AENGUS WOODS INTERVIEWS ALEANA EGAN ABOUT HER MOTIVATIONS, PROCESSES, AND MATERIALS.

Aengus Woods: Can you describe your process a little for me? When creating a sculpture, do you have a plan or do you work more intuitively?

Aleana Egan: I would say my process in the studio is cyclical and intuitive; it’s hard to delineate where one thing begins and another ends. There’s an accumulative effect that occurs, and the pieces are shaped not just physically but over and over in my mind; in dreams and waking life. Alongside, I sometimes work with cabinet maker, Flan Hedderman. This collaboration has shaped the way I make a plan, as each new piece leads to something else. I need to relate an idea to him which contrasts with the interior way of making in the studio; I find these interactions complimentary and generative.  

AW: You utilise an expansive range of materials in your work from fabrics of various texture and hue to wood, metal and plastics. What draws you to particular materials? 

AE: The old things that make their way into the work are often objects that I have had for a long time. I had never thought of them as material for artworks but for some reason, at that time, they are the right component for that particular assemblage. Mostly, the materials have a level of porosity; they are not sealed. I’m thinking of cotton, linen, cardboard, papier-mâché, wood and even pigment and oil paint have various states of porosity, depending on what you mix them with. I like colour that seems to be held within. Often, that’s why a certain item of clothing will find its way in. It’s a gestalt thing; I couldn’t separate the colour from the shape.  

AW: Colour seems to have a shifting presence in your work, waxing and waning with time and circumstance. There is also perhaps a distinction to be noted between the inherent colour of materials used and colour applied by hand. How do you understand your working relationship with colour? What is its relevance and significance?

AE: I was thinking recently about making a particular colour for a painting and it being like spotting someone in a crowd, a specific blue that catches your eye or a memory of a friend’s shirt. Colour in regard to clothes and fabric is, for me, blended with dreams, films, music and painting. As a reservoir of colours, they are all in flux. I often have someone in mind when mixing colours in paint; it is a colour I am trying to achieve that I associate with them either through clothes or shades I know they like. I do this with painters too: Gwen John, Joan Mitchell, Prunella Clough, Lucy Stein, Carole Cullen. When I say their names to myself, I see different colours for each artist. I would say I am drawn to worn out colours – things that look like they have been through the wash many times. That also introduces texture, light and opacites; all those qualities are inseparable when thinking about colour. 

AW: I am interested to know how you think about what we might awkwardly call ‘inspiration’. I know that works of literature, cinema, and music frequently seem to play some kind of generative role for various works of yours. Yet these works do not seem to be simply responses. If anything, it seems more like some kind of process whereby elements are isolated and then fixated or meditated upon. Can you talk a little about your relationship with those works that inspire you or provide source material?

AE: I indeed think that inspiration through other artists, musicians and writers is a process that never stops and is fluid. When something resonates, I internalise it; this has a permissive affect that changes how I continue in my own practice. I love the image of what Annie Ernaux has said about “an invisible chain” of artists and writers that have informed her work. I think it’s more like that: ongoing, relational, resonant, and motivating! “Notice what you notice,” as Allen Ginsberg said. When something is affecting, it gives me more confidence in my own inner life. Marion Milner has been an important figure for me. Her theories on creativity are an endless resource. She was a believer in creative work in its most expansive sense. She practiced not imposing presumptive hierarchies onto her preoccupations. 

AW: Your works are frequently very responsive to site, the recent show at Interface being a good case in point. Is there a distinction for you between working in that kind of responsive, site-specific manner and working within the more conventional confines of the white cube? 

AE: I think it’s about making exhibitions, which are, amongst other things, a set of circumstances and relationships. Often a title is useful early on as a container for this grouping and can set a tone for associative thinking. In the case of ‘A maritime child’ at Interface, it was unusual to get to work in such an expansive way onsite. It was exciting to work with the confines of the interior and exterior environments; they each had particularities that I responded to materially. 

AW: How do you know when a sculpture is complete? How do you understand this completeness in regard to your practice of reusing or remaking artworks?

AE: It’s a feeling of completeness usually. The reusing of parts of previous works is temporal and often comes about through an invitation to participate within a certain context. I like the idea of older works being enveloped into new ones. 

AW: How do you understand the relationship between your sculptural works and your drawings/paintings? Are they distinct processes for you, working towards distinct ends, or is the relation between them more complicated?

AE: I think they are interrelated, but it is hard to write about it as an artist. As a viewer of paintings, I am often struck by areas that feel like missives from the past. It’s important to me to stay tuned in to non-rational practices; a painting has its own language that doesn’t translate easily. I value this evocation rather than interpretation. 

Aengus Woods is a writer and critic based in County Louth. 

@aengus_woods

Aleana Egan is an artist based in Dublin. 

aleanaegan.com

Egan’s site-specific exhibition, ‘A maritime child’ curated by Michael Hill, was presented at Interface Inagh from 11 July to 16 August as part of Galway International Arts Festival. 

interfaceinagh.com

Egan’s solo exhibition, ‘dove passages’, will run at Kerlin Gallery from 4 September to 3 October. 

kerlingallery.com

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EILEEN MAC DONAGH OUTLINES A SCULPTURE RESTORATION PROJECT IN HAZELWOOD, SLIGO. 

In 1985, a sculpture symposium run by the Sculptors Society of Ireland was held over a three-week period, involving 13 sculptors producing 14 sculptures that were sited along the lake walkway in Hazelwood Forest just outside Sligo town. James McKenna, an invited artist, started work on a sculpture extravaganza that included two horses, a charioteer, and warrior, executed on a heroic scale. It took James two and a half years to complete the suite of four. This was truly an extraordinary achievement, not fully appreciated at the time. In fact, the likes of this symposium, producing 14 works on a large scale, has never since been replicated. A whole generation of youngsters grew up seeing and engaging with these sculptures. Being one of the sculptors involved in the symposium, I can say we all knew and accepted that they would eventually rot and decay back into nature.

Over 40 years later, one of McKenna’s figures, the Charioteer, survived in a sad pile on the forest floor. Local man and frequent visitor to Hazelwood, Barry Cosgrove, who had grown up with these sculptures, came across forest workers clearing the area, where the scattered remains of the sculpture lay. Enquires were made and permission to remove the pieces for safe keeping granted and so began the process of conserving and restoring the Charioteer. Barry tracked down Jackie McKenna and I, who were both involved in the original symposium, to see if restoration was viable. Remarkably, most of the body and limbs were still intact. They were treated to a specialised soft power wash for wood and came out very well, with a lot of the detail still distinct, even the marks from James’s hand tools still visible.

Before I get into the restoration of the sculpture, a word first about its maker James McKenna. He was a remarkable sculptor, poet, and playwright who was active in many arts movements around the country from the 1960s on, including the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (IELA), the Irish Independent Artists, Project Arts Centre, the Sculptors Society of Ireland, and others. He worked in all kinds of materials, producing small and large-scale monumental sculpture in plaster, wood, stone, cement, brick, and bronze, depending on the finances available. 

In his later years, James developed his own distinctive style of creating monumental sculptures by means of construction of smaller elements to make up the whole. He never possessed or used a drill, chainsaw, or any mechanised tools, nor did he have a camera of any description or any way of recording what he made. In fact, James cycled from Dublin to Sligo for that symposium in 1985. His tools, including a handsaw (the old type, with wooden handle), were strapped to the frame of his bike, together with his auger (for the many hundreds of holes he drilled), mallet, and chisels, secured amongst his belongings.

The Charioteer was constructed from baulks of Douglas Fir around 20cm2 by various lengths for the limbs; the body was constructed similarly from larger blocks. I can’t be absolutely sure, but it may be that James intended to construct the sculpture in this simple way but then added 5cm planks to these baulks and carved muscle into them. They were glued and attached with coach screws that eventually rusted and decayed the wood underneath which had to be meticulously removed and repaired before reassembly could take place. This was a very slow and tedious process that clocked up many hours, and in some cases, days, restoring just one limb. 

The main body of the figure was intact but needed a lot of repair. All the rusted bars pinning it together were removed and replaced with oak dowels/stainless steel fixings. The thighs, legs, and feet were glued, attached, and bolted using stainless steel threaded bar. When the figure was reassembled, muscle was added and shaped, similar to the original. The pose of the figure suggested that it was not balanced and would need to be anchored to the ground, in order to stand upright. However, this was not the case; when the feet were finally added, it did indeed stand by itself.

The work was carried out at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, where we not only had the space to work on such a large project, but also technical support on hand when needed. My appreciation of the work that went into the production of this epic sculpture, Ghost Riders In The Sky (1985–6), grew with every day I worked on it. I have always maintained with sculpture that the drive and desire to make it has to supersede the effort required by a long way. It can be an overwhelming task and in the case of James’s Hazelwood sculptures, especially so. Whilst working in the environs of the forest undoubtably had its beauty and romance, it also had rain and midges, and I can only imagine there were many desolate days. 

To preserve this piece is to preserve the whole sculpture to memory. It will not be complete until a suitable location indoors is found for it to stand testimony to the courage, skill and perseverance of an artist to take on a project of this magnitude, modestly and quietly under the canopy of the trees.

Eileen Mac Donagh is a sculptor based in Sligo. 

Acknowledgements: Sligo County Council, Creative Ireland, Coillte, Leitrim Sculpture Centre, and Friends of James McKenna.

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CHRISTINE PRESCOTT REFLECTS ON HER RECENT SOLO EXHIBITION AT CUSTOM HOUSE STUDIOS + GALLERY.

How do artists materially navigate migration and find belonging within an unfamiliar ecology?

Originally from rural Australia, I came to Ireland in 2007. For years, I looked back to that parched country and hot sun for its dry, dusty aesthetic. I had grown with that landscape, learned to crawl on its earth, explored markings made from grasses, insects, and animal tracks. I knew intimately how the sound and scent of the country would change as day passed into night and back into morning. This is what happens when children grow up in a place: they become part of it, and it becomes a part of them.

Custom House Studios + Gallery in Westport recently showcased my solo exhibition, ‘Rites of Homing’. This new body of work traverses the emotional and ecological distance between the semi-arid plains of SW Queensland and the rain-rich island of Ireland. Through poetic sculptural assemblages and intricate works on paper, I explored migration and how sites of nurture and nourishment can be found within unfamiliar landscapes.

The exploration was three-pronged. To begin, I went into the woods in a conscious effort to get to know my new homeland more deeply, like I would have done if I had been born here. My arts practice is rooted in natural materials, and, having been formally trained in textiles and sculpture at the turn of the millennium, I sought to revisit a skill-based practice through courses with basket makers, Ciaran Hogan, Tim Johnson and Mai Hvid Jørgensen. Their teachings introduced me to new materials and rhythmic processes which perfectly complemented my experiences within local woodlands. I also came across the work of immunologist, Dr Qing Li, who researched the health benefits of nature immersion, and was inspired to undertake additional training as a Forest Bathing Guide.

The real work of making art took place during a three-year studio residency at the Custom House. The studio was vital, sustaining the work in uninterrupted flow. Harvesting, weaving, stitching and repetitive mark-making, recur in my arts practice as slow, meditative rituals. Each material and process is considered and contributes to the whole. ‘Rites of Homing’ would not have been such a coherent show, without this dedicated space.

In Lay me down in pastures green and fair (2026), I sat outside in the sun and stillness of late spring, braiding rushes into a pillowcase, weaving a place to rest upon this land. Rush is abundant in Mayo and often crafted into Saint Brigid’s Crosses each spring. Braiding the rush evoked feelings of love and closeness, a muscle memory of being a young girl, braiding friends’ hair and having my own braided. To Hold (2026) is an image of my son, his hair braided in a spiral around his head, echoing the style I used to create as a teenager; the same style is repeated in the woven sculptures Nestle (2025) and Let’s Dance (2025), which are both held in the curves of ivy wood.

Sensorial memory informed other works too. Tracks (2026) and Shingleback Creek (2026) are made with spruce bark and recall the dried flakes of mud formed in shallow puddles on the dirt roads back home. The pieces of bark are held in place with a meandering stitch that mimics lizard tracks or the aerial roots of vines, to form works that climb up or around the gallery walls.

Three large drawings, Drift (2025), Currents (2026), and Earth. Skin. Scale (2024) were created through repetitive patterning of small circles of red wine. This process induces a lulling, meditative state reminiscent of water lapping on the shore or clouds moving across the sky. The finished works embody this, becoming mountain ranges, tree canopies, skin, cells, and earth – all at once. Their sculptural counterparts, Lull (2026) and Linger. Longing Still (2025), are made from garlic skins, stitched and hung from single strands of hair. Sharing the same delicate lilac hue as the drawings, they move slowly with the air currents, inviting the viewer to pause.

The Tate’s ‘Guide to Slow Looking’ tells us that gallery visitors spend an average of 8 seconds looking at a work of art. But art, like nature, rewards slow looking. We installed benches in the gallery, a simple gesture that acknowledges the need to rest and encouraged viewers to stay awhile, to look, and experience the generosity held within the materials and processes.

Commanding the most attention in the gallery space was Find Some Things To Love (2026), a large convex form made from harvested willow bark and blanket-stitched with multi-coloured pieces of cotton thread. Every step of this piece was a sensory joy, with the title reading like an instruction: This is how to make a home somewhere, find what nurtures you, what nourishes you, and follow that. Go to the place where you feel held.

Christine Prescott is a visual artist and forest bathing guide.

christineprescottstudio.com

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SARAH LONG REVIEWS THE CURRENT EXHIBITION AT THE GLUCKSMAN IN CORK.

“Panorama Europa”, two words of Greek origin, form the title of the current group show at The Glucksman, curated by Katie O’Grady and Fiona Kearney. The Greco-Roman world, often invoked as the framework for Western civilization and certainly the foundational aesthetic and code of existing power dynamics, permeates our broader understandings of Europe. This exhibition, which continues until 1 November, features the work of ten Irish artists who variously draw on European painting traditions, namely: Ursula Burke, Michael Canning, Sian Costello, Genieve Figgis, Claire Halpin, David Eager Maher, Rachel Fallon, Eleanor McCaughey, Isabel Nolan, and Geraldine O’Neill. 

The exhibition takes its title from a diptych by Claire Halpin, titled Panorama Europa (2024), which was originally commissioned by the Glucksman for the University College Cork art collection. The central motif of the painting is a Tower of Babel-like structure, altered to resemble an ancient Olympic stadium. Spread out from this central monument, which supports the large flag of the European Union, are several different narratives and timelines that pictorialise the shifting political landscapes of Europe. Within this typical Renaissance-style composition, Halpin balances multiple points of action, such as diggers extracting from deep within the earth, a series of dots and symmetrical lines that allude to the Nuremberg rallies, an assembly of Ukrainian refugees, and a more direct reference to Bruegel’s depiction of Babel, all happening within the one picture plain. The texture of the painting, with its thick impasto ground, evokes a scarred landscape, while the opaque application of paint, that renders flags, drones, and security cameras, is suggestive of layered stories and scenes, calcified underneath.

Halpin collaborated with Rachel Fallon on the sculptural work, To Never Look Away (2024), a round box holding a circular miniature painting, which calls to mind a devotional trinket. Indeed, the small object, fabricated from felt, black mirror and a gesso panel, is presented on a shelf that further imbues the materials with a talismanic quality. The exterior stitching decorates the box with small crosses. Buttery applications of Buff Titanium, Naples Yellow and Prussian Blue create the romantic looking oceanic horizon line of the painted scene held within. In the centre of the composition, however, are a mass of bodies in orange life jackets on a raft, with other bodies in the water surrounding it. The scene is terribly and inescapably familiar. Refugees continue to cross the Mediterranean, even, as the title condemns, when the eyes of the world look away. To borrow the words of Nuit Banai, and her criticism of ‘border identity’ and Eurocentricism, “It brings into relief the mostly unspoken ideological structures organising the relations between the capitalist First World and the rest of the planet: their uprootedness affirms our security; their deprivation guarantees our benefits; their death ratifies our life.” ¹

Sian Costello’s two large-scale self-portraits, The Model and The Mime (both 2025), operate within the conventions of the European painting tradition. Like John Singer Sargent, a leading figure of the Belle Époque, Costello uses the ‘sight-size’ method, translating the observed directly into the painting. Of course, Costello is depicting their own figure and so adapts the method through the use of photography, creating dynamic compositional poses. The result is extraordinarily striking; in The Model, the figure is rendered slightly larger than life, poised low on their haunches and drenched in a dramatic spotlight. The broad brushstrokes and luminescent palette create a kind of visual hum, causing the figure to appear in the midst of motion. A yellow fabric hangs as the backdrop for the figure and runs from the wall to underneath the feet. This allusion to the studio provokes a consideration of both the artist’s and viewer’s gaze, prompting questions of representation.

Elsewhere, artists engage in a more direct subversion and challenge of established practices. Across Ursula Burke’s series of three drawings, she cites traditional Arcadian landscapes by European artists and disrupts this harmony with scenes of protest and conflict in Northern Ireland. Genivive Figgis melts Rococo visions of loveliness into nightmarish figures through the slippery and loose application of paint, while Eleanor McCaughey combines religious iconography with personal motifs, and oil paint with glitter. 

A panorama can be both a broad expansive view of a landscape and an extended series of pictures unrolled before the viewer. This exhibition, with its myriad of concerns, is both. Broadly, it is interesting to centre a European lens upon painting and to interrogate the medium’s continuing association with both historical and current power dynamics. The focus on Irish artists adds additional layers of consideration that mobilise art history to differing effects – observing and recreating, challenging and subverting. 

Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in Cork.

¹ Nuit Banai, Being a Border, edited by Francis Halsall and Declan Long (Dublin: Paper Visual Art, 2021) p.24.

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PHILLINA SUN RESPONDS TO A RECENT EXHIBITION BY PHIL COLLINS AT THE MODEL IN SLIGO.

As an MFA graduate of Belfast School of Art and a former member of the artist-run gallery, Catalyst Arts, Northern Ireland in the late-1990s proved formative for visual artist and filmmaker Phil Collins, who later achieved prominence as a Turner Prize nominee in 2006. A major exhibition of his films was presented at The Model in Sligo this summer. “Many of the questions I’m still trying to answer came from that time,” Collins noted in an interview for The Berliner (the-berliner.com). “Belfast is a city with a terrible history of division and fracture, so my work became all about the political aspects of art and how to engage the public.” 

Like many of his works, the films presented at The Model variously feature marginalised people in places marked by conflict, political turmoil, or military occupation, often interweaving pop and youth culture references to elicit tensions between individual experience and collective struggle. This includes An Interval (2018/2026), featuring a long single-take shot of traffic on a busy street in Pyongyang, North Korea – a mundane scene that could be found in any city in the world. Suddenly, the screen glitches, replaced by footage from the Arirang Mass Games, a large-scale state spectacle involving thousands of people, from children to adults, engaged in militaristic and acrobatic activities. The loose ordinariness of the everyday is interrupted by the jarring artificiality of propaganda, as synchronised masses of bodies are abstracted into overwhelming, garishly coloured patterns, accompanied by a pounding, machine-like soundtrack.

Home to You (2019) uses the pop video format to present life on an eastern Slovakian housing estate, made in close collaboration with the resident Roma community. The film follows residents throughout their daily routines – working, caring, playing, or meeting friends – intercut with scenes of a community orchestra and choir performing Welsh singer Cate Le Bon’s eponymous song. For a marginalised people, ‘home’ is charged, at once alienating and sustaining, as suggested by the alternately bleak and buoyant lyrics: “Home to you/ Is a neighbourhood in the night kitchen/ Home to you/ Is atrocity in the town.” The emotional urgency of pop provides a scaffolding of feeling for a marginalised community’s shared struggles and pleasures.

The installation, they shoot horses (2004), features an eight-hour video of a disco dance marathon Collins organised with youth in Ramallah, Palestine, during the Second Intifada. On two screens, teenagers dance to pop hits from the 1960s onwards, in states ranging from ecstasy to exhaustion. Durational video invites the viewer into an intimate relationship with the observed subjects, further enhanced by the exhibition space, which has been set up as a disco, complete with strobe lights and smoke machine. As we read their faces for moods, quirks, and gazes, we mirror their bodies with our own, and sway to the music. In a haven beyond the geopolitical forces of occupation and genocide, we are invited to vicariously experience the teenagers’ defiant joy and bittersweet yearning.

Ceremony (2018) follows the journey of a decommissioned Soviet-era statue of Friedrich Engels – co-author with Karl Marx of The Communist Manifesto (1848), which established the political and philosophical system of Marxism – from an eastern Ukrainian village to Manchester, England, where Engels lived for more than 20 years. While the Manchester scenes introduce us to the struggles and longings of various individuals, the wider film traces Engels’s life as his statue is transported through Europe, ruminating on the applicability of socialist thought to a contemporary moment riven by the violence of austerity and migration, posing Engels’s most urgent question: “Socialism or barbarism?” 

After crossing the border via Calais, Engels’s statue arrives for its unveiling at an open-air socialist conference. The atmosphere is festival-like. To the tune of “Communism is coming home”, people congregate, wearing mock-Engelian beards, and wielding balloons or lilies, united in their belief that a better, fairer world is possible. This jubilant scene embodies art as proposed by John Berger in ‘Past Seen from a Possible Future’ – a 1979 essay on the instrumentalisation of the European painting tradition with the onset of modernity – offering “a tentative vision of another kind of freedom, a freedom other than the right to appropriate.”

Collins’s films emerge from emotional relationships with their subjects, harbouring a deep sympathy for the oppressed. During a public conversation with Declan Long at The Model on 4 July, he described his process as “being alive to the things you cannot see.” Collins calls on us to pay attention, to recognise the invisible, and to experience liberation, however fleetingly.

Dr Phillina Sun is a writer based in County Leitrim. 

@phillina.sun

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AENGUS WOODS DISCUSSES THE PARTICIPATION OF IRISH ARTISTS AT THE 61^ST VENICE BIENNALE.

There is something discomfiting about walking through the national pavilions that occupy the Arsenale and Giardini sites at the 61st Venice Biennale. Perhaps it has been ever thus, but in 2026, as far-right ideologies gain potency across the globe, conflicts around nationality and statehood rage unabated in Palestine and Ukraine, while migrants everywhere, desperate for a life of safety, continue to fall foul of border and flag, this microcosmic spectacle of nations jostling for cultural glory and validation, in this particular moment, feels jarring to say the least. 

Efforts are made here and there by players and participants to conspicuously place themselves on the right side of history. The Russian pavilion is predictably boycotted, demands are made for Israel’s exclusion, and of course the work of Alma Allen in the American pavilion is summarily dismissed by most commentators as merely reflective of the cultural bankruptcy of the Trump Administration. This latter point may well be true: Allen’s biomorphic sculptures are indeed almost comically bad exercises in faux monumentality. However, there is plenty of questionable art to be found all over the biennale and he is hardly the worst offender. Ultimately, there is a sense in which the very structure of the biennale, profiting from and reinforcing compulsions toward nationalistic chauvinism, display and defensiveness, does little to question and much to reinforce the more problematic taxonomies by which humans have chosen to arrange themselves, in this day and age.

It is in this light that Isabel Nolan’s presentation at the Pavilion of Ireland takes on a particularly apt resonance. In harking back to a moment at the very dawn of the Enlightenment, ‘Dreamshook’, a series of works centering on the early Renaissance artist and printer Aldo Manuzio (c1450–1515), gestures hopefully to a kind of open humanism, built on knowledge and learning. Based for most of his adult life in Venice, where he established The Aldine Press in 1494, Manuzio was a pioneer in bookbinding, producing pocket-sized editions of classical works. His efforts to disseminate the great Greek and Roman texts as widely as possible reflected a utopian desire to make a shared cultural inheritance available to all. In this way, the particular moment that interests Nolan here presents itself as almost an antidote or alternative to the kind of nationalism that would soon begin to emerge, as Enlightenment thought provided the technical grounds for the vast industrial and colonial projects that would follow. 

The work itself is sumptuous. Three hand tufted tapestries nicely translate Nolan’s drawing style into arresting tableaux of dream scenes, drama and allegory. Aldus Dreams of a Plentiful Supply of Books (2026), with its arched window shape, foreshortening, angelic figures, and the dreaming Aldo, gently echoes late Byzantine art, while Make Haste Slowly (2026) seems to map the sedimented layers of history, from primitive spiral forms through scrolls and codices up to modernist geometrics. These are offset by three sculptural works in painted steel, each continuing with the dream thematic. Oh! (2026) is a graceful pink frame with a beautifully wrought blown curtain, outlined in green. A Hole into the Future (2026) melds architectural forms with echoes of the geometrics found in the neighbouring tapestry, yet it seems literally grounded by an anchor, rendered in blue. 

Threaded through the show are a series of works on paper in which notes, sketches and quotes from Manuzio, Erasmus, and John Berryman, amongst others, are interspersed. Presented in groups with a series of artist-made benches before them, they serve simultaneously as clues, indexes, and flights of fancy. Manuzio’s pocketbooks and their dissemination have taken on a strange and unforeseen resonance, as recent stories in the press describe AI developers buying rare books en masse to feed their insatiable Large Language Models (LLMs) before shredding them. Yet, dissemination has always been a complex process with varied outcomes. We might remember too, as the great Anglo-Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983), that the strange coagulation of nation states around single languages was, in no small part, a result of the power of the printing press.

Representing the Republic of San Marino, an exhibition of paintings and film by Mark Francis continues his exploration into the visualisation of acoustics and time. ‘Sea of Sound’ presents 12 canvases and a looped audiovisual work, Listening Field (2025), originally commissioned by and presented at Solstice Arts Centre. The paintings are tightly unified, all achieved through similar techniques to produce a stuttering series of vertical patterns that oscillate with colour. There is a temporal feel that calls to mind the hypnotic dream machines of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Despite the considerable size of some of the individual works, they are well presented in the narrow confines of the Tana Art Space. To be surrounded by and in such close proximity to the rhythms of the canvases only deepens the sense of pulsation running through them. In a darkened room, Listening Field is accompanied by a small number of spot-lit works and has been scaled to complement their dimensions. This serves to create a strange oscillation, both within the works and between them, the eye and ear flitting from screen to canvas, stasis to movement, sound heard to sound seen. 

In contrast to the bombast surrounding the national pavilions, ‘In Minor Keys’, the main curated exhibition, provides an altogether more sombre and considered tone. This is, of course, due in no small part to the untimely passing in 2025 of Koyo Kouoh, the artistic director for the 61st biennale. Kouoh had previously forged strong connections with Ireland as curator of the 2016 edition of EVA International in Limerick, which informed the inclusion of several Irish artists in her Venice lineup. 

In the aftermath of her death, the vision for ‘In Minor Keys’ was followed through by an international team of her collaborators. As might be expected, in the absence of Kouoh’s unifying presence, the show has a sprawling, tentacle-like expansiveness to it. Craft, textiles and ceramics abound, and there is a sense that ritual and traditional practices exemplify those ‘minor keys’ that the curators are listening out for. A particular highlight is the substantial selection of work by Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015), a multi-faceted but long overlooked sculptor and land artist, born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her work has been rarely seen in Europe until recently; a major survey of her work at Brooklyn Museum in 2016 at last brought her to a wider global audience. Here, her unassuming shack sculptures, based on the small, vernacular, hand-built homes dotted throughout the wilds of the American Deep South, are mesmerising. As with much of the work throughout the show, their inclusion displays a curatorial sympathy for elemental materials and overlooked practices. Yet, arguably standing as something of a hollowed out heart to all this, is Alfredo Jaar’s installation, The End of the World (2023–2024) a cavernous, church-like room, lit in a pungent blood red, at the centre of which stand a small cubic stack of rare earth minerals. These are the commodities feeding our demands for phones, microchips and AI components, posing only the latest threat to the kinds of cultural practices celebrated here. 

Amongst this plethora of 110 artists, works by Alan Phelan, Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon comfortably take their places. Phelan’s explorations with the Joly screen process are presented across a freestanding zigzag wall and overseen by his transparent vinyl RGB stripe interventions on the windows of the Arsenale. 18 Joly screen photographs – backlit colour images covered in the tight vertical lines of the filter screen – offer a combination of still life and portraiture. There is a linguistic dexterity and gentle humour to the works – Underpants Darth, 1977, when it’s best to remain hidden (2019) a case in point. Yet the titles, like the images themselves, serve to simultaneously reveal and conceal. Faces are consistently obscured, feathers and plants take on symbolic overtones, and a kind of performativity also reveals itself as a strategy for hiding things in plain sight. In this manner, something like a queer history is imagined within the strictures of Joly’s analogue process. This queering strategy is then extended into space through Phelan’s architectural interventions, most notably a Carlo Scarpa designed window in the Central Pavilion, its bisecting circles contrasting beautifully with the vertical RGB bands.

The Map (2021), a large-scale cartographic tapestry by Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon, which has been widely exhibited around Ireland and internationally, finds itself suitably ensconced among other craft and textile work. It too offers an alternate history of sorts, weaving mythology, folklore and the all too real story of the abuse of women by church and state, into a defiant exercise in the assertion of female autonomy. Created by the artists in a collaborative to-and-fro during the pandemic lockdown, its razor sharp locations (Heterotopia, Outer Sanctimonia, Slag Island) are presided over by the expansive red tresses of Mary Magdalene’s hair. It’s a powerful work of righteous indignation and one whose mythic and symbolic connotations are further enriched by two other bodies of work by Maher included in the show. Les Filles d’Ouranos (1996/2025), a series of red heads floating in the shipyard docks of the Arsenale, references the birth of Aphrodite, yet the multiplication of the half-submerged heads gives them a powerful aura, both tenacious and fugitive. Most satisfying of all is The Sibyls, an installation of three large-scale drawings with sculptural elements. Sibyls were Greek oracles identified with prophetic priestesses. Here, Maher renders them faceless with impossibly long and burdensome hair. Before each drawing is a darkly reflective disc upon which biomorphic globs of metal rest, imbuing the figures with an elemental quality. 

One of a number of collateral exhibitions alongside the biennale, ‘The Spirits of Maritime Crossing’, presented at Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfù, featured work by 20 international artists, including Amanda Coogan. It was curated by Dr Apinan Poshyananda of the Bangkok Art Biennale (and curator of EV+A in 2002). Coogan presented a video of her group performance, Ode to Joy – Thai Sign Language (2024), and also delivered a live performance over several days. Dressed in red, Coogan moved among and through artworks by Parada Wiratsee and Ruangsak Anuwatwimon. A sign language user, born to deaf parents, Coogan seems to offer a kind of amplified, fully embodied language in her work, its non-verbal yet highly communicative nature creating moments of intensity between audiences and fellow performers. Much like Nolan’s dreamlike encounters with Manuzio, Maher and Fallon’s entanglements with Irish history and mythology, or Phelan’s imaginings of alternate queer narratives within the history of an obsolete photographic process, Coogan offers a way of engaging our cultural inheritances that open them up to fresh possibilities, rather than isolating them within the domain of the privileged.

Aengus Woods is a writer and critic based in County Louth. 

@aengus_woods

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RICHARD MALONE REPORTS ON THEIR RESIDENCY EXPERIENCE IN THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ROME.

The Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship is a residency in the British School at Rome – one of a number of historical research institutes offering residencies around the city. The BSR application opens annually in late November and is open to Ireland and UK-based artists. The scholarship is for painting and drawing, but this can be broad, experimental, and far reaching. Applicants are shortlisted and the final selection is made by a panel of museum directors, curators, and the foundation. The residency award comes with a monthly stipend, a large studio, three meals a day (and afternoon tea), 24-hour library access, and access to libraries and archives in Rome and around Italy.

I was surprised (and excited) to win the scholarship, as I had understood such institutions to be quite formal in how they commission and categorise research, and conservative in their approach to art, often grounded in classical frameworks that, in turn, are heavily intwined with colonial and patriarchal ideals, with Rome historically being the epicentre of these structures. My research is centred on the invisible – markers of gender, class, and queerness, which share commonalities in often being marginalised and overlooked. I’m interested in how we participate in a hierarchy of material values – grounded in principles of patriarchy, patronage, and policing – of taste, class, material culture, the body, and so on. It is a rigid system that persists to this day through education, access, language, and what is deemed valuable. How do we create ideas of truth? How can we trust historical accuracy when women, queer people, and the working class continue to be silenced, censored, and erased? 

As well as the artists, there are numerous doctoral, post-doc, and research candidates on residency in BSR, mainly from prestigious universities. It is interesting how much time is spent referencing discoveries and texts written during the Victorian era by privileged white men on grand tours. One example in a museum was Etruscan burial vessels, containing ‘couples of note’. In one urn was two women, which the archaeologists deemed high priestesses or witches, as opposed to a couple, like everyone else. This speaks to Victorian morals imposing meaning based on a limited imagination and experience. When we have a homogenous demographic responsible for the discovery, interpretation, and classification of artefacts, we are left with dogmatic readings and understandings of history. 

In the BSR studio, I explored combinations of painted surfaces, creating quilts and stitched cloth to paint on, or found board and detritus drenched in oil paint. I painted on moving blankets, cast cloth with masonry paint, created installations out of samplers, applied pigment directly to the wall. Much of my works were made in conversation with one other. The work sat like questions, as if to challenge understandings of tasteful art or exclusive histories. I loosely painted patterns, including the striped or harlequin forms used to identify the heretic, the witch, the queer, the jester. I explored ideas and representations of the ‘other’ using forms that challenge the nature of a painted object or value systems applied to the painted surface.

The BSR residency is stimulating, direct, open, inquisitive, and genuine. The studio is fantastic, as are the other artists. It is a credit to the team to select such a diverse range of practices in just seven artists. We arranged studio visits with each other and prepared collectively for open studios. It felt like an art school from another time, in which space, thought, and work were prioritised. Debate was encouraged and not polarising. We worked hard, had drinks on the roof in the sun, took trips to the countryside, or visited sites we wanted to see. We stayed up together before open studios to make sure everyone got over the finish line in time, having ice cold limoncellos while stretching canvasses and prepping studio walls. I can’t recommend this residency enough as a space for creative and inquisitive practices. I urge everyone to apply and to discover Rome as a layered, political, and enriching city that is everchanging, yet never moving. The BSR residency has opened a dialogue and raised questions that will stay with me for a long time.

Richard Malone is an artist based between Wexford and London. 

richard-malone.com

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ELAINE GRAINGER REFLECTS ON HER RESIDENCY AT CASA WABI IN PUERTO ESCONDIDO, MEXICO.

While out walking, I was listening to The Mater Podcast, featuring Mexican artist Bosco Sodi and curator Alberto Ríos de la Rosa discussing Fundación Casa Wabi (casawabi.org). I was captivated by the commitment and energy that Sodi and his team pour into this non-profit organisation. In 2014, after successfully commissioning the Japanese architect Tadao Ando to build a residency site on the pacific coast near Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca, Mexico, Casa Wabi was opened. 

Casa Wabi runs six residencies a year, hosting six artists at a time for five-week periods. It also runs a mobile community library, and community film and clay workshops. It has a large gallery space that hosts Mexican and international artists. Its mission is to support artists through residencies and develop relationships between contemporary art and local communities in three locations: Puerto Escondido, Mexico City, and Tokyo. 

I went about researching how to get onto the residency programme. Residencies at Casa Wabi Puerto Escondido are through invitation only, except for one international open call per year. The Casa Wabi X ArtReview Magazine Prize offers three international artists a funded residency for five weeks. 

For the application, you have to propose a community project and submit a portfolio of work. I proposed a project that reflects a shared human impulse to align with the stars, and to live in rhythm with the natural world. This was an outline to be further developed onsite. I researched the area and its natural landscape and studied the indigenous communities of Oaxaca. The more I researched, the more I wanted this residency, but wanting and getting are two different things. So, when I won this highly competitive prize, I knew that the stars were aligned and this would have a significant and lasting impact on me and my practice.

Since graduating with an MA from NCAD in 2018, I have undertaken multiple residencies in different parts of the world. My journey started with the RDS Awards, leading to a three-month residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in 2019. This was followed by PADA in Portugal in 2021, SIMS in Iceland in 2022, SaikoNeon in Japan in 2024, and PINK in Manchester last year. My practice thrives on residencies. Navigating somewhere new creates an alertness in me, and I seem to absorb so much more sensory information. It gives me time away from a busy family life and allows me to fully connect with my surroundings. 

Although quite used to residencies, nothing prepared me for Casa Wabi. Situated on the beachfront of the Pacific Ocean, the thunderous sounds were constant and surprisingly comforting. The residency has six independent cabins, and the main house is an open-air communal area where we gathered to eat and connect. We had three meals a day, made by an amazing team of local women. We ate communally and the staff sat down for lunch with us daily. We had large individual studios that sheltered us from the sun but kept us linked to the land and the wildlife. The residency is part of an area that has become internationally known for its architectural pavilions and public artworks. There are daily tours for visitors to experience. I accessed these on my daily walks, sought refuge from the sun in them, and got inspired by them. 

My routine started each morning with a run and swim, and then a chat over breakfast with the other residents. After that, I walked the grounds, mapping my movements, gathering sensory information, and making preparations for the community project. My days and weeks held onto this routine and as my connections with the place grew, a site-specific project formed, as well as the community project. The projects overlapped in parts and reached a point of completion on the last week of the residency. The community project took place over two days, when a group of seven participants took turns to perform short, silent walks on the land, mapping movements, observing in-between spaces, creating physical maps together, and forming an artwork, now held in the Casa Wabi Collection. 

Casa Wabi seemed like a dream at times; I feel like it is fading and building in tandem. It is a place to nurture and be nurtured, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have started this conversation with Casa Wabi and Mexico.

Elaine Grainger is an artist based in Dublin.

elainegraingerart.com

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EOGHAN RYAN REPORTS ON HIS PARTICIPATION IN THE DWELL HERE RESIDENCY AT IMMA LAST YEAR.

Thinking back on my time at IMMA, as part of the year-long Dwell Here programme, I returned to a quote that I had included at the end of my original application:

“For us it’s not about possessing the territory. Rather, it’s a matter of increasing the density of communes, of circulation, and of solidarities so that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory.”¹ 

What that quote proposed in 2011, utopian and gigantic in its conceit, feels much more specific in retrospect. I applied for the Dwell Here residency with a fairly direct intention: to consolidate a body of research and work that considers Ireland’s immediate ‘state’. At the time, I was attempting to do this remotely from Brussels, largely unsuccessfully. The residency at IMMA offered a different set of conditions entirely, not just time and space, but contextualised proximity through a sustained period of living and working, alongside the additional support of critical frameworks, an international community, finances, and a large art institution that, as an Irish millennial artist, I have grown up alongside.

For my practice, living and working within an institution, and the co-dependencies such a position invites, produces both constructive friction and access. The museum becomes not just a site of presentation, but a shell to live in, think through, and spill out from. The IMMA shell also comes with Victorian gardens and 24-hour on-site security.

The residency programme is organised and curated by Janice Hough, who carefully balances the facilitation of critical inquiry with the social and domestic aspects of care that make a year-long residency not just functional, but liveable. The critical inquiry aspect is focused around ‘intensives’. These take the form of curated weeks of workshops, field trips, and practice sharing, bringing together artists from the month-long residencies alongside year-long, live-in and studio residents, as well as invited practitioners.

These intensives are loosely framed around thematic strands relating to Technologies of Peace, The Museum as a Site of Vibration, and The Irish Paradigm, which, in practice, function more as points of departure than fixed frameworks. Outside of the intensives, my focus during the residency was directed toward developing Carceral Jigs (2025), a video installation commissioned by EVA International, and adapting my performance work, Circle A (2024), for the IMMA courtyard.

The production and adaptation of these works, interspersed with the intensives and punctuated by continuous exchange across shared meals, studio visits, pints, walks, and so on, meant conversations unfolded without pressure toward resolution or outcome. It created a rhythm between studio work and collective reflection, both organised and incidental, that retained a particular ambience, a willingness to engage with other practices, to test ideas discursively, and to sit with positions one might not necessarily agree with. I think I was starved of exactly this; thinking together from very different priorities, proximities and formalisms toward common concerns, and having the time to do it properly.

The Circle A performance I developed for the courtyard (with help from Sara Grimes, Boris Charrion, Tomislav Fellner, and Amina Szecsödy) evolved from the strangely fitting particularities of the site – an open quadrangle with a circle in the middle. Although it was independently curated from the residency, its adaptation benefitted greatly from my close proximity, as I was able to look down on it from the staff corridor, whilst picking up my post.

Now that my residency has ended, the rarity of what Dwell Here made possible 

lands hard in a city entrenched in crisis. Dwell Here offers a generous space, however temporary, in which individual practice and collective thinking can unfold alongside one another, each sustaining the other across a genuinely non-homogeneous international set of practices, all in dialogue with the institution.

Dwell Here is an exceptionally well-considered residency programme. It provides a rare set of conditions for artists to live, work, and think alongside one another in the city – conditions that still feel, to a degree, open, provisional, and actively shaped by those participating within them. I would strongly encourage others to apply while it continues to exist.

Eoghan Ryan is an Irish artist based between Brussels and Dublin working across moving image, installation, and performance.

eoghanryan.ie

¹ The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (California: Semiotext(e), 2011) p108. 

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ANNA MACLEOD DISCUSSES HER PREVIOUS PRODUCTION RESIDENCIES AT EDINBURGH SCULPTURE WORKSHOP.

The Uisce / Floraperformative community river walks is the latest phase of my ‘Water Conversations’ series that explores water and land through historical, cultural, and ecological lenses. Water is central to all human and more-than-human life on earth. Historically, water has been critical to the development of towns and cities; however, the positioning of dwellings and industry beside water bodies brought gross pollution and biodiversity loss. It is now known that, globally, freshwater life is facing alarming species loss at rates more severe than on land or in the oceans.

In my home city of Edinburgh, the Water of Leith has been rejuvenated over the past 40 years through multi-agency community trust work.¹ In witnessing the return of life and biodiversity of the water and riparian corridor of this iconic silver thread running through the city, Edinburgh seemed like the ideal spot to develop a transferable model for performative community walking, to celebrate water’s embodied animacy. 

The two-year process of research and development for Uisce / Flora was made possible through two residencies at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (ESW) in the summers of 2023 and 2024 respectively. The Reach Scotland Residency Programme, organised by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, is designed for artists working on funded projects that require either the production of final work, or a focused period of research and development (see edinburghsculpture.org). The heavily subsidised residency costs were funded through an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. 

Founded in 1986 by a group of sculpture graduates from Edinburgh College of Art, ESW was an artist-run organisation for many years, before capital funding was secured to build the Bill Scott Sculpture Centre in Newhaven, which opened in 2012. The Reach Scotland programme at ESW is an excellent living, researching and making environment in the heart of the city, where artists are offered curatorial and technical support, an apartment, a dedicated 24-hour access studio, and access to workshop facilities. The facilities in the state-of-the-art building are supported by a dedicated staff and technical support team; artists working in the workshops have specialist technicians on hand to guide them through multiple sculptural processes in the creation of new work. 

Uisce / Flora was conceived as a ceremonial procession along waterways and riverine paths (with embroidered textile sculptures and cast recycled aluminium staffs), as performative healing of human perceptions towards water, and as an act of interspecies empathy. 

Research for the project involved input from multiple individuals and organisations. At the Wemyss School of Needlework in Fife, I learned crewel embroidery and was introduced to textile designer, Katie May Anderson, who was instrumental in the form of the fabric works, generously sharing her knowledge of plant-based dyeing, pattern cutting, and assembly.² The design of the embroidered riverine plants was drawn from two collections at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: the extensive Herbarium collection of more than three million preserved specimens; and the Library and Archives collection, where the nineteenth-century John Hutton Balfour teaching diagrams and Brendel teaching models are held. 

At ESW, I was helped by the excellent technical staff through the long and complex processes of ceramic shell, sand casting, and finishing, involved in making the seven cast aluminium staffs, based on Caddisfly cases. Caddisflies (order Trichoptera) are freshwater aquatic invertebrates and indicators of good water quality; they are best known for the portable cases created by their larvae and, as such, are sometimes referred to as ‘underwater architects’. 

Uisce Lite / Flora Edinensis was held in Edinburgh during June 2025 at two venues along the route of the Water of Leith – The Physics Garden at Saughton Park and St Bernard’s Well in Stockbridge. Invited speakers contributed to the walks on health-related subjects including ethnobotany, folklore and mythology, herbalism, and river regeneration. 

A river walk, titled Uisce Sionainn / Flora Liatromensis, was recently performed on 16 May along the River Shannon, as part of my exhibition ‘Tír Breac / Speckled Land’ at The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon. I was joined by Katie May Anderson, and a talk was delivered by Niall Mac Coitir, author of Ireland’s Wild Plants: Myths, Legends and Folklore (The Collins Press, 2010). A limited edition zine, designed by Padraig Cunningham of Pure Designs Studio, with an illustrated essay by Dr Phillina Sun, was launched at the event.

Anna Macleod is a Scottish / Irish artist, researcher and educator based in Manorhamilton, County Leitrim. 

annamacleod.com

¹ See: The Water of Leith Conservation Trust (waterofleith.org.uk)

² Katie May Anderson is a textile maker, researcher, and educator based in Glasgow (@kmacostume)

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