Lismore Castle Arts

22 March – 26 October 2025

The kunstkammer or wunderkammer, the ‘cabinet of curiosities’, is, by its very nature, ostentatious. It represents wealth and worldliness, a capacity to not only collect various rare treasures but to showcase them in a suitably resplendent setting. There is a vanity to such endeavours, as noted in Samuel Quiccheberg’s 1565 advice to Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria on assembling a “repository of artificial and marvelous things”: “We are not dividing up for philosophers, precisely in line with nature itself, all natural objects: rather, we are sorting out for princes, into certain uncomplicated orderings, objects that are mostly pleasant to observe.”¹ The kunstkammer is intended not just to be shown, but to be shown off.

The current exhibition at Lismore Castle, owned by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, would thus seem to qualify on account of its prestigious lineage alone. Yet, rather than simply presenting family heirlooms, ‘Kunstkammer’ invites Robert O’Byrne to curate “a re-creation and a re-invention of the genre,” combining historical artefacts, everyday accoutrements, contemporary artworks and esoteric oddities – as per Gabriel Kaltemarckt’s 1587 definition, comprising paintings and sculptures, local and foreign rarities, and “antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals.”² 

Two full-length pier mirrors are adorned with hand-painted scenes of grotesque creatures and protruding sculptural busts of cherubs. A sphere of snail shells cluster into an impenetrable, self-contained mass. Cabinets of sinuously carved hardwood open up to reveal bronze bowls, spilling over with angular shards of coloured glass. The exhibition display, which demarcates the gallery’s central space into a series of compartments and corridors, stages a number of such distinct tableaux, some more fantastical than others. 

A particular novelty is The Prize Fight (c.1900) by William Hart & Sons, a whimsical construction that features stuffed squirrels engaged in a boxing match. The scenario, which begins with the rodents shaking hands and ends with one pugilist collapsed across the canvas, takes place over six sequential dioramas, resembling a comic strip. Like the best parts of a kunstkammer, it defies description or categorisation, with its very indefinability indicating only the idiosyncrasies of its makers and the unorthodox taste of its owner. 

The pairing of a sculpture of the Cavendish Serpent – a recurring motif in the Devonshire family heraldry – with a standing lamp incorporating a taxidermied snake, makes for a tense encounter, as the two reptiles lock gazes, perpetually frozen in anticipation. Of the contemporary artworks, John Kindness’s pieces feel especially at home. His acrylic drawings of scenes from Greek mythology, delicately rendered on antique cotton breeches, feel suitably otherworldly: Circe (2012) portrays twinned, conjoined hybrids of a sailor in naval rig and his monstrous, tattooed, porcine alter-ego (the title alludes to the enchantress who turned Odysseus’s crew into pigs). The image is doubled, reversed, like a playing card, and, like the undergarments themselves, evinces a peculiarly old-fashioned salaciousness. Kindness repeats the trick with Scylla and Charybdis (2012) a pair of cast resin toilet seats rendered with stylised beasts, schematic figures and decorative flourishes. Odysseus had to chart a narrow passage between the two sea monsters, an adventure that idiomatically refers to choosing between two evils. There is a juxtaposition of the profound and the profane here that would likely have amused Quiccheberg’s patron – and his guests.  

In spite of these exceptions, the presentation of other contemporary artworks is less considered. Pieces such as Alice Maher’s aforementioned agglomeration of snail shells, The Four Directions (2005), or Dorothy Cross’ eerily discomfiting Red Rest and Red Baby (both 2021) with their immaculately carved ears embedded in ‘pillows’ of red-veined marble, aren’t just strange; they have an inherent strangeness on their own terms. Both artists have a conceptual intent, referentiality, sensitivity to materials, and history of delving into notions of the body, metamorphosis, nature, memory and mythology that belies the inclusion of their works as mere ‘curiosities’. 

Monster Chetwynd’s handmade, oversized moths, constructed from cardboard, paint and latex, have been an abiding presence in her sprawling installations and ecstatic performances, but, here, clinging onto the gallery walls and devoid of any curatorial context, they appear as facsimiles of outsider art. Similarly, it’s hard to know what Sarah Lucas’ suspended assemblages of stuffed tights, plastic buckets and lounge chairs are supposed to contribute, other than a general atmosphere of abject deflation. 

Given that ‘Kunstkammer’ largely eschews an overall contextualisation of the collective works as well as written descriptions of the individual objects, the inference is that their selection is largely determined by taste, an intuitive affinity for the bizarre or unexpected. That’s not necessarily a complaint: historical wunderkammers have themselves revolved around the often-unarticulated preferences of their owners. Yet, as a ‘re-invention of the genre’, the exhibition feels tentative, even restrained. It is caught between its own Scylla and Charybdis, neither willing to commit to a more taxonomical display of its contents – a ‘making sense’ of the otherwise incommensurable – or to diving headlong into its eccentricities through an immersive, overwhelming, pell-mell profusion of artefacts. The straight path isn’t generally the most interesting one. 

Chris Clarke is a critic and curator based between Cork and Vienna.

¹ Mark A. Meadow and Bruce Robertson (Eds. and trans.), The First Treatise on Museums: Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones 1565 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013).

² Gabriel Kaltemarckt, ‘How a Kunstkammer should be formed’ (1587) reproduced in Journal of the History of Collections, Volume 2, Issue 1, 1990, pp. 1–6.

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TOM CLIMENT OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF HIS PAINTING PRACTICE AND HIS RECENT EXHIBITION AT CCI PARIS.

After I left secondary school in 1987, I studied engineering for a few years. At the same time, I was doing night classes in painting at Crawford College of Art and Design with the late Jo Allen, who encouraged me greatly. I later studied at Crawford full-time and qualified with a Fine Art degree in 1995. I’ve been working as an artist since then, later returning to college and completing a Masters by Research in 2011. 

Ten years ago, Solomon Fine Art in Dublin took me on as one of their artists. I’ve since had regular solo exhibitions, the most recent being ‘Pilgrim’ in May 2024. Exhibiting with Solomon has been a huge support to my practice, which has given me the sense of a commercial outlet for my work. As an artist, I probably started out making work for myself, but it’s important that it also goes out into the world and reaches people.

My recent exhibition at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, called ‘Wilding/État Sauvage’ (1 February – 13 April), presented a selection of paintings made over the last few years. A new book, published by Gandon Editions, was launched at the exhibition opening, with subsequent launches in Solomon Fine Art and Lavit Gallery, Cork. The 120-page hardback monograph documents my work over the last decade or so. It contains 128 illustrations and an essay by Cristín Leach, with additional texts by Mark Ewart, Carissa Farrell, Mary McCarthy, and Michael Waldron (gandoneditions.com).

For me, painting is trying to find a balance between being unselfconscious, allowing the work to be formed, and also making critical judgements. It’s a process of making the work and then reflecting on why I feel certain paintings are more successful than others. These paintings then become almost like signposts in the road ahead – reference points for the work as it progresses.

I tend to work in isolation; I don’t share a studio space, and, over the years, the work has become quite internal in nature. When I start on a new series, it’s quite a natural undertaking, and it comes to an end quite naturally too, when I feel I shouldn’t make any more of them. I don’t draw or sketch. I start each piece with a rough, almost hazy, image in my head. I want the work to reveal itself to me; through painting, things become clearer. Over time, the work takes on a life of its own and moves forward under its own weight.

What has always fascinated me about painting is the ability to make a flat, two-dimensional surface seem three-dimensional. This idea of creating space has been the cornerstone of my practice. From the early gestural paintings to my more structured work of the present, creating space that the viewer can enter is an enduring interest. The abstract structures and shapes in the paintings are mechanisms that invite the viewer to a threshold. The paintings merge references to architecture and landscape to generate contemplations on shelter, ritual and hopefulness. 

The surfaces of the paintings are also quite important to the experience of the work. When I start a piece, I first paint the whole surface one colour; as in music, this becomes the keynote of the painting. I use plaster and sand, building up the surfaces. I try to allow the history of the painting to be visible in the finished works; I want it to tell a story.

With my work over the last ten years or so, I’ve been using abstract geometric shapes and structures, almost like grids, to provide a foundation for the paint. I then start to shape them into something more recognisable; I don’t think the work I do is wholly abstract. I want there to be some way into them – some element or narrative that the viewer can relate to. I think all the work I’ve done has existed on this border between abstraction and representation. 

My most recent work, which was exhibited in CCI Paris, has more natural forms in reaction to the more hard-edged geometric shapes I had previously been using. Flowers, plants and trees are all suggested in this new series. Some are quite recognisable, while others are imbued within landscape to become abstracted shapes and natural forms. 

I’m currently developing a new series of paintings for my next exhibition at Solomon Fine Art in 2026. I don’t plan or think too much at this stage; I just allow the work to be made. As the exhibition gets closer, I’ll see what I have in the studio and start selecting work that has some overall connection and narrative.

Tom Climent is a painter based in Cork City. 

tomcliment.com

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Golden Thread Gallery

15 February – 29 March 2025

Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon’s internationally acclaimed opera-film, History of the Present (2023), was shown in exhibition format at Golden Thread Gallery (GTG), Belfast, earlier this year. Mary Stevens, GTG Exhibition Officer, with Fusco and Salmon created a site-specific installation to accompany the film, which included artworks, research material from the GTG archive, personal artefacts, and ephemera. In a related coincidence, the gallery is currently located in the building that was once Craftworld, a shop Fusco remembers visiting as a child. This adds another layer of connection and intimacy to an exhibition that has deep resonance within the Belfast context.

Filmed in Belfast in 2022, using 35mm film and video, History of the Present opens with a close-up of opera singer, Héloïse Werner, whose improvisational vocal work is transforming archival recordings of the ambient noises of The Troubles. Channelling the soundscape of war – sirens, helicopters, explosions, and so on – via the human voice, Werner’s vocalisations have an unsettling yet riveting effect. This dramatic – and yes, operatic – opening establishes an overarching inquiry of embodied human suffering that struggles to find expression. Themes of silencing and censorship, particularly of women and working-class communities, are found throughout Salmon’s inventive filming, and in Fusco’s deeply personal libretto.

A collaborative work, History of the Present is a ‘total work of art’ or Gesamtkunstwerk in the Wagnerian sense. It utilises a range of elements, including composer Annea Lockwood’s tremendous soundscapes, personal experience, abstracted images, disembodied voices, and vocal recordings to express subjective realities. The artwork title reflects philosopher Michel Foucault’s view that the ‘history of the present’ should be the starting point for an enquiry into the past. In that spirit, the cinematography concentrates on images of contemporary Belfast, while Fusco’s libretto provides a present-time reflection on her experiences growing up in Ardoyne during The Troubles.

Working-class areas and the women of those communities bore the brunt of the violence and hardship of the conflict; yet in the grand narrative, such voices are rarely heard. As the libretto states: “All across Belfast, all of us, always watching in silence.” Saying nothing became a way of life, a survival strategy. Libretto, cinematography, and soundscape each work in unison to convey that lived reality. The spoken words from the libretto are all the more powerful because they are devoid of overt polemic or rhetoric. At one point, the disembodied voice delivers a quietly spoken litany of experiences of daily life, played out against a backdrop of existential threat. Especially moving is the recounting of the journey home from school, experiencing harassment and fear, and keeping quiet so as not to upset a parent. In this, and the other deeply affecting accounts of growing up in a war zone, the personal is political.

Salmon’s cinematography is sensitive and moving. Images of Ardoyne show contemporary daily life in all its ordinariness, yet the residue of the conflict is visible on people’s faces, and in the physical landscape. Its legacy is reinforced by images of the peace lines or peace walls – physical manifestations of sectarian division and distrust. An aerial shot of rows of identical red brick terraced houses, divided by an imposing peace wall, conveys this very powerfully. Equally impactful is the recurring motif of the red brick, “with its three cast holes, sustained by water and hardened by history” (as described in the libretto), which becomes a metaphor for both entrenched positions and human resilience. 

There are several moments of visual beauty, such as a lingering image of the peace wall which has been given gradient colours by the opaque glass of a domestic backdoor. This and other images remind us of how The Troubles encroached on the most private of spaces and relationships.

History of the Present ends with an image of Belfast Port at night, as the camera tracks slowly, almost imperceptibly, across the screen. A soothing voice gives directions that are fine and precise. The effect is calming – comforting, even – ushering a de-escalation of the heightened emotions so beautifully and sensitively evoked by this compelling work.

Mary Flanagan  is a writer based in County Roscommon.

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JOSEPHINE KELLIHER REFLECTS ON THE PRACTICE OF MICHAEL KANE.

Michael Kane was among the first artists to join the fledgling Rubicon Gallery in 1990. We worked together intensively for 25 years and continue to collaborate. Michael’s exhibition ‘Works on Paper’ at Taylor Galleries (22 May – 21 June) coincides with his 90th birthday, so this is an ideal moment for me to reflect on the specific characteristics and narratives of his work.

The Labour of Creativity 

For decades, Michael’s home in Waterloo Road was his studio – or his studio was his home. There, I encountered a factory of creativity, a place of doers and makers. Michael alternated between the barely defined borders of his studio and living spaces, while his daughter, Aoife, and son, Oisin, worked separately on their own projects. Each had a private workspace, and everyone’s endeavour felt equally important; results and outcomes were shared and marvelled at collectively. 

In my own experience, creative projects were not often validated and categorised as ‘labour’ at that time. Similarly, ‘labour’ was not seen as creative, and the uneven process of creative labour was rarely the subject of animated conversation between adult and child. I observed there, Michael’s view on the imagination as a sacred space for creativity, a territory worth defending, in which information and emotions collage into something greater than the sum of those parts.

Michael works every day; he doesn’t wait for inspiration or any special circumstances. Michael wears work clothes, and he takes breaks for food, errands, periods of reading or news, but keeps these short. He’s intolerant of unscheduled interruptions. Michael has several projects on the go and is always starting new things. He assembles and manipulates materials and imagery; by sheer effort and trust in the process, his big bold paintings are laboriously coaxed into being.

Michael’s perspective and regard for his own labour explains his choice of subjects. Many monumental pieces portray the nobility, resilience and value of people engaged in physical labour and he celebrates mechanics, construction workers, stevedores, and factory workers as much as he does poets, gods and athletes. 

Michael’s imagery is enriched by his reading, which he dismisses as “unscholarly and unsystematic,” although his autobiography, BLIND DOGS: A Personal History (Gandon Editions, 2023) chronicles an impressive reading list, already completed in his teens. Michael’s fluency in ancient Greek and Roman literature is an important context for his work – from the series ‘Agamemnon Felled’ to others exploring the fates of Icarus, Marsyas, Narcissus and more. He also published original poems informed by the classics: REALMS (1974) and IF IT’S TRUE (2005). 

The Greeks saw their gods as utterly fallible, whose desires, ego and hubris are just like our own. Michael’s gods are full of struggle; they are sometimes depicted god-like, roaming the city, and sometimes appear in their ordinary human form. His interest in literature is balanced with an insatiable appetite for news, and both inform Michael’s understandings of human nature. 

Places and People

Born in county Wicklow, Micheal wanted access to the bigger world of his imagination and, in many crucial ways, he found that in Dublin. The city is the backdrop for so many works that he has been described as a painter of urban spaces. Speaking with curator Seán Kissane in 2008, Michael said: “I don’t think I do urban landscapes as such. I do versions of an urban atmosphere, or something like that.” 

Arriving in Dublin in his twenties, Michael interacted with writers Brendan Behan, Anthony Cronin and Patrick Kavanagh, painters James McKenna, Alice Hanratty, John Kelly, Charlie Cullen and Micheal Cullen, and several musicians, including Ronnie Drew and others in The Dubliners. Dublin was where Michael found his community of creatives and formed the “first inkling” of the possibility of life as a professional artist. 

Michael also invested in building an ecosystem to support other artists. In the 70s he founded the sociopolitical magazine, Structure, commissioning original writing and art from young creatives. He established Independent Artists, an alternative to the rigid, prevailing gallery system, and was co-founder of Project Art Centre, a radical arts venue in Temple Bar. Michael was among the first members of Aosdána. So, while it’s true that Michael was drawn to Dublin as a place, it was the community, world vision, and sense that creatives could live collectively that kept him in the city. 

Feminism and Tenderness

Michael often paints women. He is interested in the ways that women show up in the world and is aware of how the world shows up for women. His female subjects are mothers, gods, labourers, lovers, artists, survivors, students, and sex workers – each depiction, though complex, is wholly unambiguous. The women in his paintings squarely stare down or dismiss the viewer as they go about their business.

Michael never depicts women in fanciful poses; they assert themselves in the picture plane as they might assert themselves in a world that is often neither fair nor easy. He catalogues a malevolent cast of male characters circling these women – from the leering elders around the biblical Susanna to fiendish predators Michael recalls from twentieth-century Ireland. There is real tenderness in small drawings, watercolours and prints of women and girls that address violence, abuse, and cover-ups by church, school, and society. Many stories from this period recur in works throughout his career, never forgotten nor fully resolved.

When I started Rubicon Gallery, I was 21 years old, and a recent graduate. Michael was 55, a senior art college lecturer, and an established artist and cultural figure. I never felt less than Michael’s equal; business and creative directions were all up for discussion. I was invited to offer robust points of view, however contrary to his own, and together we negotiated solutions. Visual artists often won’t describe what they plan to do; meaning percolates through in the making. Sometimes it’s challenging to reduce what is done to plain words, because these things are often part of a longer unfinished body of work. Working with an artist over several years, I see that glimmers of insight emerge between the cracks and meaning coalesces over time. I am privileged for the time I spend with Michael in his studio, and for his personal humour and the stories that illuminate the work.

Josephine Kelliher works internationally as a Curator, Art Advisor and Cultural Strategist.

Michael Kane’s exhibition ‘Works on Paper’ runs at Taylor Galleries from 22 May to 21 June. 

taylorgalleries.ie

Michael’s work is also being shown in ‘Staying with the Trouble’ at IMMA (2 May – 21 September).

imma.ie

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Draíocht

19 February – 3 May 2025

Rich Gilligan’s ‘The First Draft’ at Draíocht sees the artist curate and revise his extensive body of work, both artistic and commercial, in a gallery setting for the first time. The Amharc Fhine Gall exhibition commission has allowed Gilligan to revisit his archive and his origins in and around Blanchardstown.¹ ‘The First Draft’ may not, in the main, be directly derived from the local area, but it presents the work of a photographer whose aesthetic and method were born in the surrounding streets and estates.

Outside of his commercial work, Gilligan is best known for his skateboard-related photography. His book, DIY (19/80 Éditions, 2013), for example, catalogues skater places across the world and finds in them commonalities – despite the obvious territorial and cultural differences in the myriad of places he has visited – whether a style, an attitude, or a shared take on the urban/suburban experience. Skaters are both part of their cities and exist at a slant to it. They use the urban environment in ways that critique the banality of city and suburban living and yet are dependent on and cherishes it. There is something creatively makeshift and independent about skate culture that is crucial to Gilligan’s photographs. His regard for the street, for concrete and tarmac, along with a sense that skating is pushing against constraints, is at the centre of the kind of photographic practice which Gilligan has made for himself.

One of new pieces exhibited here is Linger, a looped digital film work from 2024, which is taken up with the cycle of a carwash, as seen from inside the car. Sitting on one of the elongated sides of a triangular prism structure in the middle of the gallery, Linger becomes a series of fluid abstracts made from the water, suds and drying air of the carwash. The piece shifts between something deeply ordinary to something much more mysterious and elemental yet always manufactured. In its textures and colours, it works as if the ethos and the constituent parts of the photographs on the walls have been condensed into this sequence. 

On other side of the prism is another film piece, Untitled (2017), which follows a skateboarder down a street in Williamsburg, New York. The black and white of the film is echoed and accentuated by the monochrome clothing of the Orthodox Jews and other pedestrians whom the skater passes by. The film poses questions about the relationship between the skater and those walking on and off the pavement – whether they are all equally street inhabitants or flâneurs, or whether the skater lives apart form, and in critique of, the pavement walkers. 

Taking these two works together, as they look out across the gallery towards the photographs on the walls, gives a strong guide to Gilligan’s work here. He is interested in the shapes, patterns, colours and visual sensations of city life, and he is drawn to the actual and implicit stories of those who live and find a way to play in urban environments.

The walls of the Draíocht gallery include sequences of work from Gilligan’s back catalogue, arranged so as to create an atmosphere, or series of atmospheres, of urban life. The first skateboarding images from Birmingham and Dublin flank a bonfire at Mountview (very much signalling the importance of the locale) from 2004, and between these is a puddle on tarmac in London from 2011, reflecting the sun in a cloudy sky and echoing the light and water imagery of Linger across the way. The other works in the gallery follow this pattern, with light – and therefore a kind of tender hopefulness – being a common motif in the petting of a horse, lit from behind by the sun, kids watching a bonfire, or sunlight on a bush in New York. 

Gilligan’s work, consistently through the two decades covered in ‘The First Draft’, takes the energy, independence and creativity of the skateboarder as its foundation, seeing an urban world, full of contained possibility and dignity.

Colin Graham is a writer, farmer, and Professor of English at Maynooth University. 

¹ Rich Gilligan ‘The First Draft’ is the 13th edition of Amharc Fhine Gall (The Fingal Gaze) – an exhibition programme initiated in 2004 by Fingal County Council Arts Office, in collaboration with Draíocht, to celebrate the work of Fingal artists at all career stages. 

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ANTONIA HELD REVIEWS A RECENT EXHIBITION AT WÜRTTEMBERGISCHER KUNSTVEREIN STUTTGART.

In a time when images and their contexts are consumed and forgotten in the blink of an eye, the question arises: Are we still capable of truly looking? As streaming services flood us with endless content, and algorithms dictate our viewing behaviour, reality becomes increasingly blurred. It is worth pausing and reflecting on an artist who not only utilised the medium of television but radically questioned it: Samuel Beckett.

The exhibition ‘On Television, Beckett’ at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (19 October 2024 – 12 January 2025) presented for the first time all seven television plays that Samuel Beckett produced between 1966 and 1985 for the South German Broadcasting Corporation (SDR, now SWR) in Stuttgart: He Joe (1966), Geister Trio (1977), … nur noch Gewölk … (1977), Quadrat I and II (1981), Nacht und Träume (1982), and Was Wo (1985).

Curated by Gerard Byrne and Judith Wilkinson, the exhibition highlighted Beckett as a visual artist, portraying him as a precise designer of his works. Newly discovered photographs and production documents from the SWR Historical Archive, which document Beckett’s creative process over three decades, demonstrate that Beckett was not only an author but also deeply involved in the direction, visual composition, and editing of his films – pushing the boundaries of television as an artistic medium. His minimalist yet innovative aesthetic infused the medium with new depth and solidified his status as a visionary artist.

In the expansive exhibition space of the Kunstverein, the film works were projected within four cubes, which together formed an open, slightly offset fifth space, resembling a courtyard, the design of which borrows from Geistertrio. This was supplemented by two CRT monitors, one displaying Beckett’s film, Film (1965), the other a part of Alexander Kluge’s Deutschland im Herbst (1978), alongside a conversation with Otto Schily – lawyer for the far-left militant group, Red Army Faction (RAF) – and Eberhard Itzenplitz’s 1970 film, Bambule, which had originally been written by RAF member, Ulrike Meinhof, and therefore had for some time been banned from broadcast.

The exhibition vividly connected Beckett’s collaboration with SDR to the political history of Stuttgart. During the German Autumn of 1977, when the city was in the international spotlight, due to the actions of the RAF and the Stammheim trials, Geister Trio and … nur noch Gewölk … were created. Beckett’s themes – isolation, repetition, and the search for meaning – reflect the societal tensions of that time and touch on questions of freedom, control, and existence.

In Beckett’s television plays, he employed a radical reduction that questioned the very nature of the medium itself. That contemporary artists continue to engage with these works not only shows Beckett’s enduring relevance but also underscores the transformation and evolution of the media landscape since then. This was impressively addressed and expanded upon in the artists’ talks on 11 January.

The event included a conversation between Declan Clarke and Gerard Byrne about Clarke’s new film, If I Fall, Don’t Pick Me Up (2024), which had been shown to the audience the previous evening. Known for his cinematic investigations into modernity, conflict, and the hidden stories behind historical upheavals, Clarke brings a narrative sensitivity that can be compared to Beckett’s storytelling. While Beckett used television as a medium to abstract movements and question the structure of time, Clarke does something similar in his cinematic examinations of history and ideology.

Another engagement with Beckett’s ideas was found in the works of Doireann O’Malley, who merges virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and 3D technologies with cinematic and installation techniques. While Beckett explored television as a technological frontier, altering perceptions of body and space, O’Malley starts from a similar point, but in a world where machine intelligence and digital identities are already part of our daily lives. In their conversation with Judith Wilkinson, it became clear that their works address not only media transformations but also identity, gender, and perception, reflecting the changing narrative strategies in art. Beckett’s characters, often caught between dissolution and repetition, thus find a modern counterpart in O’Malley’s explorations of fluid identities and alternative states of consciousness.

The programme also addressed the artistic research projects of 2014 Turner Prize winner, Duncan Campbell, and the subsequent conversation between the artist and the curator bridged Beckett’s work with the present, opening up space for discussions. Campbell’s films, which deal with historical figures and political topics, explore the boundaries between documentary truth and narrative construction. This approach recalls Beckett’s staging of language and memory; where Beckett used forgetting, unreliability, and fragmentation as narrative strategies, Campbell questions the mechanisms by which history is constructed and passed down. Just as Beckett blended absurdity and seriousness, Campbell works with the tensions between documentary accuracy and narrative manipulation. In both, what appears as fact often remains a subjective and manipulable representation of reality.

‘On Television, Beckett’ made clear, through its combination of archival research, a comprehensive presentation of Beckett’s works, and conversations involving contemporary artistic reflections, that creative innovation often arises not from an abundance of possibilities, but from the conscious limitation to the essential – an idea more relevant than ever in times of information overload and manipulative media strategies. Perhaps herein lies answers to the yearning for authenticity in an increasingly simulated world. Beckett showed us the way – now it is up to us to truly look and continue his gaze.

Antonia Held is an art historian based in Stuttgart, Germany.

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Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin

1 February – 8 March 2025

In printmaking, the thing seen – the most visible layer – is not what the artist has made. Painting has a version of this dichotomy – the application of paint reveals and conceals at the same time – but in printmaking, the viewer is denied a direct encounter with the made object, the matrix itself, and presented with a version of it, a reflection or afterimage, a material ghost. If I’m labouring the point, it’s because in this two-person exhibition, what’s seen directly and what’s available as clue or implication seem at play between the different artworks themselves. That, and the fact that Tony O’Malley’s work is finished (he died in 2003), while Maria Atanacković’s work continues as a going concern. 

O’Malley’s abstraction is rooted in landscape, in the school of St. Ives, for example, but also in numerous Irish peers and predecessors. His home patch was Kilkenny, but his carborundum prints have exotic titles like Haria and Isla de Graciosa – Canary Island locations with sunny, relatively unencumbered visions of the natural world. His multi-plate, printed surfaces are compressed, with varying degrees of texture and translucence, enabling overlapping marks to retain a semblance of autonomy within their complex, visual fields. 

Atanacković’s screenprints are flat. Without modulation of hue or application, they rely on juxtaposition for their visual excitement. A title like Intervals of Quiet prompts thoughts of meditation or graphic scores, but parallel arrangements of variously coloured stripes equally suggest quilt-making. Atanacković applies colour dispassionately. She’s not interested in bodily gestures, but in the relationship of parts. With a background in textiles, and a penchant for clothing and other artistic applications, her complex shapeshifting also suggests a kind of aesthetic utility, functioning best in relation to other things. 

In relation to O’Malley, her work seems more analytical and less felt, but that’s close to a tautology when so much of her work happens through mechanical processes. Two large works on stretched linen are described as ‘reactive prints’. New to me, this is seemingly the result of digital files being transferred to the fabric and fixed by heat. In Fragments of a Gesture, differently shaped and coloured elements crowd within their right-angled format. The result is compositionally balanced, but there seems little else at stake. 

It’s unfair to wish for something unavailable, but I’d love to see how this handsome patternmaking might respond to being fashioned in three dimensions. Closer to this idea, if not quite sculptural either, wall-based, plywood assemblages of individually cut and coloured segments coalesce into locked formations or bloom outwards into counterbalanced arrangements. Construct 1 is reminiscent of Jean Arp (though the versatile Sophie Taeuber-Arp seems more relevant to the overall practice), while Barbara Hepworth came to mind in a series of related screenprints with curved elements, balancing circles and oblongs into a sculptural tension.

O’Malley liked working with discarded materials, making totem-like objects from lengths of wood, nails and string. Often resembling crude musical instruments, their ritualistic quality is most evident in a series of Good Friday paintings, made on the eponymous day and bearing suitable analogies. On behalf of Graphic Studio Dublin, James O’Nolan and James McCreary made regular trips to O’Malley’s Callan studio in the late 1990s, where mixtures of carborundum paste enabled him to apply his painterly methods directly onto plastic plates. The results were proofed back in Dublin, with the painter’s wishes interpreted through colour notes and conversations. On some very large plates, O’Malley worked outside in the garden, swapping his paint brushes for a sweeping brush. Firenze II, with broad swathes of pink, orange and black, its aerial perspective tethered with scratchy lines, is simply gorgeous. If O’Malley’s graphic work lacks something of the tangible materiality of his work in painting and mixed media, this is countered by a gained luminosity, the sunlight that so preoccupied him captured within the printed folds. 

While the exhibition sets up abstraction as a shared language, the tendency to abstract from the natural landscape, or towards universal forms, is the essential difference. ‘The Shape of Memory’ may refer to how artists conjure images from mental states, but also, perhaps, how material can recall its former shape after technological processes. Though made at different times, all prints here are undated, as though preserving them against chronology and its associated decay. This seems an unnecessary caution, because in the best examples of printmaking, what we see and what has been are equally present.

John Graham is a Dublin-based artist and writer.

johngraham.ie

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JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS DAPHNE WRIGHT AHEAD OF HER SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM.

Joanne Laws: We both studied in Sligo RTC (now Atlantic Technological University). I studied Fine Art in the late-90s, during an inspiring period for female Irish sculptors. Was there a sense of optimism at this time, or did momentum happen against the odds?

Daphne Wright: Well, everybody left in the 80s – the recession was brutal. I left Ireland in 1989. In the 90s, I just remember going from fellowship to fellowship and residency to residency, in order to sustain my practice. I was a fellow in Cheltenham, a Henry Moore fellow in Manchester, and spent a year in the British School at Rome. During my education in Sligo in the early 80s, really strong women sculptors were constantly being pointed out to us; I was learning all the time through talking and conversation. The teaching staff in Sligo at the time included Seán Larkin, Seán McSweeney, Fred Conlon, Con Lynch, Nuala Maloney, Ruairí Ó Cuív, Seán O’Reilly, and John O’Leary. There was also Robert Stewart and Peter Charney – he was Australian and came with a completely different viewpoint. I studied sculpture and ceramics, but we were such a small year group that we were all friendly with each other. 

JL: Now that you’re back in Dublin, do you have a studio?

DW: I’ve made two rooms of my house into one space, and that’s where I normally work. I’m very grateful for that because renting a studio is just so expensive. That’s how I’ve had to do it, ever since I had children; it has become a particular kind of process, and I love the routine. When I’m fabricating a large sculpture, I temporarily rent the workshop of a cabinet maker in the northwest of Ireland. 

JL: What does your day-to-day studio routine look like?

DW: I would spend a lot of time testing, exploring, and making things. I’m not just testing the materials; I also read, research, and feed my brain at the same time. Once I start to understand what I’m doing, then I make – which is often the nicest part. On occasion, I would work up to a really large piece, which is not just about making, but also about raising the money to fund it.

JL: The life-size figures of your two sons have previously featured in your work. Were they made through casting processes?

DW: When the boys were smaller, I made Kitchen Table (2014) in hand-painted Jesmonite, which involved casting each of them separately in smaller pieces. This was while they were just emerging from being children and going into adolescence. Over ten years later, I’ve gotten consensus to cast them again, now that they are on the cusp of manhood, for a new work called Sons and Couch (2025) which will be exhibited for the first time this summer. 

The figures are complete casts and are hollow. They were fabricated using the old-fashioned life cast skill, and that’s really important. It’s not computer-generated or 3D printed; it’s a very labour intensive, traditional process. It’s also quite an undertaking for the person being cast, because the body is completely encased, albeit at different times. You use the plaster to take a mould of the body, as if trapping a moment in time. 

When the casts are assembled as a complete sculpture, everything is then painted in a subdued kind of colour – one that has the essence of memory. It isn’t real colour but how one might remember colour. The figures are then assembled into an installation or sculptural scene. That’s what I’m grappling with at the moment, because I sometimes have more elements than I need. It can be a painful process, editing down to just what is necessary and what functions. 

JL: The domestic seems to be a reoccurring subject matter within your sculptural arrangements, which includes figures, personal items, plants, and household appliances. Why is that?

DW: Well, there are a couple of things that make this kind of complicated. Firstly, you go to museums and discover that there are very few women artists represented in collections. There’s something really interesting about the casts and the trapping of time that monumentalise the domestic, while placing motherhood and the feminine at the heart of the museum. In addition, I often wonder why there are certain objects within our museums that are mute or silent. They become stagnant, I suppose, and their sense of being an artwork actually disappears. For me, that’s a central concern. When an artwork has a presence and a soul of its own, then the other things just become props.  

Aside from Sons and Couch, there will be other objects in the show, including Fridge Still Life (2021) – an open refrigerator made from unfired clay, containing the usual things on the shelves, such as a chicken, ready for the oven. On top of the fridge, there’s a large vase of tulips in the process of decay. So, in many ways, it’s a contemporary still life, evoking questions at the centre of domestic life: who fills the fridge, who empties the fridge, and who are we cooking for? 

JL: A solo exhibition of your work will be presented at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford this summer. It will feature new work, developed in response to sculptures in the Ashmolean Cast Gallery. What can you tell us about this show?

DW: The exhibition title, ‘Deep Rooted Things’, is taken from a line in the Yeats poem, The Municipal Gallery Revisited (1939): “My children may find here Deep-rooted things.” The Ashmolean Cast Gallery is quite amazing. It contains ancient Greek and Roman casts that are almost complete. There’s a fascinating collection of athletes that really do still hold the qualities of young men. I took the children to the Ashmolean a lot when they were small, so in a way, it forms part of their upbringing and their learning. One’s fascination, as a mother and as an artist, looking at objects, imbues them, in turn, with fascination. 

The exhibition also responds to the Hugh Lane Gallery Collection, looking specifically at the still life painting tradition. The collection contains flower paintings by some of the very first Irish women to have gone to university or art college, many of them studying in the UK or France. Their flower paintings are quite beautiful and quietly radical. There are also some very poignant portraits, including a beautiful one of W.B. Yeats as a boy reading a book, painted by his father, John Butler Yeats, in c.1886. 

These artworks will be reproduced in an accompanying publication, alongside  writing by Emily LaBarge and from Ashmolean Museum Director, Alexander Sturgis, and Hugh Lane Gallery Director, Barbara Dawson. The show is about combining those institutions and looking at the differences in their collection: one is a world class collection of antiquity; while the other is a more modern national collection containing contemporary works. They employ different languages, but for me, it’s all museology, permeated by the domestic.  

JL: There seems to be the recurring theme of young men, portrayed throughout the ages? 

DW: That’s true – young men at a pivotal point in their lives, whether the young athletes in the Ashmolean collection, or my own sons on the cusp of adulthood. Arguably, there were similar pressures for young men in both the classical and contemporary eras. A lot of this subtext is not verbal; however, we know it instinctively. I think that is largely where my work exists – at these kind of thresholds that are universally understood.

‘Ashmolean Now, Daphne Wright: Deep-Rooted Things’ will be presented at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 13 June 2025 to 8 February 2026. The making of new works for this exhibition has been supported by a Visual Art Project Award from The Arts Council of Ireland.

ashmolean.org

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Ormston House 

21 February – 26 April 2025

In Samuel Beckett’s dramatic monologue, Not I (1972), the central character, Mouth, stretches the limits of language, being, and experience. In all her fragility and fragmentation, Mouth seemingly does not make much sense. Yet within her staccato speech, things are revealed, even if they are not communicated; we bear witness to a wide variety of breakdowns across body, identity, and language. There is no resolution in Not I – just an expectation that the voice will keep looping, even after the curtain comes down.

Arguably, Daniel Tuomey’s recent solo exhibition at Ormston House, ‘Stuck, a decomposition’, takes influence from Beckett’s play, not only in the inclusion of the words “Not I” within the artist’s charcoal drawings, but also in its entropic essence. That is, Tuomey’s show is largely an inquiry into disintegration: of speech, space, and senses of self. Using interdisciplinary mediums and methodologies – from architectural drawings to an invocation of balladry – Tuomey’s work deconstructs and reconstructs space and voice, breaking them down again and again.

‘Stuck, a decomposition’ follows the disembodied monologue of a narrator, trapped in the chimney of a Georgian townhouse, trying to make sense of the claustrophobic feeling of perpetuity. The narrator poses rhetorical questions to the audience: Where do we come from? Where might we begin and end? Where might we be going, if the paths keep changing towards an ever more precarious future?

Tuomey’s work, in part, reflects what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi refers to as the “slow cancellation of the future,” whereby time has been constricted and impacted by capitalism, so much so that imagining a future is now impossible. Instead, we find ourselves stuck, struggling to find meaning or hope that things will improve. Our narrator reminds us that “this is a crisis, by the way”, and while drawn to understanding its root cause, is also interested in the nuanced transformation of Georgian spaces, and the power structures that have historically controlled language usage in Ireland. 

Though Tuomey’s familial connections to Limerick permeate the show, the Treaty City also typifies the ‘austerity conservation’ of Georgian buildings, in which developers, landlords, and local authorities deploy glorified narratives of ‘heritage’ to stimulate external capital investment, with few material, social, or cultural benefits for the local community. One thing is said that means another; the tenses shift, history is transmogrified. 

This is further highlighted through the artist’s use of randomised voice and visual patterns. A series of wall-mounted drawings, titled Pucaí (2024-25), speaks to the shapeshifting quality of the eponymous Irish mythological figure. Tuomey’s audio-visual work, An explanation (2025), attempts to detail a genealogy of voice and culture, but also undoes itself through its self-editing software, constantly reordering the narratives that question its own authenticity and ownership. The episodes emanate from the chimney sculpture, Stack (2024-25), merging the body with the architecture, leaving only a voice that is both distinctly Irish and not Irish. This voice does not seem to know its own origins, and struggles to speak.

Tuomey appears to follow Frederic Jameson’s call to ‘always historicise’ by unsettling the presumed ‘naturalness’ of decomposition, and instead considers how ‘decay’ – cultural, economic, spatial, linguistic, and so on – is controlled and orchestrated. Tuomey references this in a multitude of ways, from creating Stack in the exact measurements of his body, to his choreographed movements on opening night, which included conducting the audience to move in unison around the gallery space. 

Overall, Tuomey’s exhibition deals conceptually with haunting, and what remains when everything is taken away. It plays upon Irish cultural memory and our enduring anxieties around property, as well as notions of authentic personhood. The work seems to respond to the notion that Romantic Ireland – envisioned in her gendered representations – is dead but not gone. Instead, she might visit us in our shrinking spaces – box rooms, converted basements, chimneys – in all her different forms, sometimes speaking in our shared tongues, and sometimes rendered mute. 

Dr El Reid-Buckley is a researcher, writer and creative facilitator from Limerick City. 

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ST. DIABHAL DISCUSSES THEIR PRACTICE AND WORK IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERN MYTHOLOGY, HISTORY, AND A NEW CELTIC REVIVAL.

Evolution of Practice

I’ve always drawn to art, for as long as I can remember. Art was the one thing I truly loved and felt I could excel at. I wasn’t the most academic in school, but art was the subject I poured my energy into. It was the one area where I felt confident, and it showed – I earned an A in art for my Leaving Cert, which really highlighted where my focus lay. After school, I pursued a PLC course in Kilkenny before moving on to study at the Limerick School of Art & Design (LSAD).

In college, I continued to draw, but early on, many of my tutors advised me to move away from this style of art, thinking it wasn’t the most interesting path. I then shifted towards photography and lens-based media, working a lot with video and photography. This opened up a new passion for styling and creating characters, often using myself and my friends as subjects. However, the themes of folklore, witchcraft, and even online character creation continued to emerge in my work.

These themes, I believe, have deep roots in my childhood. I spent a lot of time playing with dolls, which was something I kept to myself, as I was quite ashamed of it at the time. But as I grew older and became more comfortable with my identity, especially as a gay man, I realised that these characters I created were an important part of my personal journey. In a way, my art today is still about creating these imaginary figures, transforming them into something meaningful.

Over time, my practice has evolved significantly. I’ve experimented with various styles, but I’ve now reached a place where I feel that I’ve successfully merged all of my interests – my love of folklore and myth, alongside my passion for fashion and pop culture – into one cohesive artistic vision.

History, Folklore, and Mythology

Irish history, folklore, and mythology are at the heart of my artistic practice. Growing up, I was captivated by the mysticism of these stories. They added an enchanting element to everyday life, transforming the mundane into something extraordinary. As a child, I often retreated into my own imagination, creating worlds full of creatures and characters. This became a form of escape, allowing me to sit for hours drawing and painting the myths that fascinated me.

Living in rural Ireland, I was surrounded by stories passed down from my grandparents about fairies, ancient spirits, and other mystical beings. My family would often take us on day trips to ancient castles and woods, which fuelled my imagination. I would envision gods, goddesses, and otherworldly figures inhabiting the ruins and landscapes around me.

As a child of my generation, I was drawn to the mythology of other cultures – Egyptian and Greek myths, along with magical worlds in movies like Harry Potter. In a way, Irish folklore felt almost embarrassing to embrace, reduced to symbols like leprechauns and shamrocks. But as I grew older, I began to delve deeper into our native folklore, shifting my perspective from seeing it as something outdated to something vibrant and meaningful. I was amazed by its richness and complexity, and I realised that there is so much to discover. Even today, I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface, with years of exploration ahead of me.

Ancient Myths for Today

In the early days of my work, I didn’t have a set style – I found myself bouncing from one interest to the next. But over time, I’ve developed a consistent theme in my art, which mostly stems from research into folklore. My long-haired characters, for example, are inspired by the Banshee, known for her long hair that she would comb endlessly. I’ve also drawn inspiration from the gold jewellery found in archaeological sites across Ireland and other Gaelic regions. But for me, the goal has been to reimagine these ancient artefacts in a contemporary context.

I wanted to see what would happen if an Instagram influencer had travelled back in time, posing atop the Hill of Tara, decked out in ancient torcs and brooches. This idea of blending ancient history with modern-day aesthetics fascinates me – what would our traditions look like if they hadn’t been lost or overlooked, but rather evolved alongside us?

The colours I use are often inspired by nature and the Irish tricolour. The flag’s palette of green, orange, and white has been a foundational colour scheme in my work. I gravitate towards these natural tones, such as greens, oranges, browns, and golds. However, I also enjoy adding pops of neon here and there, which is a little nod to my school days, when I would cover my notebooks in sketches with bright highlighters.

Having spent half of my life in the countryside and now living in the city, I feel like I have a unique perspective on urban life. Limerick is my new home, and it’s where I began the journey that has shaped my work today. I’ve always known I wanted to move to the city because I didn’t fully feel like myself in the country. But now, at this stage of my life, I’ve developed a deep love for both rural and urban life.

What I want to convey through my work is that there’s culture to be found in both rural and urban settings. Limerick itself is a blend of the old and new, which mirrors my work. I try to mix the modern elements of the city with the ancient traditions to show how our heritage can evolve and thrive in today’s world, without being lost in time.

A New Celtic Revival

I’d like to think that I’m contributing to a modern Celtic revival, as that’s definitely a goal of mine – to reimagine the stories and characters of the past that could otherwise be lost to time. These ancient figures and myths often remain in their original settings, not given new life in our contemporary world. Through my work, I want to highlight that Irish culture is not only important but also cool – as cringey as it might sound. Our mythology is a vast, never-ending pool of stories that anyone can explore, if they’re interested.

It’s inspiring to see so many other artists embracing this movement as well. Artists are taking symbols like the Claddagh design and turning them into modern icons of Irish fashion, moving beyond their association with tourist shops and souvenirs. I think it’s essential to celebrate the positive aspects of our history, while of course, not ignoring the more challenging parts. Irish artists today are doing a great job of balancing this, and I’m proud to be part of that conversation.

Merch and the Contemporary Artist

I’ve always had a love for fashion, and it was definitely a driving force in my work, especially in my earlier years, when I focused a lot on fashion illustration. So, it felt almost inevitable that I would eventually explore the world of merchandise. I wanted to find a way to bring my art to life and make it wearable, allowing people to own a piece of my work in a practical way. I also love seeing how people style my merch – it’s exciting to see how others interpret my designs.

I do believe that merch has become an important necessity for artists today. It provides an outlet to sell work on a larger scale than a single art piece would. Being a self-employed artist is challenging enough, but merch gives artists the chance to create something beautiful that people can wear, while also supporting the artist’s practice financially.

Up Coming

Right now, my main focus is continuing to develop the world I’ve created. I want to bring it more to life, and I feel that animation is where my passion lies at the moment. I’m largely self-taught in animation, and while it’s more challenging than working with still images, it’s a medium I’m really excited to explore further. So, for me, the goal is to continue honing my skills in animation and push myself in that direction.

I’ve also been working on creating a set of tarot cards, and I plan to release a physical deck soon that people can use. Tarot has fascinated me for a long time, and I feel that it fits so naturally with the themes of mythology and the occult that are central to my work. My mind often races with ideas, so it’s sometimes hard to focus on just one thing, but I think I’ll keep exploring new ventures and see what resonates with me and my audience the most.

St. Diabhal is a visual artist whose work investigates Irish history and folklore and the strong role of masculinity and female empowerment within these stories.

@st.diabhal

diabhal666.bigcartel.com

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BEBHINN EILISH DISCUSSES HER WORK AND PRACTICE IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERN MYTHOLOGY, HISTORY, AND A NEW CELTIC REVIVAL.

Evolution of Practice

I’ve always been an artist, of course not professionally, but ever since I was young, I have struggled to identify myself beyond being a creative. Thankfully, as a child, my mam nurtured my artistic ability, and, more importantly, never doubted my talent.

I got my degree in Graphic Design, and learned very valuable skills that enhance my practice. I’m very happy to be a self-taught artist; had I studied fine art, my practice could have evolved in a completely different way.

Although I always considered myself an artist, I didn’t get started as a painter until 2021 when I lost my mam. I was an unemployed recent graduate, amidst the pandemic, and had been my mam’s carer for years. I had lost my forever muse – the greatest love I’d ever known, and the only way I could begin to process and move through the grief was to paint. Over the last four years, my style, subject matter, skillset, and materials have changed countless times, and although they will continue to evolve, I finally feel like I have my vision as an artist. Over the last two years, my themes have stayed consistent: grief and death, cultural taboos surrounding women and the female body, myths and folklore, symbolism and iconography, and a lot of personal talismans. I have also ventured into silversmithing and performance art, and it has been interesting to see how my work translates across these mediums.

History, Folklore, and Mythology

Since I was young, I have loved Ireland’s folklore, mythology, and history. Tales of Ireland’s past, both mythological and factual, were read to me by my mam. She had a keen interest in Irish history and named me after Bé Binn inion Urchadh – the mother of Brian Boru, High King of Ireland. These stories ultimately ignited a curiosity in me that continues to grow. I love how storytelling allows us to connect with and enter a realm beyond our own. This is something I try to emulate in my work.

The symbolism in ancient Irish motifs, alongside the intricate and deeply fascinating customs surrounding death in prehistoric Ireland, are most influential to my practice, as they are deeply rooted in grief.

Ancient Myths for Today

In Irish folklore, a lot of these characters are written about in great detail, but not all are visually imagined to accompany these stories. I like the idea, just like when reading a book, that the reader builds an image of the characters and space in their minds eye – that’s what I enjoy doing with folklore.

Folklore has and always will inspire both creatives and admirers. I think the interplay between past tales and contemporary art is extremely interesting and valuable, and will undoubtedly remain a catalyst for many artists for years to come.

I’d also like to mention how influential and inspirational Irish mythological figures can be on contemporary audiences. There’s an excellent piece written by Sharon Blackie for the Irish Times in 2019, on how Irish myth and folklore can inspire women to fight for ecological change, centred around one of my favourites, the Cailleach – a divine hag who fights the exploitation of the animals and the land.

A New Celtic Revival

I’d like to think I’m amongst the many artists who are preserving our cultural heritage, by helping to ensure the continuation and appreciation of these rich cultural traditions. I have definitely connected many with Irish folklore by sharing my work on social media, particularly from my last ‘Inktober’ series, where I depicted four Irish mythical beasts, each week for the month of October. During this series, someone online asked if I had created these characters and stories – I only wish I was that genius. However, this has inspired me to consider what mythological beasts I would invent for the world today – perhaps the seed for a future project.

Women, History, and Myth

There are many reasons why I love Irish folklore, but most important to me is its portrayal of strange, strong, and terrifying women. In pre-Christian Ireland, the divine female almost entirely dominates these stories. Female gods and mythical beings show a culture where women were central to society, in positions of power, and were regarded as the essence of all life, like the goddess Danú – the mother goddess of all Celtic gods and of the Tuatha De Danann (an ancient, magical people of Ireland). These powerful women, such as Danú, and devious tricksters like the Púca, are muses for my work.

I feel that women in Irish folklore are depicted more honestly than in myths of other cultures I’ve familiarised myself with. They show women to be morally complex, and often speak to the darker side of femininity: the repressed power, their surfacing rage, and the repercussions that has on the environment. I am a big fan of the many acts of retribution in Irish folklore, like Macha cursing the men of Ulster with harrowing pains of childbirth in their hour of need as punishment for making her race with horses while pregnant. Or the Dearg Due rising from the dead to suck the life from every man to do her wrong. These folktales bring a consciousness to the many attributes and skills of the great might of the feminine.

Merch and the Contemporary Artist

I’ve been really enjoying seeing other creatives express themselves in a way that invites, particularly new, audiences into the world of Irish design, but as an artist who primarily works as a painter, I have conflicting views on the topic – beyond environmental and consumerism concerns.

Merch is a great way for artists to diversify their income streams and stay financially sustainable. I’ve done it myself to stabilise my income, but I wish I didn’t have to depend on, or even consider these things. It’s beautiful and exciting – practically a walking promo of your work – and I’m honoured people like my work enough to wear it, but it can also feel a little underwhelming. My dream as an artist is to sustain myself through traditional revenue streams, like selling original paintings and prints, but unfortunately it’s not that simple. I feel forced to consider these avenues just to fund my work and feed myself. I don’t want to sound pessimistic, and I do love merch objectively, but sometimes it just feels like I am focusing too much on the marketability of my work, rather than what I want to create, and that just doesn’t sit right with me.

Coming Up

I am working on several different projects at the moment, some I’ve had on the back burner for years, and others I’ve been developing alongside. I think the reason I split my time between different projects that involve different mediums is to keep myself interested; if one is making me overwhelmed, I can easily switch to another, temporarily. A lot of my work is also very personal and I have to put myself in a place of emotional discomfort in order to pull from the source, so being able to refocus my energy elsewhere for a while is ideal. An example of this is my ongoing, and unseen, body of work entitled ‘I died with you’, which is an exploration of my own identity and self-discovery in my journey through grief after losing my mam. This body of work incorporates a lot of traditional ancient Irish motifs and is heavily influenced by practices surrounding death in Irish prehistory. I am also working on my ‘Etheric’ tarot deck, paper clay sculptures, and I’ve recently started jewellery school – I can’t wait to share what I’ve made.

Bebhinn Eilish is an artist and designer with an interest in grief, feminism, and Irish mythology.

@bebhinn_eilish

bebhinneilish.com

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AOIFE CAWLEY DISCUSSES HER WORK AND PRACTICE IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERN MYTHOLOGY, HISTORY, AND A NEW CELTIC REVIVAL.

Evolution of Practice

I have always been a creative person and I did art in school, but I really did not enjoy it. There is only so many times one can be forced to draw a still life of a pencil using only pencils! I think my art education in school was just drawing realistically, which I hated and I didn’t really gain an understanding of other processes. I went to the University of Limerick for two years to study French, German, and Irish. I dropped out after two years, but to be fair to me, I was only 17 when I started, plus I was sold a dream of travelling and working in the EU if I did languages!

I stayed living in Limerick, working full time in retail jobs, and I was quite unhappy. I was friends with a lot of people studying in Limerick School of Art and Design and seeing what they were making and what art could be. At the time, I took 35mm photos on a point and shoot, and uploaded them to Instagram. My group was really encouraging of this and said “You know you can do this at art college.”

At the time of my portfolio course, universities in Scotland were free to EU students. I got accepted into the Contemporary Art Practice undergraduate course at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. I did two years online (as I started right at the beginning of the pandemic) and did my final two years in person. I graduated last year in 2024.

I really like to highlight this story, as my journey to becoming an artist was not that straight forward. I would like people to know that there is a way around and into everything. It might not be the easiest or shortest route, but if you are determined, you will get there. I especially wish I could tell this to my younger self.

History, Folklore, and Mythology

My practice relies heavily on each of these strands. I think they’re all extremely relevant to each other too, and I’m interested in how they interact. For example, history can often be mythologised. I spent some time last summer on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne and became fascinated by one of the first recorded, and devastating, Viking attacks in Britain. Contemporary accounts of the time record how “fiery dragons” were seen in the sky while it took place. The lives of saints, such as Patrick, Brigid, or Colmcille, are so wrapped up in this incredible folklore that it becomes difficult to see the historically accurate figures anymore. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I would argue that the added elements of fantasy are in fact positive as they keep these events or figures alive. It also provides me with fantasy-like visions of the past that make it extremely easy to illustrate.

Ancient Styles for Today

I like to use colours that I am attracted to. If I go to a gallery and there is something bright and colourful, it is more than likely going to be my favourite piece in the exhibition. I began using a lot of fluorescent pink in my work, simply because it was my favourite colour. I then discovered that there was also a fluorescent orange and green and that they all worked together.

I think these bright and bold colours really lend themselves to my work for a number of reasons. The neon inks have a glow reminiscent of stained glass and illuminated manuscripts – media prominently used during medieval times. It is easy for people to forget how colourful the past was; for example, the Book of Kells is still remarked for its colour. If those monks had access to neon colours, they probably would have used them. I think that my medieval style of drawing is very accessible to contemporary audiences.

A New Celtic Revival

The inspiration for a lot of my work and designs comes from Celtic and medieval histories. I wrote my dissertation in university on the Irish Arts and Crafts movement to give myself a better understanding of why these symbols and stories are so linked with our national identity. I think, because of this time period, we have a very strong visual branding, but it is really cool to see other contemporary artists breathe new life into this genre in what has been described as a ‘Celtic Revival’. The artists and illustrators involved in this new wave demonstrate a diverse range of interpretations; they have really varied views on what St Brigid looked like, for example.

At the heart of my work is educating others and sharing my knowledge and research with a wider audience. I want to highlight the significance of these stories to our culture and identity and despite sometimes being thousands of years old, how they can be moulded into a contemporary contexts and meanings.

Women, History, and Myth

Women are central to my work, but I wouldn’t say I’m that interested in putting a spotlight on women from mythology, but more so from history. My ‘Mná na hÉireann’ risograph postcard set was born through frustration of there being a lack of representation of our female patriots, revolutionary leaders, patrons, and thinkers of the early 20th century. We were given a summer project while in university to identify a statue in our locality and to tear it down, amend it, or to just build a new one completely. It became quickly apparent that there were no statues in Limerick City of a named woman, and this really frustrated me. I had discovered that Kathleen Clarke’s (née Daly) family home was just up the road from me, but no statue, bust, or plaque could be seen anywhere. The only image of Maud Gonne I had seen was that of a muse for WB Yeats, not as the founder of Irish language and culture organisations for women. I began my research into the many women that fought alongside the men during the revolutionary period, and I wanted them to be honoured in the same way the men were. On postcards, posters, and other printed material.

As for women featured in stories of mythology, I do find that their playing field is a bit level to the men’s. Of course the goddesses have their powers, but it is usually the everyday woman that is overlooked in these stories. I recently read some retellings of the Iliad from Greek mythology that focused on the point of view from just the everyday women and their treatment through these mythological/legendary wars and it has made me reconsider the ‘heroes’ we focus on. Do we look past their treatment of women just because they were the best warriors in all of Ireland/Greece? Maybe we should apply this thinking in a real life context too.

Merch and the Contemporary Artist

I am constantly being told that my designs, like my scarves, are spotted everywhere, but I am yet to see one myself out in the wild. Maybe I don’t leave the house as much as I should!

I am extremely grateful that I have this ‘merch’ aspect to my practice, as it heavily funds what I would consider my ‘fine art’ practice. Without the scarves or stickers or my commissions for businesses and companies, I definitely would not be able to create screen prints of up to 20 layers. I would not be able to have the time to put all my effort into research, reading, recording, and visiting what truly inspires my work. I would not be able to afford my print studio fees, materials, my rent, or my bills.

I think that maybe some people would think that the merch would ‘cheapen’ their practice, but I don’t think that is fair to say. I think it makes the work more accessible. I am also very aware of the age range of the people who support my work, and how purchasing a fine art screen print of mine might not be possible at the moment due to the cost of living crisis. But by purchasing a scarf or a sticker, you can acquire art more easily.

Coming Up

I always have so many ideas and plans backlogged until the time is right. I might learn a new technique or a composition will come to me as a vision. For example, I have always been interested in the Táin Bó Cuailigne, and even debated creating a massive print of the battle for my degree show, but it just didn’t feel right. I was recently passing through Dublin airport and passed one of the Irish tourist tat shops and they were blasting Dearg Doom by the Horslips. That’s when it came to me, this vision of Cú Chulainn standing fiercely, Queen Medb lurking over the battlefield like a puppeteer. I am now currently working on the drawings for a series of screen prints.

I read the Canterbury Tales recently and found the introduction section where Chaucer introduces all the pilgrims in detailed description very visually stimulating. How each traveller nearly matched their horse in appearance and how each pilgrim matched their story. I would love to take on a huge project where I illustrate a scene from each of their stories along with the full troop on their way to Canterbury.

But like I said, I am working from a backlog of ideas that are slowly but surely making their way through. I was very fortunate to be awarded funding from the Royal Scottish Academy for my degree show work to spend 12 weeks in Florence. I am extremely looking forward to that trip as I can only imagine the inspiration I will gain from the city’s history.

Aoife Cawley is a printmaker and textiles artist from county Kildare, now working between Ireland and Scotland.

@aoifecawleyart

aoifecawleyart.com

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Waterford Gallery of Art

5 December 2024 – 5 April 2025

In the public imagination, museum collections often summon up dusty places that are cloistered and devoid of relevance. However, since the turn of the century, there has been a push to place the museum at the centre of an increasingly fluid community – a shift which has become more urgent since the pandemic, with the collection at the vital heart of this new role. 

While many cultural institutions lag behind in this regard, The Waterford Art Collection, housed in Waterford Gallery of Art, is a shining exception. One of the oldest municipal collections of art in Ireland, it comprises over 700 works by artists including Paul Henry, Jack B. Yeats RHA, Louis le Brocquy, Evie Hone, Mary Swanzy, and George Russell (using the pseudonym AE), as well as a growing number of contemporary works. It is overseen by Visual Arts Co-ordinator, Luke Currall, who has extensive experience in the UK, including a stint at The Wellcome Collection in London. Currall believes that the collection must “remain a living, developing, relevant resource, not just a time capsule of historic, innovative and ambitious ideals within Waterford’s past.”

The outfitting of the two-storey gallery in 2019 was overseen by Waterford County Council Arts Office and Rojo Studios Architects with collection consultation from Dr Éimear O’Connor. Using a system of movable walls, the space has a contemporary feel, while preserving many of the building’s nineteenth-century classical features. Currently showing until 5 April in the upstairs gallery space, ‘Bodies’ presents works from the collection alongside new commissions, inspired by the human form. The skilful use of a familiar theme to surprise and beguile is characteristic of Currall’s curatorial approach. 

For instance, while Nude Study (c.1918) by Mainie Jellett nods to Susan Connolly’s solo exhibition, ‘GROUND (two-unfold)’ – a riff on Jellett’s cubist work, which runs concurrently downstairs – it is a lively, figurative work, rather than a cubist piece. Similarly, placing James Joseph Power’s bronze of a famine-era couple, Gorta Mór (1961), beside Áine Ryan’s contemporary sculpture, Implements (2021) – a disembodied glass hand on a rusted pitchfork – brackets a space in which rural histories might be reimagined.

Many artists here were active on the wider political and cultural scene. William Orpen – whose Nude Study (n.d.) is a tutorial in drawing – was an official Great War artist. Another of his sketches depicts Irish Free State Senator, Oliver St John Gogarty. Mainie Jellett and Father Jack P Hanlon (Nude Study, n.d.) were two of the founders of The Irish Living Art Exhibition (IELA) in 1943, while Conn McCluskey, represented here by the sculpture Untitled (1960), founded the Homeless Citizens’ League in 1963 and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967. This exhibition launched Una Sealy’s huge new portrait, commissioned by the OPW and WCC, of Dr Mary Strangman – public health advocate, suffragette, and the first female member of Waterford City Council – which holds a central position in the gallery. Reclining Nude (n.d.) by artist and curator Mary Grehan (who, incidentally, played Strangman in a recent local production) hangs nearby. Notably, the collection has a considerable number of works by female artists, which Currall is committed to building upon.

There are international links too. Women in Conversation (1953) by Stella Steyn (an Irish-born artist of Russian extraction) recalls the monumentality of Picasso’s Two Women Running on a Beach (1922) but has a vibrance and lightness all of its own. Elsewhere, a watercolour by Niccolo d’Ardia Caracciolo, titled Nude Study (n.d.), reflects the artist’s mixed heritage. A member of the RHA, Caracciolo was born to a Waterford mother and Italian father and grew up in Waterford Castle. He died in a motorbike accident in Italy in 1989 aged 48. 

Local and contemporary artists also feature in the show. Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist (1981) is a beautifully executed parody – one that subverts the title of James Joyce’s second novel, while mirroring the composition of Rembrandt’s figurative painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) – by Waterford artist Pat O’Brien, the subject of the dissection. The medical students, tutors from WRTC (now SETU), will be recognisable to generations of Waterford art students, now scattered across the world. Alongside, Anthony Hayes’s Gladiators (2014), groins shielded by game controllers, crowd forward, their thrust offsetting Cuán Cusack’s You in Blue (2024) – cyanotypes and poems about dysphoria, floating on organza nearby.

Eamon Grey and James Horan’s This Little Piggy Went to Market (2023), holds such ambiguity within. A pair of feet, carved from Carrera marble, from which white bones comically jut, balance on pink stilts, sunk in a heap of white gravel. Sadly, Grey did not live to see the work complete, having died in 2022, but this sculptural installation, which provides a literal and figurative frame for the show, also suggests the possibility of moving forward with verve and zest. An alternative cipher, a terracotta nude, sits opposite, curled like a cat. The artist is ‘anon’ – a reminder that beauty lives on and belongs to all.

An effective and engaging exhibition, ‘Bodies’ exemplifies the new ideal of the municipal art collection as a tool to variously reach, inspire, reflect, and support its communities. The museum collection also acts as a repository of sorts, helping to bring history to life by providing tangible connections to stories of local, national, and international significance. However, collections need careful management, resources, and expertise to reach their full potential, since there is an expectation of durational care among those who donate artefacts. Currall’s presence has therefore been a game changer for the Waterford Art Collection, and it will be of national interest to see where he guides it.

Clare Scott is an artist and writer based in Waterford who recently completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Practice and Management at Ulster University.

clarescott.ie

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KATHRYN MAGUIRE OUTLINES HER LATEST RESIDENCY AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS WITHIN HER PRACTICE.

I am a visual artist and educator whose practice incorporates socially engaged projects, environmental awareness projects, and public art projects. I create sculptural installations and interventions to explore ideas with communities and within the gallery space. A recurrent theme in my work focuses on voices of the silenced and the non-human, exploring how they might have agency in memory and history.

Exploring geology, the history of materials, and the circular economy, my current work concentrates on lithics, minerals, and mining. I examine rocks and minerals from various international locations, through a situated, land-based practice. Increasingly, my work engages processes of making, informed by my earlier training as a jewellery-maker and sculptor. I create artworks that convey the complexities of deep time, visible in materials. 

I want to reveal fundamental and invisible forces and energies, explored by scientists and experts alike; these concepts are central to my practice. Works such as Microns 1 & 2 (2024) have used scientific technology to reveal the geomythologies we inhabit and host. Taking the form of large, printed banners, these works feature electron micrographs of river clay samples, depicting metal pollution. Geologist Dr Tim Newman sourced clay samples and other geological strata for me, from the site of the River Thames Tideway project, where the Super Sewer construction is situated. I then took these samples to Innes Clatworthy, Electron Microscopist in the Imaging and Analysis Core Research Laboratories in The Natural History Museum in London, and we used an electron microscope to create the Electron Micrographs, with the spherules of iron oxide silicates pushing out of the clay. The banners were exhibited in ‘When We Cease to Understand the World’, curated by Marysia Więckiewicz-Carroll at Interface in Connemara (14 – 28 July 2024). 

Another work exploring scientific analysis was Mountain Mapping (2024), exhibited in my solo show ‘To the Mountain’ at Leitrim Sculpture Centre (30 August – 21 September 2024). Three local mountains (Benbo, Slieve League, and Iron) were 3D-printed from digital contour maps and mounted on surveyor’s tripods, painted gold for tuning and communing with the earth’s magnetism. The work incorporates geological specimens from each of the mountains: Iron Nodule, Paragneiss and Quartzite. The suspended rocks demonstrate a simple geological experiment to determine ‘specific gravity’. 

‘To the Mountain’ exhibition was the outcome of my three-month residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, exploring the mapping of mountains. The mapping of Ireland was developed by the early Ordnance Survey (OS) in 1824 to facilitate taxation and the ‘underground potential’ of geological and material value. The mapping was done by creating a series of primary triangles; sightings were taken between stations using theodolites on top of selected mountains. This, and my question, ‘Do Mountains commune with us?’ inspired the fabrication of artworks in the show. Many of these works were informed by my research into magnetism, Earth Sciences and measurement, geological phenomena, and experiments in the field. The exhibition asked: How can we shift away from over-mining and endless extraction of the Earth’s minerals towards a circular economy?

The work, Mount Ida (2024), conjures the magical and mythical, whilst attempting to comprehend the mystery of magnetism and its name-origin. A pair of traditional Greek shoes, known as tsarouchi, are cast in iron and attached to a strong welding magnet. This work was inspired by the myth of Magnes, associated with a shepherd, reputedly the first to notice magnetism, when his shoes got stuck to lodestone/ magnetite on the ground at Mount Ida. It was also informed by time spent exploring the magnetic cores of Iceland. I visited a geological drill core archive in East Iceland and documented the magnetic power of the cores with very strong magnets (neodymium).

I am intrigued by alchemical changes in metals, minerals, and spirituality. Materials and matter have an ancient importance as Prima Materia. Using metal and stone supports these interests, because the materials are always changing and breathing. This is important to my understanding of deep time. Cast in Jesmonite with black stone-shungite pigments, my snake sculpture, The Keeper (2021), holds the secrets of stones and guards the thresholds. It was exhibited in ‘Hivernal’, curated by Eamonn Maxwell at Roscommon Arts Centre (1 November – 21 December 2024). 

Cast in pigmented Jesmonite with gold, shungite and iron oxide, the work Mineral Mountain (2024) was an attempt to commune with the sacred elements within mountains and rocks. The mountain sculptures are inspired by geodata forms of the Iron Mountain in Leitrim. Rocks, metals and plants are ground up to become homoeopathic and offer healing: shungite (for protection), gold (representing the sun, and a vital element in balancing energies) and dragon blood powder (to neutralise negative energies). 

My solo exhibition ‘To the Mountain’ at Leitrim Sculpture Centre (30 August – 21 September 2024) considered how we commune with the Earth, its divinity, scientific knowledge, and colonial histories to explore alchemical traits and forms. I was subsequently awarded a six-month Artist Studios Residency (from August 2025 to January 2026) at The Model in Sligo. My forthcoming show, ‘Material Acts’, will run from 11 to 27 September at Pallas Projects/Studios, as part of the Artist-Initiated Projects programme for 2025. ‘Material Acts’ will present a sculptural investigation relating to geology, alchemical changes, and environmental colonialism.

Kathryn Maguire is an artist based in Sligo.

kathrynmaguire.net

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Hugh Lane Gallery

3 October 2024 – 18 May 2025

Brian Maguire rose to prominence in the 80s and 90s when a trinity of male painters – Patrick Graham, Patrick Hall, and Maguire himself – seemed to dominate the discourse, chiming with the lustre of international neo-expressionism. Hall’s mystical homoeroticism and Graham’s broken self that wrestled with both tradition and his own facility, shared with Maguire personal struggles within the oppressive institutional forces of a post-colonial and post-religion society that was blinking back into the light. 

Of the three, Maguire’s art was distinguished by a burning sense of social justice and activism. Analysis at the time noted the masculine nature of the Irish Neo-expressionist wave, with Patricia Hurl’s 2023 exhibition, ‘The Irish Gothic’ at IMMA, providing a welcome corrective to this narrative. Since the 90s, Maguire has steadily painted himself out of the corner of subjective individual expressionism to significantly widen the geopolitical lens. That noted, one could be forgiven for thinking that although Ireland has progressively changed overtime in socio-political terms, Maguire’s worldview remains relentlessly bleak, tracking the shape-shifting nature and impacts of war and oppression, which simply move address.¹ 

Maguire has a track record of shining a light on the vulnerable and voiceless. Depictions of an American soup kitchen or the residents of South American favelas, when housed within the rarefied hallows of blue chip galleries or revered art institutions, could raise reasonable doubts of poverty porn, since art with a social conscience has an uneasy relationship with the capital of artmaking and its ecosystem. However, as Maguire has negotiated a position of being both inside and outside the institution, the authenticity and ethics of his socially engaged practice – working directly with prisoners and acting as a native witness – have been consistent and unwavering. 

In relation to the technical and formal painting exhibited in ‘La Grande Illusion’ – which presents works from 2007 onward – Maguire excels through the bravura painterly muscularity on display. The gestural economy, masterly use of space, imposing scale, and judicious understanding of how to maximise pictorial contrast, suggest a painter who has braided the material learning throughout his career, and is now firmly in an imperial phase. Black acrylic is pushed in sweeping, brush-sized movements across the compositional plane, while a largely neutral palette is offset by acid yellows and pinks. Painted un-stretched and then re-stretched during the installation, these works have the epic quality of grand history painting, yet there is enough grit and uncertainty in evidence that they resist falling into territory that is slick or facile for a painter of Maguire’s experience. 

The fact that ‘La Grande Illusion’ sits adjacent to the Francis Bacon Studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery neatly serves to highlight some comparisons. Where Bacon’s outlook is somewhat bleak and potentially jaundiced, dealing in historical generalities around the human condition, Maguire’s work, in contrast, is rich in specificity, based upon his extensive travel research. Police Graduation 2012 (Juárez) (2014) depicts a Mexican police graduation ceremony that has preserved the ritualistic salute of the Nazi regime, a painting that could be easily misunderstood. Maguire’s painting highlights how the ritual of the salute has been revised in world culture yet could move pendulously – Elon Musk’s witless hand gesture, following Trump’s 2025 inauguration, being a case in point.

Certain filmmakers have grappled with the issue of how to speak of the unspeakable. For example, respective depictions of the holocaust in László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015) and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) have rigorously strategised around the implicit rather than explicit. Where Nemes provides over the shoulder, fuzzy depth-of-field glimpses of stacked corpses, Glazer’s horrors are heard and not seen in what he compares to the banal ambience of oppression in our lives. Not so in Maguire’s direct and unflinching depictions of decapitated and dismembered body horror in the Arizona desert, which is closer to a Goyaesque Yo Lo Vi / I Saw It.²  

All of this may run the risk of recycling images that we have become desensitised to, through bottomless doomscrolling of our daily news feeds. The aestheticisation of human suffering is an additional potential pitfall for a painter of Maguire’s technical virtuosity; that the artist deftly navigates these slopes is a testament to the empathy and compassion that underpins his methods of looking. As a visitor to ‘La Grande Illusion’, I found the paintings powerful and moving. I experienced a confounding shock that jolted me to consider how such images are received – something we have become numb to, in an image-saturated, digital era. It is this direct encounter with the visual record of war that raises viewer consciousness and allows a chink of light into Maguire’s otherwise bleak vision. This exhibition celebrates a leading Irish artist, working at the peak of his oeuvre.

Colin Martin is an artist and Head of School RHA. 

@colinmartin81

¹ Brian Maguire, ‘War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings’, Irish Museum of Modern Art (26 January – 7 May 2018).

² Francisco Goya, Yo Lo Vi / I Saw It, Plate 44, ‘Desastres de la Guerra / The Disasters of War’(1810-20). 

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The White Pube

Particular Books, 2024, 320 pp.

Poor Artists by The White Pube, the collaborative identity of Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente, is a compelling object. Its flamingo pink cover is a flamboyant addition to my bookcase. The London and Liverpool-based critics have been writing bombastic online criticism, filled with emojis, abbreviations, and feelings, since 2015 and graciously, this content has largely been free for readers to consume. Following nine years of producing weekly blog posts, reflecting on exhibitions, art institutions, and visual culture more broadly, the pair have published their first book with Particular Books, an imprint of Penguin. Poor Artists is a material translation of the online community they have earnestly created, capturing the agitator spirit they have come to represent for their readership.  

The book narrates the endeavours of fictional art school graduate, Quest Talukdar, as they attempt to pursue a career as an artist after college. The difficulties of maintaining a creative life under capitalism are made immediately apparent to the protagonist. Grappling with the divide between the positives of art education and its frustrating incompatibility with societal structures, The White Pube expresses a similar criticism put forward by Claire-Louise Bennett in her novel, Checkout19 (Penguin Random House, 2021) which portrays the empty promises of the schooling system for working-class children. The core tension of Poor Artists – how we can live with art in our lives – remains largely unresolved, but I take some comfort in the fact that the protagonist ultimately decides to continue life as an artist, in spite of countless obstacles, and is buoyed by their reimagining of ‘success’ as simply being able to ‘make’.

The overt naming of the protagonist ‘Quest’ is one of many examples of the writers’ playful and expanded approach to criticism, which straddles different literary genres. The book is at times a memoir, with Quest an amalgamation of the authors’ own backgrounds, while also embracing fantasy and fiction, complete with tropes of quest-narratives, including a knight and king. A particularly enjoyable sequence analyses the role of art school in the development of criticality, with a surreal depiction of the head of the college as a pile of discarded artworks that its students have progressed through. At times, the writers eschew formalism altogether and embrace the polemical, with character monologues espousing opinions on topical conversations, from ableism to anarchism. The book is informed by interviews, conducted with anonymised individuals, artists, curators and gallerists, and this construction is evident in the strong opinions of different characters. 

A critique levelled at Poor Artists by ArtReview suggests that publishing with a mainstream press like Penguin undercuts the book’s articulation of anarchist ideals.¹ This seems misguided, given that we operate within particular power structures, and publishing is a method of disseminating  ideas that can be activated. It is perhaps more productive to consider what it means to have this strange book – a hybrid of different writing styles – accepted by conventional media. Muhammad and de la Puente are both art school graduates, and while this is a well-established career path for many critics, I am intrigued by the creativity of this book. 

The dematerialisation of the art object, as prognosed by Lucy Lippard in the 1970s, did not blanketly occur. However, Poor Artists highlights financial situations in determining the pursuit of material-focused or ‘dematerialised’ practices (de la Puente’s college loans are cited in footnotes throughout the narrative). 

Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist (1891) was an early originator of the school of thought that viewed criticism as an art form in and of itself, describing it as a “record of one’s own soul.” Poor Artists adopts this idea wholly by creating its own form and rationale. For many reasons, the fields of art writing and creative criticism have seen renewed interest in recent years. The general distribution of this book platforms these timely modes of creative expression for broader readerships to engage with and experience.

By converting the dominant ideas, discussed on their website and media channels, into the materiality of a book, The White Pube has created a talisman, a record of collective discordance with the opportunities for pursuing a life with art. In a way, the most appropriate review of this book would be to survey an array of practitioners – the eponymous ‘poor artists’ that the book seeks to champion and address. The interviews that inform the book demonstrate The White Pube’s community-oriented approach to criticism, with Poor Artists reaffirming their allegiance to their readership and the makers of the world. 

Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in Cork.

sarahlongartist.com

¹ Rosanna McLaughlin, ‘‘Poor Artists’ by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, Reviewed’, ArtReview, October 2024.

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Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts

31 January – 20 April 2025

Curated by RHA Director, Patrick T. Murphy, ‘BogSkin’ is a major group exhibition which spans 50 years of artistic engagement with the Irish boglands. The work of 20 artists is presented, with their collective output evincing both changing attitudes and lasting affinities. The bog variously represents the romantic, the unknown, and the poetic, just as much as it speaks to climate change and ecological disaster. 

In Ireland, conversations about boglands almost always touch on the bog bodies on display at the National Museum. This embodied relationship with the bog forms part of the national psyche, channelling centuries and millennia of slow peat growth, the preservation of human remains, and the labouring hands that have dug it up for fuel. The artistic positions presented in ‘BogSkin’ range from the removed observer (creating abstract responses) and the anthropologist (documenting human life surrounding the boglands) to the scientist (studying minute ecological elements) and the performer (experiencing full bodily immersion). 

A large screen shows a video of a wet and black spongy bog, surrounding a pool of red-brown bog water. Specks of white float on the water, which holds the reflection of Nigel Rolfe’s body. Looking down into the pool, but also looking through the screen at the viewer, his body appears upside down. The ripples in the water cause his apparition to flit in and out of distortion, as if dancing. Rolfe is, however, as still as a statue. He eventually tips slowly towards the water, as his feet sink into the spongy black earth, falling head-first into the bog hole. The sound of the crash fills the gallery, before the artist reemerges, sopping wet. 

Robert Ballagh’s painting, The Bogman (1997), is a self-portrait of the artist cutting turf. Some kind of ancient jewel is submerged below his feet, while flying overhead is a raven – the bird of prophecy in Celtic mythology. Camille Souter’s oil painting, The bog, early morning (1963) overlays muted tones of beige, grey, brown, and green, in scenes that show people working or moving. Bold lines scratch away the paint to reveal a blue underlay, evoking the dividing cuts of the sleán, enacting a manmade geometry over the natural landscape. Barrie Cooke’s Megaceros Hibernicus (1983) depicts the long extinct Irish Elk. The large canvas barely contains the mammoth deer’s body, which is surrounded by matt black, evoking the timeless vacuum experienced by a body cocooned underneath the bog. One imagines a narrative unfolding between these three works: a group working to cut peat; an individual striking a bone; a body, frozen in time for millennia, coming back to this world. 

Patrick Hough’s film, The Black River of Herself (2020), gives voice to bodies preserved beneath the bog. “I’m not ready to leave,” says the ghoulish corpse of a woman to the archeologist excavating her, this exposure to the air affecting her decomposition – a second death. She has wisdom, derived from centuries of observation swathed in peat, and is highly critical of contemporary man’s impact on the environment. “And now a broken bog bleeds carbon…” 

These pieces engage with the macabre concept of the ‘revenant’ – a body preserved from the moment of death and brought back to life. However, the chemical makeup of boglands provides not only the ability to sequester bodies, but the efficient absorption and storage of vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Fiona McDonald’s automated sculpture, We Share the Same Air [1.1] (2024), explores the ecological and atmospheric significance of peatlands. Monitored by a CO2 sensor, three transparent chambers are periodically opened and sealed by a central robotic arm, showing how unexcavated green peatlands filter carbon from the air. Conversely, the black, shorn plains of cut bog, actually leak stored carbon back into the atmosphere, producing a stark visualisation of environmental degradation. 

Shane Hynan presents photographs from his ongoing series, ‘Beneath | Beofhód’, which observes the raised bogs of the Irish midlands and the culture surrounding them. A large black and white image, titled Recently Rehabilitated Esker Bog with Mount Lucas Wind Farm in the Distance (2023), portrays the bleak expanse of a ploughed bog, showing a barren, puddle-covered landscape with no traces of wildlife. Until fairly recently, County Offaly was associated with the commercial harvesting of peat by Bord na Móna – a process that permanently ceased in 2021 as the company mobilised its new green energy business plan. In the far distance, an urban skyline features the silhouettes of wind turbines, thus signaling a new beginning in power generation technologies. 

Perhaps one of the most well-known works concerning the Irish boglands is Brian O’Doherty’s Rick (1975) – a large-scale assemblage of hand-cut turf, originally installed at the David Hendrick’s Gallery in Dublin. With current awareness of the importance of preserving boglands, the sale of turf was banned by the state under solid fuel regulations in October 2022. It was therefore not possible to recreate O’Doherty’s sculpture for the show; however, photographic documentation of the piece is exhibited as part of ‘BogSkin’. As the boglands are now left to recover after centuries of damaging excavation, it will be interesting to see how artistic relations with this enigmatic landscape continue to evolve. 

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

elladeburca.com

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LISA FINGLETON REFLECTS ON A MONTH-LONG RESIDENCY AT NAVDANYA BIODIVERSITY AND CONSERVATION FARM IN NORTHERN INDIA.

“We are all connected through food. We are all connected through soil. We are all connected through life. And those are the interconnections that we have to build consciously now.”¹  

For over 20 years, much of my life and art practice have been focused on food systems, and the increasingly radical acts of growing and eating local and organic food.

I regularly wonder how we have reached this point, where most of the food and seed in the world is controlled by a small number of global corporations. Why are we eating poisoned and ultra-processed food, even though we know it is damaging our guts and making us and our loved ones sick? Why are we, as an island, so dependent on imported food? How can we feed ourselves in increasingly precarious climactic conditions and protect biodiversity at the same time?

These questions propelled me to travel all the way from our farm in Kerry to Navdanya at the foothills of the Himalayas in India. Navdanya biodiversity and conservation farm was founded by Dr Vandana Shiva in 1987 (navdanya.org). Vandana is a prolific writer, internationally renowned food activist, and environmental thinker. She not only resists capitalist food systems at an international level, but she and her team grow 750 varieties of rice, fruit and vegetables in the living seed bank on the farm, as a way to protect and save indigenous seeds.

I travelled with my partner, photographer Rena Blake, to take part in a month-long agro-ecology residency at the Earth University in Navdanya, with 20 other diverse artists and activists from around the world. All the food for the month was vegetarian, organic and locally sourced. The programme started each day with herbal tea at 6:30am, breakfast, an opening circle and shramdaan (shared tasks in the communal area) before heading to the fields to do whatever jobs were needed: harvesting, seed saving or weeding. I was really glad to have a cold bucket shower after even a short stint of working outdoors in 35 degrees and high humidity. This was followed by lectures, practical workshops and opportunities to present our own projects until around 8:30pm each evening. It was brilliant and intense in equal measure.

I drew in journals every day as a way of processing the experience, both for myself and so that I could share it with others upon my return. I set up an outdoor studio for myself on the balcony outside our room overlooking the mango orchard. One of the absolute highlights of the trip was being in the stillness of the seedbank and drawing with the seed savers Sheela Godiyal and Kavita Negi. There was something deeply moving about being surrounded by seeds grown with such love and passion for this planet we call home.

Vandana was extremely generous with her time and energy, delivering lectures with lots of time for discussion afterwards. It was a real privilege to interview her about the interconnectedness between food, creativity and climate change for my short film, The Radical Art of Living (2025). She had strong cautionary messages for Ireland in terms of protecting small growers and food producers. “Just remembering the Irish famine, I would just say, if the current trends continue, every place will be a place for a potential famine.”

Dr Mira Shiva, Vandana’s sister, was with us for a few days, weaving stories from her lifelong experience as a medical doctor and activist. She talked about an international meeting, where a scientist was proposing to create square tomatoes to facilitate easier packaging. Those present, reminded him that everyone knew tomatoes were round, and therefore would know that this was not natural. He responded, “In one generation they will forget that tomatoes were round.” 

Mira cautioned us against this collective amnesia and shifting baseline, whereby each generation assumes that their degraded ecological environment is ‘normal’. ‘The Square Tomato’ formed in my mind as a symbol for so many things that are challenging within the current food system. I decided to use it as the title for my current exhibition at Siamsa Tíre in Tralee, which includes the film and drawings from Navdanya.

Before leaving, I asked Vandana how she sustained her energy, and she said “Living truth. Expressing truth is my oxygen.” It’s not always easy to digest hard truths but I left Navdanya with a renewed sense of urgency. People have asked me many times if it was a life changing trip, but I feel it was more life affirming. I didn’t get answers to all my questions but rather a validation for my concerns and a clearer call to action. As Vandana says in the last line of her book, The Nature of Nature, “With every seed we sow, every plant we grow, every morsel we eat, we make a choice between degeneration and regeneration.”² My choice is clear.

Lisa Fingleton is an artist, writer and organic grower based at The Barna Way, an organic farm, woodland and wildlife sanctuary in Kerry.

lisafingleton.com

Fingleton’s film, The Radical Art of Living: An Interview with Dr Vandana Shiva (2025), is being screened as part of her solo exhibition, ‘The Square Tomato’, which continues at Siamsa Tíre until 22 March.

siamsatire.com

¹ Vandana Shiva, The Nature of Nature: The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change (New Delhi: Women Unlimited Ink, 2024).

² Ibid.

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Solomon Fine Art 

6 February – 1 March 2025

A striking quality of the landscapes featured in ‘The Old Grieving Fields’, apart from the Sligo-based artist’s clear aptitude for drawing, is the role played by many of their supports. Standing in front of an artwork, it is common to absorb content without conscious regard for the material upon which it has been created. But, here, the supports invite greater attention.

Sometimes remote, sometimes immersive, the 38 depicted scenes are arranged in clusters with common features that, together, proffer diversity in perspective and scale. They emit an air of disquiet, of things in flux yet somehow timeless. This is partly due to Wann’s use of charcoal, derived from his copying of black-and-white photos from newspapers as a child.¹ Working from darks to lights through erasure and reinforcement, he achieves a wide tonal and mark-making range, disrupted by occasional colourful elements.

The largest group, 20 tray-framed works on panel from 2024, represent a recent development within his practice. Applying charcoal direct to wood requires careful handling, and the results remain both crisply detailed and sensitively atmospheric. Warmth from the wood glows through, its grain contributing to the imagery. Each is composed of three-quarters sky, one-quarter aerial view of the terrain below, and hints of danger from natural phenomena or human intervention. 

While Deep Dark Night features a pitch-black firmament, dark, lightly textured ocean, and softly lit horizon, Eclipse reserves the blackest black for the titular phenomenon, ringed by crepuscular rays. Its print-like feel derives from the wood grain, which also reads as clouds, while the patterning in Murmuration enhances the dynamism of a formation cohering in flight above a tracery of fields. Omens (Crows Arriving) obliterates other elements with an all-over, chaotic scattering of birds, their portentous blackness exuding a sense of menace.

People rarely feature in Wann’s landscapes, yet human intrusion is implied by the intriguing visualisations Balloons and Recon; the first features hot-air inflatables, the second a squadron of helicopters. Consequence from human activity is suggested by Controlled Explosion and Footprints, the latter foregrounding a passenger jet to reference carbon-dioxide excess. All seem emblematic of the impacts of needlessly induced crises, including climate change.

Opposite, are large drawings on Fabriano supports, collaged together from smaller pieces. The resulting patchworks in Aerial 1-6 (2024) create an uneven surface that traps or resists the medium, depending on the direction of travel. Wann senses they may reenact his experience of being adopted and later piecing together his family history. Some years ago, he was taken up in a small aircraft over County Carlow by a half-brother, who pointed out the farm where his birth father had lived. The photos he took combined with memory and creative processes to inform the series. 

Aerial 6, The Bloodline of the Fields, directly references that encounter, the red lines that define gaps in the assemblage emulating a family tree. Aerial 3, Night Visions takes it into a dream world where the artist experienced a vision of the fields his father worked being on fire.² Here, and in other exhibits, he overwrote in red the Fabriano watermark, inviting attention to the artifice of his creations and establishing a tension with the interior acts of drawing out that produced them. 

Possibly referencing the role certified records play in authenticating a person’s identity, other devices used to mark works as ‘documentation’ include a ‘rejected’ stamp in Aerial 3, Night Visions and official ‘seals’ in Approved Landscape #1 and #2 (both 2024). In Landscape on Fire (2023), inspired by news that the Amazon rainforest was in flames, Wann includes an ornate trompe-l’oeil frame, reflecting his desire to talk about imagery and how we look at it.³ 

Described as a “lament to a landscape in distress,” ‘The Old Grieving Fields’ reflects our constructive impulses and the impacts of our destruction – including the lost potential of unadulterated nature.⁴ Although Wann prefers that his work not be defined by biography, his drawings impress as a form of working through, and this, above all, gives them deep resonance.⁵

Susan Campbell is a visual arts writer, art historian and artist. 

susancampbellartwork.com.

¹ Michael Wann interview, The Artist’s Well, 8 February 2025 (youtube.com).

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Exhibition Press Release, Solomon Fine Art.

⁵ Michael Wann interview, The Artist’s Well, 8 February 2025 (youtube.com).

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