South Tipperary Arts Centre
5 July – 1 August 2025
So much of artmaking feels like self-laceration. You’re chasing some half notion – something barely there, but urgent – and it never comes out the way you imagined. The work stumbles, misfires and fails. What I admire most about ‘Encounters with Failure’ at South Tipperary Arts Centre (STAC) is that the exhibition doesn’t try to redeem failure or alchemise it into something transcendent. It lets it stay recognisably human, messy, unresolved, and often funny.
Here, humour bridges the gap between artist and viewer in a way that theory rarely manages. For that alone, the exhibition deserves credit, and it scores bonus points for avoiding the overused (and totally misused) Beckett quote. Helena Tobin’s curatorial eye is perceptive and assured, holding space for both humour and rawness without either one diminishing the other.
Shirani Bolle’s Treaty (2025) stands guard at the entrance, part monstrous scarecrow, part monument, knotted from old rugs, half-made cushion covers, and crocheted bits she once wrote off as failures. Described as an embodiment of ‘inherited trauma,’ the sculpture’s manic anatomy flaunts its unruly materials. The work honours the failure to perfect or smooth over, and in its tangled physicality, there’s something so easeful in how it bluntly refuses all neatness, all shame.
The wall text, like the work, is refreshingly unvarnished. Bolle calls her father a failed father, and the Fisher Price palette jolts us into childhood nostalgia, confronting us with a reckoning: that we are all the flawed children of flawed humans, entangled in and shaped by each other’s failures.
Noel Hensey’s Rejection Rejection (2021) and Oh, the Irony (RA Summer Exhibition Rejection) (2025) lean into absurdist wit with a weary sigh. Framed like trophies of defeat, these digital prints of Dear John emails capture the sting that all artists know, especially those caught in the churn of open calls – only here, the twist is that Hensey is the one doing the rejecting.
Art about rejection isn’t new, but Hensey’s choice to lay it bare feels honest in a culture that pressures us to flaunt wins or stage vulnerability in ways that can feel self-serving and mawkish. We always need reminding that rejection is constant, mundane, and survivable. By looping the rejection into the work itself, Hensey is both wry and sincere. The pieces make you laugh, wince, then laugh again, because what else can you do?
Seán Farrell’s four small works hover between painting and sculpture, modest in scale, made from salvaged offcuts, and animated by a quiet, formal wit. Pieces like As Tight As the Corner (2024) hold a calm, deliberate presence, not in spite of, but because of their leftover origins. Farrell doesn’t conceal this; he embraces the logic of surplus with confidence and clarity, allowing it to shape the work’s structure and rhythm. His process feels attuned and exacting; a tactile inquiry into how elements might sit together, not to become something else, but to reveal what they already are, through careful, provisional acts of making.
Niamh Hughes’s paintings channel the emotional chaos of art making with humour, style, and melodrama. Drawing on the visual language of vintage pulp horror – saturated colours, tight framing, and a sense that something’s about to go very wrong – she casts the artist as haunted not by ghosts, but by deadlines, doubt, and creeping fears of not being enough. In God Cursed the Blank Page and Little Horror (both 2025), the pressure to keep producing, to stay visible and relevant, becomes theatrical absurdity. But the comedy cuts close to the bone. Hughes doesn’t glamorise the grind or wallow in it. Instead, she holds anxiety up to the light, turning it into something pointed, strange, uncanny, and satisfying.
Clare Scott’s Cloud Machine (If I Ever Get to Heaven) (2025) is a big, sprawling, restless assembly of fragments and near-works that somehow cohere. It’s one thing to channel feral energy in the studio, but to exhibit that raw, unresolved wildness is something else. The work resists tidy resolution in favour of process, intuition, and risk. Materials clash, structures wobble, ideas echo. Nothing behaves, and that’s exactly the point. Scott’s work is bold, funny, and deeply considered. What emerges is not chaos but a language entirely her own, full of nerve and conviction.
Beth Fox’s My Bed, Our Tent (2020) is a short video that’s funny, incisive, and quietly devastating. It parodies the strange and creepy ways we fetishise certain artworks while overlooking others that are messier, more elusive, and harder to pin down. So much great art goes unseen, not for lack of brilliance, but because it doesn’t play the game. Set in the drag and bloat of a depressive episode, it features The Great British Bake Off, Tracey Emin’s iconic unmade bed, and something all its own. This video work is available on Fox’s website, and if you can, you absolutely should watch it.
The bulk of contemporary culture can feel like cover versions: premeditated, already riffing on something else, caught in a loop of citation and self-consciousness. ‘Encounters with Failure’ didn’t deny this condition so much as make space for it, allowing influence and imperfection to sit alongside a refreshing sense of presence. The works felt deliberately unresolved, open to process, misstep, and ambiguity, rather than bound to polish and presentation.
Sheenagh Geoghegan is an artist and writer from Tipperary.
sheenaghbgeoghegan.com
