingly absorbing. It is impossible not to be moved by the personal experiences revealed, and by the reminders of female oppression and exclusion, rendered creatively in a multiplicity of approaches. Textile materials and traditional processes (such as knitting, embroidery, crochet and weaving) are repurposed here as radical forms of expression, which serve to reclaim the ancestral feminine principles of creativity, resilience, and interconnection.
Mythological and classical references infuse the exhibition, nowhere more clearly than in Ursula Burke’s intricate and beautiful textile works, Embroidery Frieze – The Politicians (2015–24), The Politicians (2017–18), and Truncheon (2019). The artist mines classical and art-historical sources to shine a light on contemporary politics, including post-conflict scenarios, while drawing on the cultural memory of violence and war.
With Mother Medals 1–5 (2018) and The Assumption (2018), Rachel Fallon engages in critical correspondence between women’s historical, religious, and contemporary experiences. Using soft materials – including household sponge, embroidery threads, and wool – Fallon has created works that provide powerful commentary on patriarchal oppression, especially as it relates to the denial of women’s bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and freedom.
Poised on a clothes rail and protruding from a wall, Lucy Peters’ series of snaking sculptures, Making it Laaaast (2022), also applies the subversive potential of textiles to reveal circular, exploitative connections –namely, between women working in clothing factories in the Global South, the pollution caused by the textile industry, and the naivety of young consumers. Painstakingly assembled by weaving and knotting strips of discarded garments, these large, soft,
tactile forms appear as conduits, even harbingers, of the catastrophic impacts of fast fashion under late capitalism.
If the exhibition title, ‘Soft Surge’, refers to an inexorable force of feminine energy and resilience, this swell reaches a high point with Dee Mulrooney’s film installation, The State of Her (2025). In this newly commissioned work, the artist takes on the persona of vulva-clad Growler, becoming the embodiment and expression of generations of suppressed female rage. Through music, ritual, spoken word, and incantation, women’s power is celebrated and reclaimed.
The State of Her is a dynamic, totemic monument to the women and children who were incarcerated in mother and baby homes in Ireland. A handcrafted quilt from the Irish NAMES Project (1990) – the inclusion of which adds a powerful, commemorative thread to the exhibition – can also be seen as an enduring memorial, honouring lives lost to the AIDS epidemic, as well as the public act of collective mourning.
In highlighting that memory does not exist in isolation, but is shaped by performativity, as philosopher Judith Butler theorises, the exhibition prompts reflections on what might constitute a monument. With feminist and intersectional frames of reference, Banks’ curatorial approach proposes an alternative paradigm, rooted in active remembering. Thus, ‘Soft Surge’ extends the meaning and experience of a monument, from a static object to a dynamic, subjective, and participatory set of events. For its beautiful evocations of women’s lived experiences and shared rituals, this voluminous exhibition will remain in the mind and the heart for some time to come.
Mary Flanagan is a writer based in County Roscommon.
[Top]: Emily Wazsak, Obaachan I 2025, mixed media, 290cm x 120cm; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and Luan Gallery.
[Bottom]: Rachel Fallon, Mother medals 1-5 2018, wool felt, embroidery threads; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and Luan Gallery.
[Top]: Shirani Bolle [L-R]: The Birthday Party, 2024, photographic series; Thank You Very Much 2025, mixed-media sculpture; Treaty, 2025, mixed-media sculpture; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and Luan Gallery. [Bottom]: ‘Soft Surge’ installation view, Luan Gallery, July 2025; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artists and Luan Gallery.
Rachel Doolin, ‘Heirloom’ Glór, Ennis
14 June – 6 September 2025
MULTISPECIES ETHNOGRAPHERS HAVE used the term ‘contact zones’ to describe spaces where encounters between humans and other species occur.1 Doomsday seed vaults and art exhibitions can both be seen as mediated contact zones, where life or work is removed from its original setting and reframed. This concept is central to ‘Heirloom’, an exhibition by Cork-based artist, Rachel Doolin, currently showing at glór in Ennis. Through sculptural installation, visual media, and digital experimentation, ‘Heirloom’ highlights the artist’s response to the “profundity of seeds.” The collection and preservation of heirloom seeds is a profound form of resistance to extractive capitalism and industrial agriculture, functioning as an act of multi-species solidarity that supports biodiversity and ecosystem regeneration. For this series, Doolin worked with local collaborators such as Irish Seed Savers in County Clare, who preserve over 800 varieties of heritage, open-pollinated vegetables from Ireland, using seeds and crops to protect biodiversity and celebrate cultural heritage. The obligation to preserve species locally and globally is important in the Anthropocene, and in the Digitocene.2 This duty extends beyond the physical preservation of life to safeguarding stories, codes, and cultural lineages, often using digital technologies and accompanied by detailed genetic, ecological, and geographic data. Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) is one safety system designed to preserve and protect against loss of biodiversity. Opened in 2008 within the Arctic Circle, the vault stores backup copies of seeds from 1,700 gene banks worldwide. The vault currently houses 1.3 million seeds in ‘black box conditions’. If any species housed in the seed bank are lost due to disaster, war, or human error, the original gene banks can request replacements
from Svalbard to restart their collections. The SGSV represents a vision of ecological reversibility, offering the possibility of undoing catastrophic damage.3
‘Heirloom’ takes as its conceptual and material departure the cryogenically preserved seed specimens held in Svalbard, drawing attention to the precariousness of genetic biodiversity in the face of climate catastrophe and global conflict. A photographic image of the vault’s exterior, taken during a 2017 Arctic residency, is displayed at the centre of glór’s atrium. The work captures the tension between the vault’s role as a contact zone for ecological preservation and the reality that human access to the vault is minimal. Doolin’s works are often community focused and the solitary image of SGSV is startling in its bleakness.
In contrast, installed at the entrance of the glór atrium, the large-scale sculptural installation, SeedARIUM (2022), originates from a community engagement project inspired by the Sanctuary of Hope in Calasparra, Spain, and is conceptually linked to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The flawlessly fabricated sculpture houses a collection of seeds donated by individuals across Ireland and abroad, including adults and children, gardeners, growers, and conservationists. Here, there is no scientific classification; the seeds are embedded in bio resin and illuminated by the gallery lighting. SeedARIUM functions as a community archive, shaped by the collective acts of gifting, gathering, and preserving seeds in solidarity.
At the opposite end of the atrium, SeedCLOUD (2022) is an interactive audio-visual sculpture featuring eight seed varieties in individual bowls, each linked to a recorded story, accessed via NFC-enabled devices or a gallery-provided tablet. Global biodiversity
projects increasingly use bioinformatics, transforming seeds into digital objects with accompanying genetic, ecological, and geographic data. SeedCLOUD links physical seeds to the digital and offers the stories that contextualise human connections to them. Developed over two years, partly in response to Covid-19 lockdowns, the work invites visitors to experience seeds as vessels of knowledge, connection, and conversation. Recordings are also available on the artist’s website. By placing seeds within an artistic and community context, ‘Heirloom’ invites reflection on the gap between storing seeds as insurance against global catastrophe, and sustaining the local conditions in which life and art can flourish.
Gianna Tomasso is a writer, artist and researcher. Gianna lectures in Limerick School of Art and Design.
1 S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,’ Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 25, No. 4, November 2010, pp. 545–576.
2 The neologism ‘Digitocene’ appears to have been first publicly used in 2016 to 2017 as the title and thematic frame of an MA in Digital Art at the Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia, where it was defined as a conceptual epoch shaped by the pervasive influence of digital technologies on culture, perception, and the environment. The term has since been adopted in art criticism, media theory, and ecological discourse.
3 Leon Wolff, ‘The Past Shall Not Begin: Frozen Seeds, Extended Presents and the Politics of Reversibility,’ Security Dialogue, Vol. 52, No. 1, 11 June 2020, pp. 79–95.
Rachel Doolin, ‘Heirloom’, installation view, glór, Ennis, June 2025; photograph © and courtesy of the artist.
‘Together in Commune’ Rua Red 27 June – 13 September 2025
‘TOGETHER IN COMMUNE’, curated by Marysia Więckiewicz, is the first group exhibition from Rua Red’s Studio Programme, showing work by seven current residents, David Beattie, Ala Buisir, Cecilia Bullo, Pauline Cummins, Lauren Kelly, Maria McKinney, and Fiona Whelan.
The initial curatorial challenge – to bring together a diverse group of pre-selected artists – was approached not through thematic constraint, but by foregrounding core values of the Studio Programme: support and relationship building. While a socially engaged approach underpins much of the work, what emerges is an overarching ethos of care: between the artists and those they work with; between the institution and its residents; and among the artists themselves.
This spirit of care is attentively reflected in the exhibition structure. Recognising that the artists were on different residencies and project timelines, Więckiewicz did not ask the artists to produce new work for the show. Instead, she engaged in dialogue with each, exploring their processes to variously capture works in progress, touchpoints for practice, and experiments that had emerged through sharing space. As a result, the exhibition also reflects on what having a studio space means: as a place for making work, thinking, gathering, and holding one’s practice, but also through cohabitation, as the site of energetic exchanges across disciplines, life experiences, and career stages.
For Pauline Cummins, an established performance and video artist, her time at Rua Red represents her first regular studio in over 40 years. Speaking during the curator’s tour on 19 July, she reflected on the studio crisis, the loss and damage of archives, and how the ethics of care need to extend to the objects we create. Her recent works, Dictators Die and Empires Fall (both 2023), suspended high in the gallery, respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The mark-making behind the yellows and blues belies a deep anger, while the crumbling, plaster-infused paint on tracing paper speaks to geopolitical and personal vulnerability.
Nearby, works by Lauren Kelly and Ala Buisir extend this register. Buisir’s Part of the Fabric (2025) overlays family photographs onto the tricolour, tracing their history of migration and resistance. Her grandmother, a poet who “couldn’t be silenced”, is just one of the figures in her rich and personal inheritance, as explained by the artist during the curator’s tour. This piece is accompanied by other flag-based images, generated with participants in workshops led by the artist, which are part of a broader series of activities embedded within the exhibition’s duration. Buisir shares a studio with Lauren Kelly, allowing for conversations that revealed connections in their work and fostered practical support.
Kelly’s contribution in immediacy looks political but comes from the deeply personal, not forgetting the feminist slogan, “The personal is political”, in particular relating to experiences of gender. A stitched composite banner composed of the flags of Ireland, China, and Taiwan, is planted into the floor, from a performance in which she and her mother walked between a former
Magdalene Laundry site and Chinese and Taiwanese diplomatic missions in Dublin. The work honours Kelly’s late father, of Chinese-Taiwanese descent. In front of it, soil remnants from Kelly’s opening night performance, Against the Oppressor (2025), spell out “REFUGEES ARE WELCOME,” in comment on identity and generational intolerance.
Maria McKinney’s Cattle and Capital (2019) documents a sculptural intervention at a Jersey cattle show, with McKinney leading a cow while adorned with a structure made of a milking yolk and semen straws used in artificial insemination. Her second work, Need Feed Greed (2023), is a malty-smelling, wall-based text piece that utilises cattle feed to evoke the agricultural-industrial complex. Its olfactory element shares the gallery space with the scent of lavender emanating from Rhizoming: Actions of Process by Cecilia Bullo. An installation of rope sprawls across the ceiling, rising from a base of hi-vis material and lavender, guiding the eye up to her frieze, Vestigial Ornaments: A Procession of Endangerment – Lament I (2025), which encircles the gallery in yellow, printed with garlands, cattle skulls, and animal remains.
David Beattie’s practice “explores the material world through experiential, physical engagements with objects and non-objects,” and is increasingly research and community-driven (david-beattie.net). It takes form here as an open structure: trestle tables, stools, books, and notes documenting his collaboration with Clondalkin Global Garden. The project, Along the Camac (2025), exists both off-site in Corkagh Park and within the gallery through a series of workshops as part of the exhibition’s public engagement programme.
A long-standing figure in socially engaged art, Fiona Whelan presents The River (2025), a large-scale map illustrating the methodologies of collaborative practice. Developed in collaboration with artists Dr Ciaran Smyth and Orla Whelan, and further refined through workshops with other practitioners, The River transposes phases of engagement onto an imagined body of water, with “Radical Listening” emerging as its largest pool.
‘Together in Commune’ offers insights into the depth of making and thinking currently happening under Rua Red’s roof. The exhibition also embodies the ethos of the artist’s studio as an active space for creation, dialogue, and care.
Neva Elliott is an artist and writer based in Dublin. nevaelliott.com
[All Images]: ‘Together in Commune’, installation view, Rua Red, July 2025; photographs by Ste Murray, courtesy of the artists and Rua Red.
Critique
‘Foreword’
International Centre for the Image 17 July – 14 September 2025
‘FOREWORD’, THE INAUGURAL exhibition at the new International Centre for the Image, operated by PhotoIreland, comprises an expansive sweep of work by 17 artists who each grapple head-on with the political, material, and visual culture of western capitalist hegemony. While resistance and critique connect their work, their collective interests are less about struggle for change and more about anticipating a cathartic tipping point – the ultimate disintegration brought about by the Anthropocene age.
‘Foreword’ aims to highlight the curatorial priorities of the new centre and the critical role of the still and moving image within arts discourse and broader society. The exhibition presents a broad spectrum of works which are curated to maximum capacity in the relatively small, darkened exhibition space.
Penelope Umbrico’s vast grid of over 1500 sunset photographs creates a pixelated burst of intense colour. Harvested from Flickr, each image places the subject facing the camera with their backs to the sunset, obscuring them into darkened silhouettes. Umbrico has produced multiple iterations of this work, revealing the scale and ritual of this human impulse, perceived as simply another form of consumption.
Nearby is a selection of work from Alan Butler’s ongoing photographic project, 100 Years of Solitude, which documents landscapes from video games, set in the 19th century. Butler reproduces these digital landscapes using wet-plate collodion on black glass – a very early chemical photographic process from the 1850s. On his website, Butler emphasises how the “subject/images relate to the medium’s materiality,” which could be described as a major understatement of their aesthetic appeal. Their size and proportion, deep framing and industrial feel, as well as the enigmatic quality of the image that hovers between painting, print, and photography – sustained even in the larger pixelated images – are extraordinary.
Juxtaposed in ‘Foreword’ are works by Anna Ehrenstein and Anna Safiatou Touré, female artists of Albanian-German and Malian-French heritage respectively. Ehrenstein’s work, Melody for a Harem Girl by the Sea (2023), combines sculpture and collage featuring archival images of Muslim women. The work was made in response to the west’s preoccupation with the hijab, which she views as a smokescreen for ignoring the actual contribution of Muslim women to science and the arts. The collages are framed in expanding foam, giving them a raw and anarchistic beauty, somewhat reminiscent of the work of Frida Kahlo. Meanwhile, Touré ridicules western society’s misappropriation and shallow fetish for African Masks by casting their interiors, resulting in crude disfigurations that would likely be unpalatable to western tastes. The nine crisp, monotone photographs are accompanied by a very sweet videogame that can be played by visitors, involving insects finding existential meaning in a post-apocalyptic desert.
Moving image works by Alex Prager, Ana Zibelnik and Jakob Ganslmeier, and Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehi-
gan occupy just under half of the gallery space. Having these three videos in close proximity, with voice-over, narration and dialogue in addition to soundtracks, creates quite a demanding sensory environment for the viewer. Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan exhibit Uncensored Lilac (2024), a compelling 30-minute computer animated saga, chronicling the journey of a group of goddesses and their companions. Narrated by a hypnotic female voice, emanating from a shimmering floating protagonist, the work is both voluptuous and strangely one-dimensional, while simultaneously fun and absorbing.
Ana Zibelnik and Jakob Ganslmeier’s Bereitschaft (readiness) (2025) examines the phenomenon of male self-discipline and fitness movements and their alarming alignment with fascist and sexist ideologies. It effectively mixes a kinetic montage of video clips with urgently voiced personal narratives. Meanwhile, Alex Prager’s high-quality, Technicolour film, Run (2022), is made in the cinematic style of 60s spy-fantasy dramas, such as The Prisoner and The Man from Uncle. Its material quality and narrative action are incredibly seductive but felt a little out of place here.
In the same area of the gallery, Abigail O’Brien’s sublime, high-resolution photographs capture Aston Martin cars at vulnerable moments in their production, in a clever and funny emasculation of James Bond. Colin Martin’s astonishing yet notquite photorealist paintings withstand the pressure of the lens-based environment, holding their position with integrity, while Eamonn Doyle’s contribution offers an interesting preview of a major project, due to be presented in the gallery in 2026.
Informed by her extensive knowledge of the dye transfer printing process, Jean Curran’s new work, Spring: Begin Again, demonstrates an interesting departure from previous Hollywood-themed photographic series like The Vertigo Project and Godard Bardot – though work from those projects would have worked equally well in this exhibition. Mishka Henner’s Words and Pictures comprises a mock gallery environment with a slideshow of artworks, exploring the conventions of exhibition making. Other artists included are David Farrell, whose personal experience of losing his entire archive during a flood in Italy is illustrated in the presentation of prints from flood damaged negatives, and Dominic Hawgood, who combines innovative CGI photography with hand-fabricated sculpture.
Located outside the exhibition space in the reception, Basil Al-Rawi’s House of Memory (2022-ongoing) comprises a traditional Iraqi floor-based seating area, upholstered in vibrant red with dynamic geometric patterns. In a short video of still images, screened on a small television, a man and woman (perceived as Al-Rawi and his mother) recall the mixture of sadness and joy of crossing the border from Iraq into Jordan by car, following the American invasion in 1991. The power in this work is in its testimony to human endurance, providing a suitable endnote to the show.
Carissa Farrell is a curator based in Dublin.
[All images]:‘Foreword’, installation view, the International Centre for the Image, July 2025; images courtesy of the artists and the International Centre for the Image. [Top]: Ana Zibelnik and Jakob Ganslmeier; [Bottom]: Eamonn Doyle.
[All images]:‘Foreword’, installation view, the International Centre for the Image, July 2025; images courtesy of the artists and the International Centre for the Image. [Top]: Basil Al Rawi; [Bottom]: Alex Prager.
‘Encounters with Failure’
South Tipperary Arts Centre
5 July – 1 August 2025
SO MUCH OF artmaking feels like self-laceration. You’re chasing some half notion –something barely there, but urgent – and it never comes out the way you imagined. The work stumbles, misfires and fails. What I admire most about ‘Encounters with Failure’ at South Tipperary Arts Centre (STAC) is that the exhibition doesn’t try to redeem failure or alchemise it into something transcendent. It lets it stay recognisably human, messy, unresolved, and often funny.
Here, humour bridges the gap between artist and viewer in a way that theory rarely manages. For that alone, the exhibition deserves credit, and it scores bonus points for avoiding the overused (and totally misused) Beckett quote. Helena Tobin’s curatorial eye is perceptive and assured, holding space for both humour and rawness without either one diminishing the other.
Shirani Bolle’s Treaty (2025) stands guard at the entrance, part monstrous scarecrow, part monument, knotted from old rugs, half-made cushion covers, and crocheted bits she once wrote off as failures.
Described as an embodiment of ‘inherited trauma,’ the sculpture’s manic anatomy flaunts its unruly materials. The work honours the failure to perfect or smooth over, and in its tangled physicality, there’s something so easeful in how it bluntly refuses all neatness, all shame.
The wall text, like the work, is refresh-
ingly unvarnished. Bolle calls her father a failed father, and the Fisher Price palette jolts us into childhood nostalgia, confronting us with a reckoning: that we are all the flawed children of flawed humans, entangled in and shaped by each other’s failures.
Noel Hensey’s Rejection Rejection (2021) and Oh, the Irony (RA Summer Exhibition Rejection) (2025) lean into absurdist wit with a weary sigh. Framed like trophies of defeat, these digital prints of Dear John emails capture the sting that all artists know, especially those caught in the churn of open calls – only here, the twist is that Hensey is the one doing the rejecting.
Art about rejection isn’t new, but Hensey’s choice to lay it bare feels honest in a culture that pressures us to flaunt wins or stage vulnerability in ways that can feel self-serving and mawkish. We always need reminding that rejection is constant, mundane, and survivable. By looping the rejection into the work itself, Hensey is both wry and sincere. The pieces make you laugh, wince, then laugh again, because what else can you do?
Seán Farrell’s four small works hover between painting and sculpture, modest in scale, made from salvaged offcuts, and animated by a quiet, formal wit. Pieces like As Tight As the Corner (2024) hold a calm, deliberate presence, not in spite of, but because of their leftover origins. Farrell doesn’t conceal this; he embraces the log-
ic of surplus with confidence and clarity, allowing it to shape the work’s structure and rhythm. His process feels attuned and exacting; a tactile inquiry into how elements might sit together, not to become something else, but to reveal what they already are, through careful, provisional acts of making.
Niamh Hughes’s paintings channel the emotional chaos of art making with humour, style, and melodrama. Drawing on the visual language of vintage pulp horror –saturated colours, tight framing, and a sense that something’s about to go very wrong –she casts the artist as haunted not by ghosts, but by deadlines, doubt, and creeping fears of not being enough. In God Cursed the Blank Page and Little Horror (both 2025), the pressure to keep producing, to stay visible and relevant, becomes theatrical absurdity. But the comedy cuts close to the bone. Hughes doesn’t glamorise the grind or wallow in it. Instead, she holds anxiety up to the light, turning it into something pointed, strange, uncanny, and satisfying.
Clare Scott’s Cloud Machine (If I Ever Get to Heaven) (2025) is a big, sprawling, restless assembly of fragments and nearworks that somehow cohere. It’s one thing to channel feral energy in the studio, but to exhibit that raw, unresolved wildness is something else. The work resists tidy resolution in favour of process, intuition, and risk. Materials clash, structures wobble,
ideas echo. Nothing behaves, and that’s exactly the point. Scott’s work is bold, funny, and deeply considered. What emerges is not chaos but a language entirely her own, full of nerve and conviction.
Beth Fox’s My Bed, Our Tent (2020) is a short video that’s funny, incisive, and quietly devastating. It parodies the strange and creepy ways we fetishise certain artworks while overlooking others that are messier, more elusive, and harder to pin down. So much great art goes unseen, not for lack of brilliance, but because it doesn’t play the game. Set in the drag and bloat of a depressive episode, it features The Great British Bake Off, Tracey Emin’s iconic unmade bed, and something all its own. This video work is available on Fox’s website, and if you can, you absolutely should watch it.
The bulk of contemporary culture can feel like cover versions: premeditated, already riffing on something else, caught in a loop of citation and self-consciousness. ‘Encounters with Failure’ didn’t deny this condition so much as make space for it, allowing influence and imperfection to sit alongside a refreshing sense of presence. The works felt deliberately unresolved, open to process, misstep, and ambiguity, rather than bound to polish and presentation.
Sheenagh Geoghegan is an artist and writer from Tipperary. sheenaghbgeoghegan.com
‘Encounters with Failure’, installation view, South Tipperary Arts Centre, July 2025; photograph by Dara McGrath, courtesy the artists and South Tipperary Arts Centre.
Beirt le Chéile
CATHERINE MARSHALL OUTLINES THE FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION BY BERNADETTE COTTER AND ÁINE RYAN AT GRILSE GALLERY.
IT’S CURIOUS HOW exhibitions come together – sometimes drawing out points of connection between artists, or conversely, highlighting differences that complement each practice. Artists Bernadette Cotter and Áine Ryan had not previously met before they were invited to participate in a forthcoming two-person exhibition at the Grilse Gallery in Killorglin. While they appear to be very different in their artistic intentions, their practices overlap to a considerable degree, so there are good reasons for putting the artists together.
They both came to art a little late – Cotter because she had first trained as a primary school teacher, and Ryan because of health issues. However, this delayed start served only to strengthen their commitment, and they each hit the ground running. Cotter exhibited in two RHA annual exhibitions while still an NCAD undergraduate student in her twenties. Having returned to the family farm following serious illness, Ryan had a new but highly developed consciousness of the place of women in agriculture, and the place of agriculture in the future of the planet.
Sometimes, contrast is an even better reason for juxtaposition. Both artists are from rural backgrounds, but this is where their differences start to emerge. In conversation, Ryan radiates a sense of connection to the land and the earth in a very physical way. On the other hand, although born in Ballingeary in West Cork, Cotter had an urban childhood in Dublin and admits that she found it challenging to live in County Cork after that, and an 11-year period in San Francisco. Her work deals with the existential challenge too, but from a position that is filtered through layers of exposure
to world cultures, especially those of California and Korea, where she has shown many times.
Cotter’s work is not about any particular place, defying the expectation that all artists from the Gaeltacht must constantly reflect this heritage in their work. She works intuitively, often only realising what the work means after it has been completed, whereas Ryan declares herself to be concept-driven and an ecofeminist. Both are absolutely committed to working with their hands, using textiles and discarded objects and traditional methodologies such as stitching, engraving, and glassmaking.
However, where Cotter emphasises human fragility – as observed in performance/installation works such as Edge of Absence (2014), involving shards of broken glass, engraved with poetry by Eavan Boland, Mary Oliver and Adrienne Rich – Ryan, of a generation younger, defiantly spells out her agricultural background in works like Bound (2021), combining a beautifully crafted, beaded glass chain with an old wellington boot and a sod of turf. She said, during our recent conversation, that she thought she knew about equality, because of the way men and women worked together on the farm, until the fieldwork was done and the men relaxed, leaving the women to tackle the domestic chores. Her artworks, ‘Go make the tea’, he said (2023) and She rests (2024) (both shown in the RHA this year) reference this tension, which is reflected in the precarious balance of the teacup on a silver tray.
Ryan works with energy and humour, playing on what farm women have in common with the animals in their care, speculating on childbirth and calving jacks
and looking for fresh source material in the Greek Legend of Zeus and Io – the beautiful maiden he lusted after, who was turned into a cow, in order to hide her from his wife, Hera. Conversely, Cotter, struggling to find her way back to creativity after an artistic block, looks inward, at her own relationships with colour and form, reverting to a deep exploration of blocks and grids in an exploratory manner that has echoes of Paul Klee’s colour charts and the drawings of her heroine, Agnes Martin, whose art practice helped her to survive mental illness and self-induced isolation.
There is a shamanistic element, too, in the work of both Cotter and Ryan: one proactive, ready to challenge the world; the other intuitive, allowing the actions of hand and eye to meld with the materials that will restore her. In doing this, they might use all or some of the wide range of processes and materials that have brought them to public attention, ranging from delicate jewellery in cast glass, to farmyard detritus, or objects discarded from a life of use. I can’t wait to see what the selection process settles upon, and how their distinct bodies of work will interact.
Catherine Marshall is a curator, art writer, and founder member of the Na Cailleacha art collective.
nacailleacha.weebly.com
‘Beirt le Chéile’ will run from 18 October to 23 November at Grilse Gallery in Killorglin, County Kerry. grilse.ie
[Left]: Áine Ryan, Part of the Herd, 2022, digitally manipulated photograph, 30 x 30 cm; [Right]: Bernadette Cotter, Edge of Absence, 2014, performance; images courtesy of the artists and Grilse Gallery.
The Home that Held Us
CLARA MCSWEENEY OUTLINES A RECENT EXHIBITION BY CURRENT RESIDENTS AT FIRE STATION ARTISTS’ STUDIOS.
WHEN IT FIRST opened its doors in 1900, the building on Dublin’s Buckingham Street Lower wasn’t just a fire station; it was also a home. Upstairs, it housed the firemen and their families in married quarters and single rooms. Downstairs, there was an engine room, stables, harness room, office, laundry and a tall hose-drying tower. This was a time when fire engines were pulled by horse and cart, and hoses were made of cloth.
In 1963, following the Dublin tenement collapse, the fire station opened its doors to displaced residents. The site was decommissioned as a working fire station in the early 1980s, and from 1985 to 1989, the Dublin Simon Community made it their base, operating a soup kitchen and a night shelter within its walls.
After the Dublin Simon Community vacated and before construction began on the artists’ studios in the early 1990s, there was a quiet, unrecorded chapter. During this time, the building fell into a state of vacancy and dereliction. This ignored period came back into focus recently during the digitisation of the FSAS Archive, when Helena Gouveia Monteiro, the current Digital Media Manager, came across a collection of photographs. The images show the building at perhaps its lowest point with slate tiles missing, and windows smashed or bricked up.
In 1991, it was agreed that the old fire station building would house residential studios for visual artists. Construction began and, slowly, the building became a home again. Fire Station Artists’ Studios (FSAS) was established in 1993 to support professional visual artists in Dublin’s northeast inner city. It has now been 32 years since Fire Station Artists’ Studios was established, and I hope it continues being a home for many and a home for all.
This year, for one special week in mid-July, the building hosted ‘FSAS Presents: The Home that Held Us’ across its communal spaces. I curated this exhibition, which celebrated the building’s long-held function of providing home and shelter, presenting works by nine of the current resident artists. In the main reception, visitors were greeted with a site-specific installation by Sorcha McNamara. Her work reflected on adjusting to living and working in a shared space, something that speaks to the dual function of the building, not just in the present day, but also in the past.
In the back foyer, Day Magee’s Still Life featured artefacts from past performances: a vessel, a surface, and an eye, each formed from mineral materials such as crystal, sand, and glass. These objects act as memory vessels, each carrying traces of performances, echoing how the building’s architectural features hold memories for those who take
the time to notice.
Peninsula, a large weaving by Emily Waszak, was also presented in the back foyer, constructed of brass, scrap wood, Leitrim Ash, Donegal Marble, and waste yarn from factories in Dublin and Donegal. This work held a soft, comforting presence as it looked through the windows quietly into the courtyard. A tiny weaving by Waszak, titled Pliable Plane 1, also wove its way into a corner of the stairway, quietly waiting to be found.
Excitingly, there were pieces in the stairway, such as a digital collage by Alice Rekab, titled Hawa’s Sleeping Room. This collage incorporated objects from their family home in Sierra Leone, as well as existing sculptural pieces. A large window featured in the collage, and so it was placed beside the outline of a bricked-up window, which preceded the renovations of the 1990s.
Hanging from a banister was Elements from the Venues of Ecstasy III by Samir Mahmood. This large scroll featured an organic flower form, created with ink and pigment on cotton. It brought attention to the stairwell and prompted consideration of this functional space: rarely acknowledged but frequently used.
Entering the back courtyard, a recorded voice drew visitors into the engine room. Evelyn Broderick presented Before Us (2025), an audio work and accompany-
ing script from a conversation with Colm O’Brien, a volunteer from the 1980s when FSAS was a night shelter.
Surrounding a small tree in the courtyard were ceramic sculptures by Kian Benson Bailes, titled Squashcocks (2024). Embedded in the landscape, they emerged as a new, sensational, and erotic species, taking root in FSAS.
Paul Hallahan’s video work, Paper Thin Walls, was displayed in the project space and reflected on a period he spent in Berlin, where he visited the zoo weekly and observed a group of chimpanzees. The piece offered viewers an intimate window into the unspoken politics and social dynamics that unfold within their captive home. In the same space, there was a series of photographs by Mieke Vanmechelen. Taken from her window on Buckingham Street, they captured the faces of passers-by – strangers who slowly became familiar.
Clara McSweeney is a curator and artist from Cork, currently based in Dublin. clara_mcsweeney_art
‘FSAS Presents: The Home that Held Us’ ran from 16 to 22 July. firestation.ie
[Right]: Evelyn Broderick, Before Us 2025, recorded interview, photography and sound; [Left]: Kian Benson Bailes, Squashcocks 2024, glazed stoneware ceramics, dimen¬sions variable; photographs by Maria McSweeney, courtesy of the artists and Fire Station Artists’ Studios.
Out of the Strong
AISLING CLARK REFLECTS ON A RECENT GROUP EXHIBITION COMMEMORATING 30 YEARS OF GAY HEALTH NETWORK.
‘OUT OF THE Strong, Came Forth Sweetness’ took place over a fortnight in May at the Naughton Institute on Pearse Street. The exhibition was staged to commemorate 30 years of the charity Gay Health Network (GHN) and to honour the grief, joy, and resilience of Ireland’s LGBTQ+ community. This survey show saw 28 artists present over 40 artworks across two floors of the building that formerly housed the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin. Works on display spanned performance, painting, photography, film, print, sculpture, architectural, and botanical installations, along with archival materials, all of which attempted to chronicle queer identity over the past three decades in Ireland, and its overlap with the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Artist Brian Teeling began working on the project in early 2024 and I was brought on as curatorial support shortly after. Brian was well placed to lead an exhibition of this type. Actively part of Dublin’s queer scene – from coming of age in the early 2000s up to the present day – he drew on his lived experience and social connections. Conveying a collective cultural memory was central to how we went about curating the exhibition. Materials chosen for display included flyers and posters from queer club nights, cabarets, and gigs, along with personal items, such as a frame belonging to The Diceman, a Dublin street performer who publicly spoke about living with HIV on Irish television during the height of the crisis. Artworks were selected both through invitation and via an open call process, circulated mostly through LGBTQ+ organisations. Multiple invited artists (Alice Rekab, Kian Benson Bailes, and Samir Mahmood) came from Fire Station Artist Studios (FSAS), where Brian was in residence at the time. The material conditions of living in Dublin are at odds with sustaining an artistic practice. Therefore, the importance of subsidised living and working
‘Out of the Strong, Came forth Sweetness,’ installation view, Naughton Institute, Dublin, May 2025; photograph by Evanna Devine, courtesy of the artists and Gay Health Network.
facilities for artists, such as FSAS, cannot be understated in fostering a thriving community of artists, which includes queer artists.
This is not a revelation to anyone reading The Visual Artists’ News Sheet, but there is a great lack of exhibition spaces in Dublin city. The Science Gallery shut its doors during the pandemic and has since sat vacant. The building, known as the Naughton Institute, is now managed by an internal events team at Trinity College, who mostly deal in conferences and corporate hires. Two key factors aligned, allowing us to use this venue for an exhibition: to cover the large rental fee, Gay Health Network received a considerable grant from the Department of Children, Disability and Equality to mark the anniversary of the charity; and I had previously been the Curatorial Fellow at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, on the other side of the Trinity College campus, a position directly funded by the Provost’s office.
During the exhibition’s installation period, we found the Science Gallery’s former tech room fully stocked; cables, nails, and paint cans were gathering dust. Another morning, we came in to find a small office room filled with lobster traps, and the door labelled with a handwritten sign saying: “Property of Zoology Department”. The Naughton Institute was purpose-built for exhibitions – its glass façade grants a large amount of natural light, and its ceiling is kitted out with a hanging system. Over the course of the exhibition, many people asked me what’s next for the space, but I don’t have an answer.
In a recent essay on programming queer exhibitions in Ireland, Seán Kissane, Curator at IMMA, chronicled the changing tides of institutional commitment to queer art, which are subject to the preferences of individual curators and rising political extremism.1 In recent years, several public libraries across Ireland have been targeted in coordinated campaigns of agitation and disruption by right-wing protesters, demanding the removal of LGBTQ+ related reading material.
This year, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and initiatives have reportedly been scaled back or dismantled at tech companies including Google, Meta, Amazon, and Accenture – major players in Ireland’s economy with considerable political sway. In the context of an increasingly hostile political landscape, how do we ensure that queer art can continue to be made and shared with audiences? Bringing together LGBTQ+ artists, working across art forms and generations, on a scale that hasn’t happened in Ireland before, was hugely exciting to be part of – I hope it wasn’t a one-off project.
Aisling Clark is a curator and writer based in Dublin.
@aislingclark
1 Seán Kissane, ‘Queer Programming in Ireland’ as part of ‘Instituting Queer Art in Britain’, in Fiona Anderson et al. (eds), British Art Studies: Queer Art in Britain since the 1980s, Issue 27, July 2025, published by Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale Center for British Art.
[Top]: Christopher Robson, Dublin Pride March 1993, archival photographic print, reproduced from the Irish Queer Archive; photograph by Evanna Devine, courtesy of the artist, National Library of Ireland and Gay Health Network.
[Middle]: Bill Harris, you & us 2025, black tea, sugar, lubricant, water, metal chain, mirror; photograph by Evanna Devine, courtesy of HIV Ireland and Gay Health Network.
[Bottom]: ‘Out of the Strong, Came forth Sweetness,’ installation view, Naughton Institute, Dublin, May 2025; photograph by Evanna Devine, courtesy of the artists and Gay Health Network.
Ceri Richards La Catédrale Engloutie, 1959, oil on canvas, 127 x 127 cm
Bedrock
MIGUEL AMADO REVIEWS THE LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL 2025.
THE SPECTRE OF empire haunts Liverpool. Everywhere across the city, British colonialism’s exploitation of people and lands near and far, and the corresponding wealth extraction for the benefit of the British aristocracy, is summoned. The theme of this year’s Liverpool Biennial, BEDROCK, draws directly from the city’s geology, but a complementary understanding of the concept, anchored in a social perspective, makes the articulation between the city and its history more thoughtful, and helps explicate the intellectual edifice formulated by curator Marie-Anne McQuay. In BEDROCK, the sandstone that spans Liverpool is more than a geological quotation; it is a metaphorical lens by which a wound in today’s society might be reclaimed, even if the fractured relationship between Liverpool and its past is too profound to ever be entirely repaired. Alice Rekab is one of the 30 artists featured in BEDROCK, and their contribution encapsulates the curatorial premise. Like Rekab, around half of them operate from European cities – from Amsterdam to Vienna, Oslo, and Dublin – yet have roots in diaspora, with the majority exploring topics of identity and representation informed by their lived experience. In advancing a selection that pays particular attention to demographics and politically driven content, McQuay points to cultural hybridity as the quintessential characteristic of the twenty-first century, suggesting that contemporary Liverpool, independently of its complex foundational principle, synthetises such attribute. In this regard, BEDROCK aligns with a myriad of recent European biennials, placing a globalist interpretation of art at the core of their reason for existence. Similarly to those other biennials, BEDROCK struggles with Liverpool’s ambiguous historical condition as a centre of power, as well as the mere fact that its curatorial vision necessarily departs from a position of privilege – whether financial, ethnic or other – granted
Nandan Ghiya, Manthan (Hindi, noun, lit. Churning; syn.: Introspection), 2025, installation view, Liverpool Biennial 2025 at Open Eye Gallery; photograph by Mark McNulty, courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Biennial.
DARCH, Heaven in the Ground 2025. Liverpool Biennial 2025 at FACT; photograph by Mark McNulty, courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Biennial.
by its European institutional and ideological apparatus.
At The Bluecoat, Rekab presents an expansive, refined mix of works, both new and from recent years, that epitomise the questions posed in BEDROCK. The display consists of fragmented clay pieces that resemble body parts, African statuettes, miniature replicas of animals associated with wildness laying on found mirrors, and a salvaged cabinet holding archival items, from heirlooms to books. Furthermore, a wallpaper digitally blends old portraits of Rekab’s paternal grandmother and father, architectural details of The Bluecoat and other buildings where Rekab exhibited before, impressions of Rekab’s sculptures shown elsewhere, and fluid lines depicting transatlantic ship routes linking Liverpool, West Africa and the Caribbean, known as the ‘Blundell family’s slaving voyages’. Appropriately, the display is titled Bunchlann/Buncharraig (2019-25), linguistically relating ‘bedrock’ to notions of origin and family.
Rekab’s display speaks to their Irish and Sierra Leonean heritage. It combines the Irish language and elements of the white monoculture in which they grew up, with aspects of a multifaceted Black culture acquired via interactions with their Sierra Leonean progenitors. At stake here are issues of racial memory, generational trauma in marginalised communities, and senses of displacement and belonging, all entangled with inherited and chosen lineage. The same theoretical framework guides another artist showcased at The Bluecoat, Amber Akaunu, whose film, Dear Othermother (2025), takes Black Liverpudlians as a subject in a fitting crossover of fact and self-reflection, typical of the regional stories the artist documents. The work is an emotional chronicle of kinship, pride, and resilience among single mothers from Toxteth, illuminating a matriarchal care network derived from need and solidarity.
Another interesting pairing of artists is that of DARCH (composed of Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel) and Linda Lamignan at FACT. Lamignan’s three-channel video, We Are Touched by the Trees in a Forest of Eyes (2025), is a grandiose description of Liverpool’s commercial ties with the Nigerian state of Delta, predicated on palm oil and petroleum. In a
captivating sequence of scenes, it demonstrates the antagonistic interests of Western corporations and the earth-oriented belief system of the region’s inhabitants. To create their installation, Heaven in the Ground (2025), DARCH collaborated with residents of Sefton, a village in Merseyside, to compile accounts of their worldview – which integrates humanity, nature, and spirituality in equal terms – focusing on death and grief. DARCH render them in audio, accompanied by four interconnected soil mounds, above and within which are animals, fabricated in ceramic.
A rich layering of narratives with the exhibition’s theme appears outdoors and in unconventional locations. Along Barry Street is Kara Chin’s installation Mapping the Wasteland (2025), a group of tiles inserted into the concrete paving stone that poignantly address the impact of overconsumption. At a warehouse in Jordan Street, Imayna Caceres’s installation, Underground Flourishings (2025), comprises countless intricate clay pieces uniting the artist’s Peruvian ancestry with matter and water sourced from the Mersey and Danube Rivers to elegantly consider primeval ways of life.
Also of note is Isabel Nolan’s sculpture Where You Are, What We Are, with Others (2025), set against the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. The work is inspired by interior design plans for the Lutyens Crypt, part of this site, and the demolished St Nicholas Pro-Cathedral. The forms are infused with ecclesiastical sensibility, smartly resonating with the construction: Arched window frames unfold in a concertina motif, whether in colourful and delicate or austere and brutalist lines. They are barely held together, conveying a state of imminent collapse. The work examines the role of religion – including sectarianism and inter-faith encounter – in defining Liverpool’s civic mindset, and expands Nolan’s enduring interest in the intersections of architecture, myth, iconography, and abstraction.
Arguably, BEDROCK’s highlight is at Walker Art Gallery. In dialogue with a collection developed during Liverpool’s economic heyday – and still a symbol of the city’s engagement with art – Antonio José Guzmán and Iva Janković present Concrete Roots/Griots Epic Stories from the Black Atlantic (2025), a potent iteration in
their series of large-scale modular structures that serve as backdrops for textile banners and soundscapes, as well as scenarios for performances. In all works by the duo, the textile banners are dyed in the unique indigo of a workshop in India that employs artisanal methods. This substance, once known as ‘blue gold’, was a highly prized commodity in Europe, and rapidly acquired the status of cash crop across the colonised world, from India to South Carolina, mostly relying on slave labour.
The textile banners bear abstract patterns influenced by DNA sequences that evoke the forced resettlement of enslaved West Africans in the Americas. The music is affiliated with dub, a style that emerged in Jamaica. In conjunction, they express a wider, distinctive Black culture formed through the exchange, and later fusion, of artefacts and knowledge from West Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and England – what has been designated the Black Atlantic. Here, a more contextual output is illustrated by allusions to urban unrest using printed textual graphics – a nod to Liverpool’s so-called race riot in Toxteth in 1981 (which actually involved members of the working class from diverse backgrounds), which is explicitly referenced in the soundtrack.
It is precisely this commitment to the locale that upholds the ideas and materials amalgamated in BEDROCK, so eloquently elucidated in Guzmán and Janković’s work by addressing legacies of dissidence in Liverpool. In addition, because Guzmán and Janković are surrounded by the paintings and sculptures of the Walker Art Gallery – assembled in the context of the institution’s embedment with Liverpool’s mercantile elite of British colonialism – they are able to establish a parallel between the titular Black Atlantic and processes of capital accumulation that provoked, and continue to shape, inequality and segregation, whether dividing the West from the rest of the world or, within the West, the working versus the ruling classes.
Miguel Amado is a curator and critic, and Director of Sirius Arts Centre.
Petros Moris, Ghost (ALONE) I, II, III, IV & V, 2024, Liverpool Biennial 2025 at The Oratory; photograph by Rob Battersby, courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Biennial.
El Reid-Buckley: What can visitors expect from your Guest Programme for the 41st EVA International?
It Takes a Village
EL REID-BUCKLEY INTERVIEWS THE CURATORIAL TEAM FOR THE 41ST EVA INTERNATIONAL, NOW SHOWING IN LIMERICK.
Eszter Szakács: What visitors can expect is a multitude of mostly larger-scale artists’ projects and installations. In terms of thematics, several artworks engage with political struggles, issues and practices related to land and the natural world, colonisation, nationalism, but also personal (counter-)histories, as well as alternative models for economy or community activation.
The majority of the artworks are made for this edition. These include a new film by Naeem Mohaiemen that traces rumours of an unfinished film by Zahir Raihan, who was active from the 1950s in former East Pakistan until his mysterious death in 1972 in newly independent Bangladesh. Raihan is posthumously known for his 1971 anti-war epic, Stop Genocide. The work continues Mohaiemen’s long arch of films about the binary of hope-despair, and the haziness of memory, within uprisings and revolutions.
Yazan Khalili is also making a new artwork, a series of scarves that carry a poem written by him. The exhibited scarves can be purchased as a merchandise item, so Khalili not only plays with the boundaries of art/merchandise, but he set up the scarves also as an alternative economy model. The proceeds from the sales go towards supporting grassroots cultural initiatives that operate outside the institutional/funding landscape. I have often imagined randomly seeing people wearing these scarves on the streets of Limerick, each carrying a piece of the poem, and a piece of EVA too.
Matt Packer: The same thematic engagements are also true of many of the Irish artists, including Eoghan Ryan’s new video work that uses the rhetorical husks of children’s television and Irish hol-
Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty, Anybody’s Bones 2024, Drumcliffe Churchyard, County Sligo; image courtesy of the artists and EVA International.
iday resorts to look at the shifting cultures of Irish nationalism.
ERB: Can you talk about your collaborative curatorial approach, and your motivations to approach the biennial in such a way?
ES: I would first like to discuss the behindthe-scenes organisational framework, looping back to the title as well. ‘It Takes a Village’ refers, on the one hand, to a methodology of how the Guest Programme is curated and organised. I invited the EVA team back into their Guest Programme, so we could co-curate the programme together. In this sense, the title is not an overarching curatorial theme, but more of a practice, a method. On the other hand, ‘It Takes a Village’ also refers to a communal perspective – to view, experience and think about artworks and projects as inherently part of visible and invisible collaborations, networks and communities – hence its relationship to the proverb, “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child.”
Following this, all biennials and exhibitions are also inherently collaborative. I am really interested in experimenting with group-based forms of organising and curating that can rub against but also extend the parameters of what is regarded as curatorial work. And while sometimes the group-way is the harder way, I think this approach can be more sustainable in the long run.
For the Guest Programme, this collaborative approach extends to partners and artists in the sense that many of them developed new works for this edition. Thus, they essentially co-created the overall programme with their own themes and practices. The artists’ projects are themselves based on several layers of collaborative work. For instance, some of Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh’s works are presented at and in partnership with Sadlier’s Fishmongers in Limerick, and the artist collective Family Connection is a collaboration of the members of the Martinus family from the Buena Vista neighbourhood of Curaçao. Two works in the programme are also co-commissioned with OFF-Biennale Budapest, by Gideon Horváth and Gypsy Criminals, a Budapest-based artist group. All of these bring the involvement of additional communities, practices, and artworks.
Ailbhe W. Drohan: ROMANTIC IRELAND (2024) by Eimear Walshe is another artwork in this edition that has been made real through layers of collaboration, resonating with the practice Eszter speaks about. Like the Guest Programme itself, the work is not the result of a single voice but emerges through shared labour and care. Originally developed for the 60th Venice Biennale, it involves a collective earth-building process using Irish clay, which feels especially meaningful in the context of the work and its homecoming. This tactile, collaborative making is inseparable from the themes explored in the video and libretto by Walshe. Each time the work is re-made, its mournful and triumphant spirit is unearthed again. Bringing ROMANTIC IRELAND into this edition affirms the curatorial approach of ‘It Takes a Village’, where the strata of authorship and collaboration are made visible.
ERB: I’m really interested in your meth-
odological approach of ‘inviting’ the EVA team back into their Guest Programme, thereby deconstructing curating but also potentially destabilising binary notions of guest and host. I’m reminded of Karen Barad’s work on radical hospitality. Could you speak about how the programme might reflect that?
MP: In some senses, Eszter initiated in the 41st EVA International what we were already beginning to discuss as an organisation at a more structural level. EVA’s legacy as an organisation is often written as a list of celebrated international curators, and without discounting the value of what those curators have brought to Limerick, it has not necessarily or clearly translated into something that is retainable or sustainably co-extensive of this place or the people within it.
As Director of EVA since 2017, there is the sobering and provocative thought that the successive appointment of international curators has actually normalised and reinforced the sense that curating and curatorship is something that is lacking in Ireland, and only existing elsewhere. The idea of working together on the curatorial development of this edition is about trying to move towards an approach of sustainable co-development between those old notions of ‘local’ and ‘international’, host and guest.
I think of hospitality a lot at an organisational level, too, though perhaps in a further abstracted sense than is being referred to here. I feel that a lot of our work as an organisation and as a team is about making and creating accommodations – for artists, curators, as well as the ideas, values and discourses that they bring with them. On the ground, relatively little of our work is prefigured in any material, infrastructural
or ideological sense, so what we have to do is create conditions that allow us to develop and deliver the programme within. This process renders hospitality as something more than a thematic or notional concern at the level of the artwork, but as something that runs through the entire flow of operations in making EVA happen.
AWD: A newly composed vision poem, or aisling, by Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty, presented at the Limerick Museum, enacts a form of radical hospitality by inviting engagement with contested language and history in the form of a video installation and fold-out song sheet. Using the saorbhriathar (free verb), which avoids naming the subject of an action, the artists allow room for ambiguity and alternative perspectives. This refusal to assign fixed roles allows resistant and spectral voices to surface. The work becomes a threshold – an open space for reimagining belonging and the relationship between people and place.
ES: I would not claim that the Guest Programme contributes to these theories or that it totally deconstructs the dichotomies you mentioned. It is much more an experiment in organising within the arts and various ways of working together with and within the available frameworks. One simple term that I have been thinking about to signal in a way this type of working together is perhaps ‘supporting’. Having reciprocal trust and patience with the people we are working together with, to support practices and ideas instead of trying to streamline them in a predetermined direction has been, for me, really important. Of course, this also rests on privileges and power positions; who can support or invite who.
I would like to mention a few examples
for collaborations and the diffuse interconnectedness of ‘art’ and ‘life’, and thus for grappling with imperialism and injustices that ‘radical hospitality’ also tries to counter. The 2022 film piece by Marwa Arsanios that documents a ‘real-life’ legal and agricultural experiment she carried out in the north of Lebanon together with a lawyer, a historian, and an agricultural cooperative to change the status of a private land (property) to a common or social waqf (non-property). Arsanios’s contribution also includes a ‘convention’ organised for the closing weekend, where together with thinkers and practitioners from Ireland, they will discuss modern and historical commons, from the perspective of land contestation and struggles in Ireland.
The lecture performance by Noor Abuarafeh on the EVA opening weekend is based on the artist’s actual hikes in the West Bank in Palestine. It also includes the story of sketches and paintings made of the Palestinian landscapes that essentially turn into archives in the aftermath of destruction and occupation. Reza Afisina’s contribution is a mobile stage, a portable cultural platform to which communities in and around Limerick are invited to programme. Afisina’s project title perhaps also resonates with the radical hospitality you mentioned: to have heart like grass, holds up and stands fast (2025).
Dr El Reid-Buckley is a writer and researcher from Limerick City.
Matt Packer is Director of EVA International, Ailbhe W. Drohan is Creative Producer and Curatorial Researcher, and Eszter Szakács is Curator of the Guest Programme for the 41st edition. eva.ie
Reza Afisina, to have heart like grass, holds up and stand fast 2025; image courtesy of the artist and EVA International.
Shelter: Below and Beyond
MAEVE MULRENNAN REVIEWS THE HELSINKI BIENNIAL.
THE THIRD EDITION of the Helsinki Biennial (8 June – 21 September), entitled ‘SHELTER: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging’, vibrantly continues the ecological discourse of the previous two editions. Founded in 2021, this focused biennial has so far been largely concerned with the climate crisis and the place of art in conversations on mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. An enduring enquiry into the relationships between the maritime city, nature, and art is the conceptual foundation of the biennial. In its third iteration, this relevant and pressing thematic is still fresh and far from exhausted.
Curated by Blanca de la Torre, Director of the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), and Kati Kivinen, Director of the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), this iteration offers somewhat hopeful perspectives on the climate crisis. None of the 57 artworks feature humans as the main subject, although the environmental destruction caused by humans is all too present. De la Torre and Kivinen’s curation harnesses innovative approaches, genuinely rooted in an ecological ethos, with ‘SHELTER’ seeking to address the imbalances between humankind and nature, offering a multi-species and holistic alternative future.
The work of 37 artists and collectives is presented across three venues: HAM and Esplanade Park – a long, narrow greenway –are in the city centre, while Vallisaari Island, a now-uninhabited nature reserve, is a short ferry ride from Helsinki. A military site until the 1990s, many of the empty military buildings on Vallisaari Island make perfect, if somewhat dystopian, settings in which to encounter artworks. Disembarking visitors are greeted with the visual spectacle of Pia Sirén’s Under Cover (2025) – a gateway installation of a mountainous landscape, made from tarpaulins and plastics, which camouflages a large, derelict building. Under Cov-
Katie Holten, Learning To Be Better Lovers (Forest Alphabet) 2025, detail, Helsinki Biennial, Esplanade Park; photograph courtesy of HAM / Helsinki Biennial / Henni Hyvärinen.
er creates space for viewers to contemplate this artwork and prepare for the others they will encounter on the island.
Located on the trek around the island perimeter is Hans Rosenström’s Tidal Tears (2025). The work comprises a circle of petrified wooden columns, a pool of water, and an ethereal audio piece that sounds like a primordial opera, borne from the earth. As with many of the works presented on Vallisaari, the audience is cast into the role of witness. Islands lend themselves to interstices, and this setting is the perfect curatorial device for works exploring alternate realities and non-anthropocentric models.
The Helsinki Biennial has a practice of commissioning permanent artworks, which includes a number of new commissions this year for ‘SHELTER’. Sara Bjarland’s sculptures, entitled Stranding (2025), are bronze casts of semi-deflated, dolphin-shaped, plastic swimming floats, beached on the rocky shore. These emotive works are forever trapped in the liminality of half-inflation, underlining the permanence of plastic waste and the fragility of marine ecosystems.
Irish artist Katie Holten’s work, Learning To Be Better Lovers (Forest School) (2025), straddles two separate sites: an indoor ‘classroom’ set-up on Vallisaari, and an installation of flags along the Esplanade. The classroom offers a communal, participatory experience, which gently asks viewers for their time and contemplation. Holten presents a reimagined alphabet, which includes letters from the Finnish alphabet as well as drawings of trees, plants, fungi, and birds from the island. An accompanying guide includes walks, instructions, conversations, breathing exercises, and a considered text, written by the artist. The alphabet and guide are available to download from the biennial website (helsinkibiennaali.fi).
As with many of the other works, Learning To Be Better Lovers is concerned with the climate crisis without inciting feelings of helplessness or hopelessness. There is a direct dialogue between art and landscape, with plenty of space to meaningfully connect with this proposition. However, the busy Esplanade promenade in Helsinki city centre is a tough site to present work. Holten’s work is exhibited as a set of flags,
which manage to both stand apart from the busy site while appearing to integrate into the fabric of the city. The flags contain ‘letters’ of the Forest Alphabet. Even if a viewer does not read the accompanying explanatory text, there is still the feeling that the flags are communicating something. Esplanade Park has a colonial appearance, with manicured lawns and trees planted in rows, casting dappled shadows on bronze monuments. Holten’s work reminds us that there are alternatives to prevailing systems, with re-foresting and re-wilding conceptualised as acts of love.
HAM contains works that benefit from a gallery space rather than an outdoor environment. Ofrenda (Offering) (2024), an installation by Regina de Miguel, comprises paintings, engravings, and a mural, which read as a visual encyclopaedia of a multi-species, harmonious universe. Engravings on metal plates are reminiscent of the Voyager Golden Records – phonograph records, launched aboard the Voyager spacecrafts in 1977, containing sounds and images, selected to portray the diversity and beauty of life on Earth to extraterrestrials.
Artist/activist Jenni Laiti and photographer/reindeer herder Carl-Johan Utsi, both Sámi, present the beautiful video work, Teardrops of Our Grandmother (2023). It is a poetic meditation on the precarity of Sámi life and culture, due to shifting arctic weather conditions and other persistent threats to Indigenous communities. The piece explores the relationship between intergenerational trauma, the land, and the animals bonded to it. Like Holten’s work, the piece invites the viewer to slow down, nurture their relationship with the natural world, and participate in nature’s healing.
The curators describe ‘SHELTER’ as a “caring space where all lifeforms can thrive” (sttinfo.fi). The focus on non-human nature and indigenous narratives creates perspectives not traditionally prioritised within the Western art canon. However, across a former military site, manicured park, and white cube museum space, we are reminded of the negative impacts of colonialism and capitalism on our world, which cannot be disregarded.
Maeve Mulrennan is Assistant Arts Officer in Cork County Council.
[Top Left]: Olafur Eliasson, Viewing Machine © 2001/2003 Olafur Eliasson; [Top Right]: Pia Sirén, Under Cover 2025; [Bottom Right]: Tania Candiani, Sonic Seeds, 2025, detail; all photographs Vallisaari Island, courtesy of HAM / Helsinki Biennial / Maija Toivanen.
Ireland Invites
JOANNE LAWS REPORTS ON A PILOT INITIATIVE TO ENHANCE THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSURE OF IRELAND-BASED ARTISTS.
WHEN ATTENDING THE 12th edition of the Liverpool Biennial in June 2023, I was perplexed to find that no Ireland-based artists had been selected to participate in the programme. Notwithstanding the creative synergy that had been cultivated with the Irish visual arts community in recent years, Liverpool has always held robust historical connections to the Irish diaspora. An accessible port of entry during the Great Famine and beyond, the city’s demographics and cultural landscape have been significantly shaped by Irish immigrants.
Curated by Cape Town-based independent curator, Khanyisile Mbongwa, and titled ‘uMoya: The sacred Return of Lost Things’, the 12th edition aimed to “address the history and temperament of Liverpool” – a city deeply intertwined with the colonial era, when it served as a major port for the exchange of goods and enslaved people between the West Indies, Africa, and the Americas. Indeed, the city even has an International Slavery Museum to mediate this dark history, and several key exhibitions were staged for the biennial in a former tobacco warehouse in Stanley Dock.
If ‘uMoya’ was a “call for ancestral and indigenous forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing” I could think of more than a dozen Ireland-based artists who would have been ideally positioned to contribute to this critical conversation, not least Alice Rekab, whose work emerges from their mixed-race Irish Sierra Leonean identity, and whose astonishing exhibition, ‘Family Lines’, had been presented at the Douglas Hyde Gallery the previous summer. What were the possible explanations for such an omission? I briefly considered whether this could be partly due to the increasingly complex customs and shipping bureaucracy caused by Brexit. Perhaps deficits within Irish infrastructure or policy-making were somehow failing to equip artists with the funding or commercial
[Above]: Alice Rekab, Bunchlann/Buncharraig 2025, Liverpool Biennial 2025 at Liverpool ONE; photograph by Rob Battersby, courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Biennial. [Opposite Top]: Léann Herlihy, to be nowhere 2022–ongoing, billboard photograph, installation view, Abell Street and Queen Street West, Toronto, September 2024; photograph by Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the artist and Toronto Biennial of Art. [Opposite Bottom]: Isabel Nolan, Where you are, what we are, with others 2025, Liverpool Biennial 2025 at the John Lennon Art & Design Building, LJMU; photograph by Rob Battersby, courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Biennial.
leverage to prominently showcase their work abroad? Gradually, it seemed most likely that there were simply tangible gaps in the knowledge of international curators about the vibrancy and tenacity of the Irish visual arts.
Around the same time, Culture Ireland launched Ireland Invites, a new initiative in partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and the Hugh Lane Gallery, aimed at enhancing the international exposure of Irish-based visual artists by hosting biennial curators. As the three-year pilot project reaches is conclusion, an impact report has recently been compiled to relay the findings, including some optimistic participation statistics.
According to the report, 52 Ireland-based artists hosted studio visits with invited curators, which resulted in 14 artists being chosen to participate across seven different international biennials.
The first curator to participate in the initiative was Inti Guerrero, Artistic Director of the Biennale of Sydney, who visited in May 2023. Having curated the 38th edition of EVA International in Limerick in 2018, Inti was well-placed as the first invitee. During his visit, Inti gave a talk at the Hugh Lane Gallery, and subsequently selected Breda Lynch to present her Cyanotype print, Cake Bomb (2016) – part of a long-running series focusing on identity, hidden histories, and queer culture – at the 24th Biennale of Sydney.
Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López, co-curators of the Toronto Biennial of Art 2024, visited Ireland in August 2023 whereupon a public conversation was held with Annie Fletcher at IMMA. Artist Léann Herlihy was subsequently invited to install their photographic work, to be nowhere (2022–ongoing), in downtown Toronto as an enormous, iconic billboard. Speaking of their participation in Ireland Invites, artist Léann Herlihy said: “Meeting the curators of the Toronto Biennial of Art 2024 […] was a pivotal point in my practice, opening up space for a plethora of disparate narratives to crossover. Subsequently participating in the Toronto Biennial, I witnessed the transformative potential of reciprocated care within curatorial practices and how this care and attention drew out the joyous rage within artists’ practices. One of the highlights of this opportunity was meeting the other participating artists and learning about their work and life worlds –an accumulation of knowledge I hold dear to me.”
Binna Choi, one of three curators of the Hawai’i Triennial 2025, visited Ireland in February 2024, undertaking several studio visits and delivering a talk at the Hugh Lane Gallery. Binna’s visit resulted in four artists (Vivienne Dick, Kian Benson Bailes, Isabel Nolan and Belinda Quirke) being invited to contribute to a bespoke triennial programme, called Kīpuka Ireland, in April 2025, comprising sonic performance, film screenings, and workshops. Speaking of her experience, Bina said: “Ireland Invites opened up new, unexpected lines of resonance, connection and friendship between Ireland and Hawaii. My visit to Ireland allowed me to meet a number of artists in Dublin as well as other areas whose practice and concerns resonate with artists of Hawaii so much in terms of its geographic positionality, colonial experience and the politics of decolonization, value of culture, land, tradition, and critical practice of indigenization. This led me into conceiving the visiting program Kīpuka Ireland within the context of Hawai‘i Triennial 2025: ALOHA NÕ. This could not be realized without inspiring encounters in Ireland as well as the relationship forged with new colleagues and institutions in Ireland.”
Blanca de la Torre, Head Curator of the Helsinki Biennial, visited Ireland in July 2024 and subsequently selected Katie Holten to participate in the third edition of the biennial, which launched in June of this year (see pp. 38–39). Speaking of her visit to Ireland, Blanca said: “I had the privilege of engaging with a remarkable community of Irish artists whose practices closely align with my curatorial research interests. The programme offered the opportunity to deliver a lecture at IMMA and collaborate with its exceptional team of women professionals. This experience provided valuable
insights into the contemporary art landscape in Ireland and facilitated meaningful dialogues that will continue to inform my curatorial practice.”
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain and Basil Al-Rawi were selected by John Tain for the Lahore Biennale 2024 through his participation in Ireland Invites, while Aideen Barry, Amanda Coogan, George Bolster, and Kira O’Reilly were selected by Apinan Poshyananda for the Bangkok Biennale 2024.
Returning to my opening lines about the Liverpool Biennial, I was thrilled to see the inclusion of Alice Rekab this summer in the 13th edition, as a direct result of Ireland Invites. Isabel Nolan was also invited to participate, and both artists created ambitious, site-responsive works for gallery settings and the public realm. ‘BEDROCK’ continues across Liverpool until 14 September (see pp. 34–35).
Commenting on her visit to Ireland, Liverpool Biennial Director, Dr Samantha Lackey stated: “In 2024 Ireland Invites extended the opportunity to join a group of international curators and directors, visiting the brilliant EVA International. My time in Limerick and subsequently Dublin enabled me to further explore the deep connections between Liverpool and Ireland and convinced me of the importance of bringing in a curator who had existing connections with Irish artists to curate our 2025 festival.” Curator of the Liverpool Biennial 2025, Marie-Anne McQuay, added that: “Working with Isabel Nolan and Alice Rekab has been a joy and a privilege. The work exhibited by both artists has a special resonance with the city – Isabel responding to the city’s historic art collections and lost architecture, while Alice engages with stories of migration and belonging, narratives shared between Dublin and Liverpool. I can’t thank them enough for their outstanding contributions.”
Overall, the documented successes of Ireland Invites attest not only to the effectiveness of the initiative in the short-term – insofar as the collegiate gestures of invitation and hosting clearly result in the more prominent showcasing of Ireland-based artists on the international biennial circuit – but to its less tangible and longer-term influence on international curatorial knowledge. One hopes that this can be consolidated and progressively expanded upon in the future, with each new round of curatorial invitation.
Joanne Laws is Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. visualartists.ie
The Space Between Real and Shadow
ÁINE PHILLIPS INTERVIEWS BREDA BURNS ABOUT HER SHOW AT CUSTOM HOUSE STUDIOS AND GALLERY.
BREDA BURNS HAS been a stalwart of the Mayo visual arts scene for decades. A central figure in the development of resources and facilities in Westport, as one of the founders of the Custom House Studios and Gallery, she also presented (with Grainne O’Reilly) The Arts Show West on Westport Radio for six years. I conducted an interview with Breda as she prepares for a major exhibition of her work at Custom House in October to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Westival – the oldest music and arts festival in the west of Ireland (westival.ie). Breda began our conversation by emphasising how honoured she is to be invited by Westival as this year’s artist in Custom House, following in the footsteps of other artists she admires. It is also true to say that the festival is equally honoured by her involvement, given her outstanding contribution to the arts ecology in the region.
Alongside a busy socially engaged practice, Breda’s artistic output is diverse and exploratory. She incorporates many varied industrial materials into sculptural and two-dimensional, layered images and objects. A high-contrast monochrome palette characterises the assemblages she constructs, which often use reflective and fluid layering of light and shadow elements. The structures and imagery she creates have consistently explored her queerness and the othering of those outside of social norms. In her current body of work, she is directly addressing neurodiversity and engaging with the lived experience of people with ADHD.
Áine Phillips: How are preparations going for your upcoming show, ‘The Space Between Real and Shadow’? I understand your approach is to work with trusted methods and material processes in the service of a new thematic?
Breda Burns: Audio recording is my primary research methodology
Breda Burns, Artists’ Voices to be Continued... 2022, video, commissioned by Mayo County Council Arts Office, Clare Island Lighthouse; photograph by Frank O’Reilly, courtesy of the artist.
and a key component of my practice. I combine these with sourced and studio-produced visual containers to build immersive installations. The topic for this exhibition, an exploration of my own and others’ neurodiversity, is fresh and all-consuming for me. I found the diagnostic process in Ireland a cruel one. One really has to jump over hurdles to find information. Following an initial in-person psychological assessment, the only accessible resources and support I found were online. Art has always been a way to discover and comprehend my place in the world and will continue to be, as I work on integrating what feels like a new life. Everything is layered in my work; fragments, reflections, and sectional surfaces relate to levels and layers of understanding, especially of difference. At the moment, I’m gathering lots of objects which I will distill and re-present. In the past, I have accidentally broken things, which have subsequently been integrated into the work.
ÁP: Can you describe your goals for the show and your plans for collecting and incorporating participant contributions?
BB: In previous works, I have used fragmented words and text pieces – narratives drawn from conversations with others, especially artists talking to artists. This practice came out of co-presenting and producing radio shows and podcasts. For my exhibition at Custom House Studios and Gallery, I will be conducting a series of interviews with artists and creatives across genres and disciplines, who are neurodiverse, in par-
ticular, those who have a diagnosis of ADHD. I want to weave these recorded voices into sound pieces. The texts and words will be edited and incorporated into visual images and works to be displayed across the three gallery spaces and possibly some off-site locations. I also hope to work with the local radio station to record visitor responses to the exhibition, so they become part of it and the show is a living, changing thing, responding to how audiences engage with the work. I want the show to give neurotypicals insights into the fractured and overlapping mental thought processes of ADHD. The use of digital text, layered with imagery and sound, will be presented in such a way that at times, you see and hear some parts and don’t see others. This is similar to the way the ADHD brain gets interrupted and can be fragmented.
ÁP: Central to this show is the exploration and presentation of your own experience of neurodiversity alongside research you have been conducting since your diagnosis. How do you think the findings will inform the outcomes of this work?
BB: Arising from personal reflection on the impact of my diagnosis on my work as an artist, I felt compelled to further explore the experiences of others living in similar circumstances. With funding from an Arts Council Agility Award, and in collaboration with Clinical Psychologist Dr Eamon Smith, I conducted preliminary investigations into how ADHD affects the personal and professional lives of creatives. This is where the impulse to develop this body of work arose.
The immersive, narrative approach to the exhibition aims to give voice to the often overlooked or misunderstood experiences of neurodivergent artists, creating a space for empathy, awareness, and dialogue.
My expectation is that the exhibition and the process of making it will bring fresh perspectives and new insights. I’ll be curious to see how this will be received by audiences. The show is a way for me to develop these themes; looking back on previous work, I can see I was searching for a sense of self that was hidden – hence the title, ‘The Space Between Real and Shadow’. I am curious to see how these experiences are mirrored in others. In putting myself front and centre, I risk exposing myself with this work, in the hope of gaining a community for sharing and exchange. I want the show to reflect the diverse ways of thinking and being in the world.
Breda Burns is a multimedia artist based in Westport. bredaburns.com
Áine Phillips is a visual artist, writer and academic based in Galway. ainephillips.com
‘The Space Between Real and Shadow’ will be presented at Custom House Studios and Gallery from 22 October to 23 November. customhousestudios.ie
[Left]: Breda Burns, Next, ‘Celebrating 21 years’, November 2023, paint, glass, mirrors; photograph by Breda Burns, courtesy of Custom House Studios and Gallery. [Right]: Breda Burns, HORIZON, 2023, sculpture, mirrors, paint, etching; photograph by Conor McKeown, courtesy of the artist and Linenhall Arts Centre.
Uisce Salach Agus Dríodar
ANNA MARIE
SAVAGE OUTLINES THE RESEARCH, MATERIALS AND PROCESSES UNDERPINNING HER RECENT PAINTINGS.
I AM AN Irish visual artist, primarily a painter, living and working in Omeath, County Louth, and I hold a First-Class Honours degree in Fine Art from the University of Ulster, Belfast (2009). My practice explores identity across personal, cultural, historical, and ecological dimensions, through fieldwork, microscopy, and site-specific research. I investigate how memory, language, land, and place shape individual and collective identities. Living on the border, I am deeply aware of psychogeography – the emotional and psychological imprint of landscapes and contested spaces – which influences my work through subtle gestures, such as mapping invisible systems and tracing ecological change.
Before my current project, my work explored the Irish border, focusing on the British Army watchtowers and their visual and psychological impact on the South Armagh landscape. This work highlights the tensions between the rural landscape and militarised architecture – once dominant symbols of surveillance and power. In 2019, I was selected for ‘Drawn from Borders’, a creative engagement programme for the Decade of Centenaries project. This led to my inclusion in the exhibition ‘Frontier Work’, curated by Garrett Carr at the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, in 2022. After being invited to exhibit in the yearlong showcase, ‘Newry Artists Past and Present’, the Newry, Mourne and Down Museum acquired the artwork from my Túir Faire (Watchtowers) series for its permanent collection.
Currently, I am collaborating with Dr Conor O’Reilly from Leeds University on a project examining petroculture and the illicit fuel economies along the borders of Ireland and Mexico. Uisce Salach (Irish for ‘dirty water’) focuses on illegal dumping from the illicit fuel industry into local rivers, highlighting the environmental impact on our aquatic ecosystems. I took water samples from the River Fane that runs along the Louth and Monaghan border – a well-known dumping site for green diesel and its byproducts. I taught myself how to use a microscope and by using a photomicrographic lens, I was able to capture detailed images of the microorganisms and
phenomena at cellular and sub-cellular levels that were contained within the water samples.
As an abstract painter, I engaged in exploratory processes including hybrid printmaking, collage, and ink studies, which led to the development of my current series, Uisce Salach and Dríodar (meaning ‘sediment’). Inspired by the ever-shifting microscopic molecular forms I observed, the paintings evolved into highly tactile, impasto surfaces. Seeking to translate these three-dimensional structures into the work, I began incorporating raised wooden circular elements. This addition introduced a sculptural dimension to the paintings, altering their physical dynamic and deepening the viewer’s spatial experience of the molecular imagery.
Dríodar takes the form of an installation wall that was exhibited in May as part of my solo show at the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny. It also features in my current solo exhibition at An Cultúrlann, Belfast, which continues until 11 September. This wall of small relief paintings represents sediment particles, translating their molecular textures and highlighting the fragmented yet interconnected nature of pollution. Displayed together, the works invite close observation, reflecting the detailed study of polluted water under the microscope.
My collaboration with Leeds University, which spans the Mexican border, brings an international dimension to my exploration of environmental degradation. Uisce Salach bridges art, science, and activism, addressing the impact of human activity on fragile ecosystems and polluted waters. Through this work, I aim to raise awareness, encourage dialogue, and deepen understandings of environmental and social issues. Recently, I was awarded the 2025 Training and Development Bursary from Louth County Council, which will support my further investigation into 3D sculptural molecular forms at the FabLab in Creative Spark, Dundalk.
Anna Marie Savage is a visual artist living and working in County Louth. annamariesavage.com
First-person
ISABEL ENGLISH DISCUSSES HER RECENT AND FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS.
IN 2022, SHORTLY after completing an MFA in Fine Art Sculpture at the National College of Art and Design, I took up a studio in The Complex, a former fruit ripening facility and banana wholesale market, owned by the Smyth family, located just off Capel Street in Dublin city centre. For those who haven’t previously visited, the gallery space is devoid of both natural light and the generally assumed ‘white-cubeness’ of most contemporary art galleries. Instead, one is met with bare brick walls, steel rafters, and a palimpsest of floor markings of bygone concrete pours, all lit by an overhead system of fluorescent bulbs.
Early on in my time here, I was invited by Mark O’Gorman and Niamh O’Malley to exhibit as part of ‘Fly Floor’, a group exhibition in association with the national tour of Ireland at Venice (23 March – 7 April 2023). I exhibited a separate self, a textile-based wall sculpture, made from pleated sections of pale yellow, second-hand, cotton bedsheets.
Margaret Mahler, from whose theories the title emerges, was a psychoanalyst born in Austria in 1897, who developed the theory of Separation-Individuation, perceived as the period of time when a child separates from their mother and begins to individuate. Affixed to the gallery wall through a choreographed system of curtain hooks and steel wire, and hung at waist-height, this piece reflected the competing concerns of decoration and concealment. In her text, ‘Embracing Contradiction’ for Mirror Lamp Press, poet and author Julie Morrissy noted, “the waist-height represents a half-way point in the body, gesturing to the transitory period between girlhood and adulthood.”
My upcoming solo exhibition, ‘first-person’, renegotiates these ideas, again utilising sets of domestic materials to create a contextually sensitive installation, composed of sculpture, found objects and printed matter. Opening on 5 September at LHQ Gallery, this exhibition marks the conclusion of my Emerging Visual Artist Award 2024,
supported by Cork County Council Arts Office. The exhibition title acknowledges the narrative style in which a protagonist relates their story using the pronoun ‘I’, offering a direct and intimate connection to the narrator’s experiences and thoughts. In this new body of work, psychology processes interweave and overlap with those of making. Ideas such as Repetition Compulsion – described by Sigmund Freud as an unconscious tendency to repeat patterns of behaviour – transform everyday materials into meticulous assemblages that reveal shifting degrees of knowability. A series of low-relief sculptures are formed from sets of patterned, disposable, aluminium plating, replicating the composition of honeycomb cardboard, generally used as protective packaging in the shipment and transportation of goods.
These sculptures accompany physically and digitally distorted images, originating from A Manual of Artistic Anatomy by John C.L. Sparkes (London: Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1888) – a guide for art students, depicting illustrations of muscles and bones inside the human body. These images are displayed on assorted sheets of acetate, tentatively hung from the gallery walls on stationers’ clips, or attached to an old x-ray illuminator. From here, I position the audience somewhere between the domestic and the clinical, suggesting spaces of perceived protection and care, yet also those that evoke anxiety and unease. These artworks outline the processes and mechanisms of defence that shift and transform to protect our sense of self and identity.
Another solo exhibition of my work will subsequently be presented at GOMA Waterford in early November. Cork County Council and GOMA are supporting the development of a new publication that will include texts by Sarah Long and Julie Morrissy.
Isabel English is a visual artist based in Dublin. isabelenglish.net
Isabel English, a separate self, 2023, textile sculpture, installation view, The Complex, March 2023; photograph by Jan McCullough, courtesy of the artist and The Complex.
Anna Marie Savage [Left]: Dríodar 3, 2025; [Right]: Uisce Salach I, 2024; images © and courtesy of the artist.
Diagonal Acts
MARIE FARRINGTON CHRONICLES SEVERAL EXHIBITIONS
EMERGING FROM HER UNFOLDING CROSS-SITE PROJECT.
‘DIAGONAL ACTS’ IS a multi-platform project incorporating a series of distinct but interconnected site-responsive exhibitions. Beginning at the entrance of Kunstverein Aughrim in spring 2025, the project continues with participatory workshops at my studio in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, along with presentations at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, and Commonage Projects in London. These material outcomes are supported by a range of collaborations and connected by an expansive programme of generative public engagement elements, devised to critically extend the possibilities for encounter and access.
With curatorial support from Kate Strain, ‘Diagonal Acts – Act 1’ was presented at Kunstverein Aughrim from 1 March to 31 May. We held a Spring Preview event on 29 March, sharing insights into the project’s methodologies through a group walk to the local allotments, with pitstops along the way for sharing artefacts and ideas. This included newly commissioned technical drawings by archaeological illustrator Róisín O Meadhra; a text, written and read by Isabel Nolan; and a hand tool, made by Liliane Puthod.
At Van Der Wel allotments, an excavation plot dug by Shane Malone-Murphy became an activation site for ACTS (catch/ sift) (2025), a sculptural archaeology sieve for sifting soil that I produced in response to the dimensions of the gap in Kunstverein Aughrim’s moveable display unit, Granite Leap (2021) by Forerunner. This interactive
steel sieve and Liliane Puthod’s Barrow (2025) – a playful, relaxed wheelbarrow for transporting soil samples – formed the first in a collaborative set of excavation tools that will accumulate across the year and accompany the unfolding project, with upcoming contributions from artists Laura Ní Fhlaibhín and Sibyl Montague.
Concluding with a picnic by Cow House Studios, the event also marked the launch of a digital archiving platform in collaboration with Alex Synge, which functions as a touchstone and active repository for project artefacts.
‘Diagonal Acts’ arises from research into geological and archaeological imaginations of gaps, openings, and thresholds, exploring the boundaries of the body in the landscape from various counter-topographical perspectives. The project expands on and elaborates a hybrid practice of exploring symmetries between staged presentations and field work, via their continual renegotiation of categorical boundaries and their shared interest in memory, partiality, fragment, trace and assemblage.1 Through intrinsically contingent material interventions and participatory gestures, ’Diagonal Acts’ excavates the ‘/’ in Theatre/Archaeology as a site of interdisciplinarity, convergence, and reworked borders, articulated through the sculptural position of the diagonal line. Thinking across and between sites, the project explores diagonality as a relational and collaborative stance, temporarily ‘leaning’ against contexts, communities, and histo-
ries.
The structuring of the project across consecutive ‘acts’ provides a framework for presentations that are unfixed, willingly iterative, and process-led. Thinking about my output in this way enables me to imagine the wider form of the project as a sculptural entity in itself, with pieces being added on, pulled apart, reshaped or reoriented.
‘Diagonal Acts – Act 2’ at The Dock (23 August – 1 November) is curated by Kate Strain, supported by Mary Conlon. The exhibition responds to thresholds in the gallery, reinforcing the diagrammatic positions of the X, Y, and Z axes of the space as a way to embody archaeological schematics. Carved soapstones on the floor register the horizontal plane through participatory action: audiences are invited to lift, hold, or rearrange these. Hanging casts explore surface, layering, and transparency as vehicles for thinking about co-creative relationships. Leaning panels become sculptural translations of flat architectural plans.
Act 2 builds directly on Act 1. Soil samples sifted and collected in Aughrim are cast into an excavation shovel for unearthing stone samples from a nearby site. A nutrient-rich ‘worm tea blanket’ by Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, made from earthworm castings, will then replenish the soil during a day of events in September. Act 2 introduces the first in a series of commissioned texts by Megan Macedo, and further archaeological illustrations by Róisín O Meadhra, which function as expanded documentation of
objects and outcomes.
The approaches employed in Acts 1 and 2 will be further developed for Act 3 at Commonage Projects, London, curated by Séamus McCormack, which opens in February 2026. In collaboration with Frank Prendergast and Sara Murphy of Space Forms, a cast access ramp, made from volcanic olivine sand, is currently in process as a temporary sculptural intervention for the threshold of Kunstverein Aughrim, seeking to enhance accessibility to the space.
Marie Farrington’s artistic practice reflects on the act of making through geological and archaeological lenses, making formal reference to field sampling, built heritage, and histories of display.
mariefarrington.com
‘Diagonal Acts’ is accompanied by Kunstverein Aughrim in a curatorial capacity throughout 2025. The project is supported by the Arts Council (through a Visual Arts Project Award 2025), Culture Ireland, and Wicklow County Arts Office, through the annual Strategic Project Award Scheme. diagonalacts.com
‘Diagonal Acts’ – Act 2’ continues at The Dock until 1 November. thedock.ie
1 Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2001).
Marie Farrington, [Right]: Toolkit re-membered, 2025, Anthracite, wax, mild steel, volcanic olivine sand, resin; [Left]: Acts [catch/sift] 2025, mild steel; photographs by Brian Cregan, courtesy of the artist and Kunstverein Aughrim.
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Autumn 2025
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CASTLEBAR
BOLAY VISUAL ARTISTS CAFÉ:
CURATOR & ARTISTS NETWORKING
EVENT
Location: Linenhall Arts Centre,
Date: Monday 29 September
Time: 11am – 4pm
Places: 24 (18 x Mayo-based Artists; 6 x General Admission)
Cost: FREE
NEWBRIDGE
THE ARTIST AND THE GALLERY: BUILDING THE RELATIONSHIP
Location: Riverbank Arts Centre
Date: Wednesday 1 October
Time: 11am – 1pm
Places: 25
Cost: FREE (Kildare-based Artists Only)
TRALEE
KERRY CAFÉ: ARTIST & CURATOR
NETWORKING EVENT
Location: Siamsa Tíre
Date: Friday 3 October
Time: 11am – 4pm
Places: 30
Cost: FREE (Kerry-based Artists); €10 (VAI Members); €15 (General Admission)
GROWING MY PRACTICE: A PRACTICAL AND MEANINGFUL GUIDE
Location: Siamsa Tíre
Date: Saturday 4 October
Time: 11am – 12:30pm
Places: 30
Cost: FREE (Kerry-based Artists); €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)
DUNDALK
LOUTH CAFÉ: ARTIST & CURATOR
NETWORKING EVENT
Location: Creative Spark, Dundalk
Date: Thursday 23 October
Time: 11am – 4pm
Places: 60
Cost: €5 (Louth-based Artists); €10 (Cavan and Monaghan-based Artists); €10 (VAI Members); €15 (General Admission)
In Person NI Events
BELFAST
BELFAST PEER SUPPORT: ARTIST TALKS | SHOW & TELLS
Location: Upstairs Theatre, The MAC, Belfast
Date: Wednesday 1 October Time: 10am – 3:15pm
Places: 120
Cost: €5 (Northern Ireland-based Artists and VAI members); €10 (General Admission)
BELFAST PEER SUPPORT: CURATOR TALKS | PANELS
Location: Upstairs Theatre, The MAC, Belfast
Date: Wednesday 8 October Time: 10am – 2:30pm
Places: 120
Cost: €5 (Northern Ireland-based Artists and VAI members); €10 (General Admission)
BELFAST PEER SUPPORT: SPEED CURATING | CLINICS | INFORMAL GALLERY WALK
Date: Tuesday 28 October Time: 10am – 5pm
Location: The Factory, The MAC, Belfast Places: 96 (Speed Curating); 20 (Clinics)
Cost: €5 (Per Speed Curating Slot); €8 (Per Clinic Slot); Max 2 slots per attendee
Webinars & Online Clinics
CONNECTED HORIZONS: PEER CRITIQUE SESSION
Date: Wednesday 17 September
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Places: Unlimited
Cost: €5 (Antrim, Clare, Kilkenny, Kildare and Leitrim-based Artists); €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)
MAKING MY PRACTICE MORE VISIBLE
Date: Thursday 2 October
Time: 11am – 12:30pm
Places: Unlimited
Cost: FREE (Clare, Limerick or Tipperary-based Artists); €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)
CONNECTED HORIZONS: STUDIO FELLOWSHIP SHOWCASE
Date: Thursday 9 October
Time: 11am – 12:15pm
Places: Unlimited
Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)
CONNECTED HORIZONS: DUBLIN | BERLIN
Date: Tuesday 21 October
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Places: Unlimited
Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Admission)
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
Fees
VAI members receive preferential discount of 50% on fees for all VAI training and professional development events.
NI Information and Bookings
To contact the NI Helpdesk or to inquire about upcoming Professional Development events in Northern Ireland, visit: visualartists.ie/ni-portal/ help-desk-advice
Ursula Burke
Curated by Aoife Ruane
Wexford Arts Centre
11.10. 06.12. 2025
A Highlanes Gallery National Tour
wexfordartscentre.ie / +353 (0)53 9123764 / Y35 X5HF
Ursula Burke, Busted Nose, 2024, mosaic glass, 58 x 37cm advertVAI(halfPage).indd 1
Sidelong Glances: An Oblique Look at the Sea
Curated by Catherine Bowe
Orla Barry, Hernán Braun, Gary Coyle, Ann Hamilton, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Kathy Prendergast, and Marisa Rappard.
Wexford County Council 13 October – 21 November, 2025
Wexford Arts Office in association with IMMA’s National Collection.
Image: Hernán Braun, Norte, o Sur, o Este, u Oeste, 1982, lithograph on paper, IMMA Collection.
Wexford County Council / 053 9196369 / wexfordcoco.ie Opening Hours: Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm
