JOANNA HOPKINS DISCUSSES HER ART PRACTICE AND A RECENT COMMUNITY ECOLOGY PROJECT AT NEPHIN NATIONAL PARK. 

I hold a BA in Fine Art Painting (2007) and an MA in Social Practice and the Creative Environment (2011) from Limerick School of Art and Design. As part of an Erasmus Exchange programme, I spent time at an art school in France, where the curriculum wasn’t separated by disciplines. Realising I could use new methods and processes encouraged me to work with multiple mediums. 

Residencies and small commissions help to support and develop my practice. In 2014, I was part of FIND, a public art project funded by Mayo Arts Office. I created a film work in an old silent cinema, commissioning a musician to create an original piano piece, with mentorship by Aideen Barry and Alice Maher. I was also mentored by Marie Brett – as part of a Residency in a care home in 2017, funded by Age & Opportunity – and by John Conway, for an Artist in the Community R&D award, funded by Create in 2022. Through funding from an Arts Council Bursary Award in 2023, Dr Eileen Hutton mentored me in ecological art approaches. I am inspired by these contemporary Irish artists whose practices are rooted in multiple mediums, with vibrant approaches to care, ecology, collaboration and experimentation. I combine my studio practice with collaborations and participatory projects by growing and making art with plants, such as The Studio at Beaufort House (2023–26) and the Soil Project (2024). 

Around 2016, my digital and neuroscience interests began to intersect with plant inspired research. I explored paper making with grass across two commissions and collaborated with Mary Conroy on An Urgent Enquiry (2019). As artist-in-residence at Dublin City University in 2020, I researched native plant folklore and their medicinal qualities. Because of pandemic restrictions, I started to feature myself in my work for the first time. For my solo exhibition, ‘Sympathetic Soup’ at DCU in 2021, I made pink ceramic cabbage leaves, tracked my menstrual diary with self-portraits of blood-related flowers, and documented the collecting of seven native wildflowers on the full moon. 

For my solo exhibition ‘Fruity Bodies’ at GOMA Waterford in 2023, I delved further into the folklore of plants, experimenting with plant-based inks, dyes and anthotypes. These processes are slow and seasonal. I hung a hawthorn tree in the gallery, and draped hawthorn trees with blackberry dyed wool and fabrics, to correlate seasons and the natural world with female bodily experience of cycles, decay and re-growth. 

In 2025, I was invited to participate in Wilderland, a public art and community ecology project in Mayo connecting people to their local environment through engagement, embedded research, and site-responsive art in the landscape. I researched and gathered plants by walking through Nephin National Park. Dye colours were extracted in my studio and during two participatory workshops, using a method of dying with lichens, passed on from local woman, Kay Goonan. 

Ring forts are rooted in folklore. I’m interested in their shifting uses over time, including how these circular cairns now share space with farms and conservation areas. Lios na Gaoithe (The Windy Fort) is a well-preserved ring fort in Nephin, which has undergone multiple uses as a burial ground and as a dwelling place. It sits gently in the park, a soft space in a gap of planted non-native conifers, holding a quiet energy, with a single hawthorn rooted at its entrance. 

On the morning of the winter solstice, I filmed at Lios na Goithe, a slow sequence of movements designed by Colm Hynes Yoga, inspired by trees and sheela na gig deities. Three bodies move through the space, then remain rooted in place, wearing handmade masks and plant-dyed, embroidered leaf motifs, layered to represent a vulva. They are dyed with lichens, hawthorn, oak, buddleia and invasive rhododendron, all gathered in the National Park. This film work was scored by musicians Irish Lights and will form part of my forthcoming solo show ‘Palimpsest’ at SUIL Gallery, County Clare, in February 2027. 

Joanna Hopkins is a visual artist working in video, drawing, photography and installation. 

joannahopkins.com

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Sinead Mc Cormick DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF THE BAVA PROGRAMME ON SHERKIN ISLAND.

Over the past 25 years, the BA in Visual Arts (BAVA) programme on Sherkin Island has become known for its unique, evolving model of art education. The community-based, four-year, honours degree programme is fully accredited, managed, and delivered by the School of Art and Design at TU Dublin in partnership with Sherkin Island Development Society (SIDS), and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. It is part-funded by the Department of Rural and Community Development and Cork County Council. The programme provides an artist-centred, place-responsive education that embraces uncertainty, independence, and lived experience.

Far away from the infrastructures typically associated with art schools, BAVA Sherkin does not really have a specific purpose-built studio, or fixed workshop facilities, and no clear boundary between campus and community. Instead, Sherkin itself becomes both the place and the subject that shapes how students work, and also how they will come to understand what it means to be an artist in the real world. This is a course created in the real world for those who want to leave as fully-fledged, working artists, and is most likely the reason why BAVA graduates have won some major awards over the past number of years. 

Spanning just five kilometres, Sherkin’s scale has never been a limitation; instead, the land itself and the islanders who inhabit it become the focal point of the course in so many more ways than could even be imagined. For BAVA, Sherkin is not a backdrop; it is a collaborator with students developing work in kitchens, sheds, fields, and along the shoreline. Student exhibitions have emerged over the years in response to the landscape with installations in domestic spaces, on beaches, or within working environments. The relationship between art and place has always encouraged students to work both practically and conceptually with material choices shaped by availability. Ideas and concepts are tested by and against weather, terrain, and time.

While much has been written over the years about the programme, what isn’t always captured is how the students themselves become so embedded in the island that many of them choose to make Sherkin their permanent home after graduation, earning it the title as the Island of the Arts. BAVA students become part of the wider Sherkin community and there is an understanding that if aid is needed for anyone, it is given. This resonates with how people reminisce about the old days of villages and what community was once built upon. 

Because of this, students are not only learning techniques; they are learning how to situate their practice within real conditions, while solving real world problems along the way. Being on an island demands adaptability and forces students to foster artistic resilience that extends far beyond graduation and benefits them in their lives as working artists, says artist and course facilitator, Majella O’Neill Collins.

At the core of BAVA is a model that is entirely different from conventional art education courses. Alongside the curriculum, the programme emphasises mentorship, peer learning, and self-directed practice. Speaking of the course, lecturer Sinead Mc Cormick says: “Tutors are themselves practising artists, actively engaged in exhibition-making and research. This creates a learning environment grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction. The relationship between student and tutor is closer to apprenticeship than instruction, with knowledge shared through dialogue, critique, and example.”

Due to smaller class sizes, peer critique is central to the course. Students are encouraged to articulate their ideas, challenge one another, and develop critical frameworks together. The absence of a large institution is what pushes students to be extra accountable and to engage in more tangible ways with their peers, tutors and the islanders, who they come to rely on during the course of their four-year degree programme. BAVA is a model of how art education is imagined for the future, yet it has been happening on Sherkin for decades.  

One of the most unique aspects of BAVA is its integration within the island community. Sherkin is not simply a location for the programme; it is a participant and so too are the people who live there year-round. While students draw from the community, they also contribute to it, bringing new perspectives and creative energy to the island. This has helped to establish Sherkin as a site of ongoing artistic activity, with an international reputation that belies its small size. The result is a model of art education that is not isolated from the world but deeply embedded within it.

As BAVA moves into its next phase, its significance lies not only in its longevity, but in what it suggests about the future of art education in Ireland. Over the course of the programme, participating students have come from Sherkin and other West Cork islands; elsewhere in Ireland, including Dublin; Ukraine, Poland, Germany, and the UK. A number of graduates of the programme now live permanently on Sherkin Island. At a time when rental costs are rising and accommodation is a constant struggle, Sherkin offers an alternative: a decentralised, community integrated model that prioritises sustainability and community living, both artistic and social. Students rent accommodation on Sherkin for the weekend blocks, staying in shared houses and the island hostel. The programme’s evolution reflects a shift towards recognising the value of diverse educational ecologies that are responsive to place, grounded in practice, and open to experimentation. 

The MA Art and Environment (MAAE) is a TU Dublin School of Art and Design master’s programme that combines post-studio art practice, interdisciplinary research, virtual teaching, island studies and community engagement. It is located in the West Cork archipelago and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. Like the BAVA programme, this archipelagic master’s is a significant arts and cultural resource for the region and has extended the range of creative opportunities not only for islanders, but for the broader West Cork community. With its focus on environmental art practice and community art-related knowledge, the students, led by Programme Chair, Dr Glenn Loughran, are actively involved in contemporary culture as organisers, makers, and commentators.

Recruitment for the 2026 intake signals not just the continuation of BAVA, but the renewal of how art education is perceived and received internationally. It is a course that understands learning as something that happens not only in studios or lecture halls, but in landscapes, in communities, and in the spaces in between. On Sherkin Island, art education is not removed from life. It is inseparable from it. 

Sinead Mc Cormick is an artist based on Sherkin Island. She is a graduate of BAVA and MAAE and is now lecturing on the BAVA programme.

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RACHAEL GILBOURNE INTERVIEWS ALBERTA WHITTLE ABOUT HER TWO-PERSON EXHIBITION WITH CAMILLE SOUTER CURRENTLY SHOWING AT IMMA.

Rachael Gilbourne: When we first met in 2019, we spoke about our shared experiences of caregiving, and the difference between empathy and compassion. Your work carries this too – a deep sense of healing and hope in a brutal world. How do you speak about trauma and violence through your practice without it sinking into despair?

Alberta Whittle: Thinking of that time reminds me how lonesome being an artist can be, but also how global crises can bring people together in affinity and hope. My heart was sore then, and I was trying to figure out my voice. I was disturbed by the grief and rage of that socio-political landscape, which in hindsight, seems much calmer than today. I am the child of two trade unionists, and I’ve learned that community is what stops me from sinking into despair. Community can come from kith and kin, or from the chosen family I am lucky to work with. Isolation can narrow one’s thinking, and we need people to remind us of what is at stake when we lose touch with our individual softness. Togetherness keeps us intentional. 

RG: You’ve previously mentioned that you think of yourself as a self-taught artist. How do you reconcile academic achievement with your authentic, organic, and intuitive approaches to making? 

AW: Whilst I think art education is an indispensable place of thinking and community-building, I am a reluctant student. Academia and education in the UK, Europe, and North America is incredibly colonial, and insists on following conservative parameters of judgement and curricula that ignore and obfuscate the global majority’s experience. The systems of education I participated in rarely fit my needs. Coming from a family of excellent teachers and artists, I am aware of their tremendous role as pastoral caregivers, questioners, and educators. However, we still need to change the system itself. I look forward to reimagining arts education as a lecturer or teacher myself someday. For me, education has always been a foundational instructive space, but the important work can happen outside of these environments. 

RG: How representative is the selection of your works within ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’, your two-person exhibition at IMMA with Camille Souter (1929–2023)?

AW: I am always curious about what will unfold when working with a new curator and institution. I’m genuinely delighted with how you have brought works into conversation with one another for the first time. For instance, it’s exciting that the RESET installation sits alongside key watercolour suites. I think the exhibition gives a good flavour of my practice, while also speaking to Camille’s work. This is very much a two-person show, and it’s been intriguing to see how the pairings of our works complement and ask different questions. It speaks very clearly on our shared concerns of environmental catastrophe, whilst also thinking about grief, family, and other healing practices. 

RG: The works of key thinkers and philosophers have been significant in the development of your practice. Can you share some of those research influences with us? 

AW: Studying for my PhD was indispensable in encouraging me to balance my making practice with researching thinkers and philosophers like Edwidge Danticat, Kamau Brathwaite, Christina Sharpe, bell hooks, Maud Sulter, and Saidiya Hartman. Crucially, this taught me that the humanities are indispensable for imagining different futures and opened my eyes to my responsibility as an artist. For instance, reading Maya Goodfellow’s Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats (Verso Books, 2019), was important in understanding the fundamental structures of racism and anti-blackness that have continued to stoke the fires of British imperialism and fracture the safety of global majority folk. I see the traces of this book in my Autumn Equinox paintings and in the wateriness of my coil sculptures. 

RG: Your beaded works, referred to as ‘coils’, are woven hanging sculptures with cowrie shells, pearls, bells and other materials, streaming vertically from ceiling beams to the handcrafted frames of your paintings. In ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’, you’ve created your longest coil sculpture to date, at over 11 metres. Can you speak about coils as a recurring form in your practice? 

AW: I first began making coils as a response to the collective reading of Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’. I was part of a wonderful interdisciplinary group exhibition, ‘Sex Ecologies’ at Kunsthall Trondheim curated by Stefanie Hessler in 2022, and by reading Lorde, I found myself gravitating to the power of pleasure and inter-species love. It still feels like a massive change in direction to remember how this manifested. The coil is a way for me to think about intergenerational connections, but also interspecies relations. It is a naval string; a line from the land to the bottom of the ocean. It is a transmitter of intertidal knowledge as well as memory work. When I string the beads, I count them and order them in particular permutations linked to prime numbers. Threading these beads into a coil becomes an act of meditation and a way to remember. 

RG: This is the first time your work has been shown in Ireland. What has become apparent for you, in thinking about audiences here?

AW: Whenever I am invited to show my work in new contexts, I always try to imagine what existing conversations I am entering into, but also what knowledge might be missing for my audiences. I don’t take my audiences’ knowledge or instincts for granted and try to give them clues into my thinking. This is the first time I have been able to work with a curator to develop such a full-some timeline of my work. Some of these details are intensely personal, such as my parents’ reasoning to return to the Caribbean to raise their children family. Other details reveal the historical, social, and cultural issues I am drawn to in my work. I wonder whether audiences here will be interested in the interlinking colonial histories between the Caribbean and Ireland.

RG: Can you share your experience of working on ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’? 

AW: It has been an honour to get to know Camille’s two children, Tim and Natasha, who have shared time and personal stories with me. In particular, it was so special to visit her studio in Achill with you and Natasha, and to toast her with a wee whiskey. Since returning to my studio in Glasgow, I’ve kept thinking of Camille and her vigorous practice, pushing me on as part of a new generation. But one of the most special times, in preparation for this show, was working with Camille’s son, Tim Morris (and his assistant Gem) in his foundry, on Summoning Spirit – Experiments in Alchemy. There was something so magical about the process. We talked about so many things, from Benin bronzes to memories of Camille, to love and grief – it’s all present in those bronze sculptures. This making process became a bit of a rebirth for my practice, to try something completely different, while emphasising the presence of love, friendship, and labour in this collaborative work. I am forever changed. Thank you. 

Alberta Whittle is a Barbadian-Scottish multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow.

albertawhittlestudio.com

Rachael Gilbourne is the curator of ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’ and Assistant Curator: Exhibitions – Projects & Partnerships at IMMA, where ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’ continues until 13 September.

imma.ie

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SÉAMUS MCCORMACK DISCUSSES THE UK-BASED ORGANISATION SUPPORTING EMERGING AND EARLY-CAREER ARTISTS FOR OVER SEVEN DECADES. 

At New Contemporaries, we believe that creating environments where artists feel supported from their first point of contact with the art world is essential to building a more diverse, inclusive and sustainable system. Founded in 1949, by and for artists, we continue that sprit today to be led by our values that artists change us, and that everything can be reinvented. 

Over the decades, our programme has included artists such as Ed Atkins, Monster Chetwynd, Phil Collins, Tacita Dean, Antony Gormley, Sophie von Hellermann, Mona Hatoum, David Hockney, John Hoyland, Isaac Julien, Anish Kapoor, Mark Leckey, Rachel Maclean, Haroon Mirza, Richard Mosse, Mike Nelson, Laure Prouvost, Paula Rego and Gillian Wearing, among many others. What connects these artists is not a shared style, but the moment at which they were supported, at a formative point before wider recognition.

During the 1970s and 1980s, our annual exhibition operated as an artist-led initiative, organised and selected by students and artists themselves. In 1988, we re-established as an independent organisation and registered charity, creating a more sustainable structure while retaining a commitment to artist-led selection, strengthening our role between art education, professional practice, and public institutions. We are a small core team of five staff, with a Board of Trustees, and are funded by Arts Council England as a National Portfolio Organisation. 

While formats and contexts continue to evolve, our purpose remains the same: to support artists at the point where new work, new thinking and new practices emerge. We co-curate an exhibition and public programme with leading London-based institutions including South London Gallery, ICA, and Camden Arts Centre, and nationally including most recently at Grundy Art Gallery (Blackpool), KARST (Plymouth), Humber Street Gallery (Hull), and upcoming at MIMA (Middlesborough) and Focal Point Gallery (Southend). By partnering with each of these institutions, we want to celebrate the particular art ecosystems in that locality. We build programmes to extend from the exhibition with artist-run spaces or other activities in each region. 

Artists are selected for participation through an annual open call, which is selected by a panel that includes our team and established artists. For 2026, this panel includes Joy Gregory, Florence Peake, and Abbas Zahedi, who represent an exciting cross section of contemporary practice. To apply, artists need to be based in the UK, be over 21 (with no upper age limit), and we actively encourage applications from artists who are underrepresented in the sector, including those who experience barriers linked to ethnicity, class, disability, gender and sexuality. 

Over the last few years, we have expanded our eligibility remit, which now is self-defined by artists wanting to participate in our programme as ‘emerging or early-career’ and have removed the need to have graduated from formal art education. This is in recognition of the variety of trajectories for artists to start or even maintain a practice. We have seen an increased growth in pathways for artists, including informal, non-accredited learning programmes such as Open School East, Syllabus, and the Turps Studio Programme, as well as artists returning to practice later in life. In response to this expanding and increasingly diverse landscape, we are keen to support artists who are developing their practice outside of traditional routes of education. 

Our work takes place across a year-round programme of artist development. This programme is shaped by the approaches, needs and ambitions of artists working today, and includes mentoring, workshops, talks, residencies, and commissions. Currently, we work with organisations such as FORMA and Hospitalfield to create opportunities for studio residencies, and this is something we are keen to grow, as access to studio provision becomes increasing challenging for artists. 

Our remit is to support artists across the four nations of the UK, and we are actively working to create stronger relationships and visibility for artists working in all areas of the country. We have recently received a curatorial grant from Art Fund to undertake some research with practitioners and organisations in both Belfast and Derry/Londonderry, as a way of understanding the needs of artists in the Northern Irish context. 

The UK, particularly the city hubs, still attract many Irish or Ireland-based artists to either study or practice. Over the last number of years, we have worked with artists from the island including Christopher Steenson and Aaron Alexander Smyth (2025); Síomha Harrington and Hazel O’Sullivan (2024); Alannah Cyan and Anne McCloy (2023); Aoibheann Greenan (2021); and Cáit and Éiméar McClay (2020). We have seen their individual practices benefit from inclusion, leading to more opportunities, visibility, and connecting with new networks. 

Artists can participate in our programme in two ways: either by applying through our annual open-call programme, which opens in the spring of each year; or through attending our online or in-person events, advertised on our website or social media channels, that address topics and issues to support the next generation of artists. What excites me about working at New Contemporaries is the variety of artists we get to collaborate with, along with the range of UK-based partners we programme with. Our programme is agile, adaptive, and able to create meaningful change by responding to artists’ needs, while remaining new and forward-looking.

Séamus McCormack is an Irish born London based curator and Senior Curator at New Contemporaries.

newcontemporaries.org.uk

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MAEVE CONNOLLY CONSIDERS THE VALUE AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF PALLAS PROJECTS/STUDIOS AS THE ORGANISATION CELEBRATES 30 YEARS. 

Pallas Projects/Studios (PP/S) is 30 years old this year. Established by artists Mark Cullen and Brian Duggan in 1996, with Gavin Murphy joining ten years later, its first home was the former Pallas Knitwear factory on Foley Street in Dublin. Since 1996, PP/S has moved many times, occupying 16 different premises around the city, and running off-site projects across multiple locations.¹ A long-term lease was finally secured on an old school building in Dublin 8 in 2012, where Cullen and Murphy now lead the organisation, with Eve Woods as curator. In addition to the gallery and studios in The Coombe, PP/S now encompasses studios in The Digital Hub and a community and workshop space in Newmarket Yards, due to open in early summer. 

In his introduction to Artist-Run Europe: Practice/Projects/Spaces, a collection of texts published to coincide with 20 years of Pallas, Gavin Murphy highlights the struggle for space in the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and 70s. Arts organisations, he notes, “opted to locate themselves as groups in spaces: spaces for production, thought, exhibition, and debate, and spaces which lay outside commercial or cultural zones […] situating themselves in run-down inner-city areas […] largely ignored by commercial, cultural and political interests of the time.”² This history of run-down spaces repurposed by artists is also a history of profit accrued over time through land ownership, inaccessible to artists and other tenants. 

Exposed to the ebb and flow of public funding, artist-run organisations cannot always afford to ignore the temporality of capital investment and return. As observed by UK-based arts consultant Sarah Thelwall in 2011, small-scale visual art spaces often support the early practices of artists who go on to achieve career success, but the “artistic, social and societal value” generated by this investment is not realised until much later.³ Thelwall describes this delayed return as ‘deferred value’, a term used in financial reporting when profits fall outside reporting cycles, and she advocates a shift from annual comparisons to lifecycle assessments.⁴ While this might be transformative, it would require an ongoing commitment to tracking and reporting, alongside the demands of everyday operations.

Despite modest resources, PP/S excels at its everyday operations, with a programme that maximises the gallery’s potential for events and exhibitions. While larger institutions have extended the duration of their shows, Pallas maintains a brisk pace, especially in the case of the Artist Initiated Project (AIP) programme. But the rhythm of artist-run time at PP/S is more complex than the fortnightly turnover of high quality exhibitions. In fact, Cullen and Murphy work with time in ways that are complex and distinctive. In 2011, when the gallery was briefly housed in Dominick Street, Cullen and Murphy initiated the first instalment of what has become their annual ‘Periodical Review’. Generally selected with invited collaborators, each iteration reflects on the artistic output of the previous year, or an even longer time period, with a decade of practice reviewed in ‘PR X’ (2020). 

‘Periodical Review’ is an explicitly future-orientated project, described as a “discursive action, the gallery proposed as a journal, a magazine-like layout of images that speak, the field talking to itself.”⁵ This annual ‘discursive action’ is documented on the PP/S website, providing a useful resource for exhibition researchers.⁶ The website also includes details of ‘In the making’ (2015–ongoing) an almost annual presentation of work in progress by IADT BA in Art students. The form of ‘In the making’ has been revised to account both for lengthening commutes and changing patterns of social media use. In recent years, students have become more interested in the experience of being together in time and space, and apparently less interested in performing their sociality for platforms.

In her contribution to Artist-Run Europe, Valerie Connor analyses photographs of artists who appear to be at leisure but are actually at work. An image of Eve Hesse in the 1960s, featuring objects made by artist friends as well as Hesse herself, prefigures the sharing economy and the “instrumental use of down-time […] in adding value to oneself (through the curated consumption of digital media) and monetising of mass ‘browsing’ patterns.”⁷ Affective labour and the “work of enthusiasm” is performed by groups as well as individuals. This situation requires artist-run organisations to adopt carefully considered strategies of self-representation, and it also requires researchers to expand their analytical paradigms to include visual methodologies.⁸ 

How can the value of artist-run organisations be recognised and sustained without resorting to metrics determined by platform media and capital investment? I have focused here on relations between humans, but PP/S has also explored the ‘more-than-human’ world, most recently through ‘Entangled Life’, a series of events curated over seven months by Cristina Nicotra.⁹ The more-than-human ‘commons’ describes a complex of relations, emphasising continuities between the material and the immaterial, the natural and the social, which are clearly of relevance to artist-run organisations. But simply categorising the work of artist-run organisations as a kind of ‘commoning’, because this work involves complex relations of care, use and conflict, does not solve the problem of visibility. As noted by Patrick Bresnihan, it is precisely the “practical, situated nature of commoning that makes it hard to see”, to the extent that it might be “recognized and valued only after it has disappeared.”¹⁰ Hopefully, in deepening its ongoing engagement with time, through the exploration of what is more-than-human, PP/S can engage others in the shared work of recognising value beyond dominant metrics, and in the process, sustain its own survival.

Dr Maeve Connolly is a Dublin-based researcher, focused on changing cultures and economies of art and media practice. She is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Film, Art & Creative Technologies at IADT.

maeveconnolly.net

¹ For the full list of previous locations see pallasprojects.org and also Mark Cullen, ‘Zones of Contention – Two Decades in the life of Pallas’, in Artist-Run Europe, Practice/Projects/Spaces, edited by Gavin Murphy and Mark Cullen (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2016) pp56–71. 

² Murphy, ‘What makes artist-run spaces different? And why it’s important to have different art spaces’, Artist-Run Europe, p6 [italics in original]

³ Sarah Thelwall, Size Matters: Notes towards a Better Understanding of the Value, Operation and Potential of Small Visual Arts Organisations (London: Common Practice, 2011) p7. [Available at commonpractice.org.uk]

⁴ Thelwall, p35.

⁵ ‘PR X’ press release, 2020 [See pallasprojects.org] 

⁶ PP/S has also supported archive-focused projects. See Megs Morley, ‘The Artist-led Archive: Sustainable Activism and the Embrace of Flux’ in Artist-Run Europe, pp72–77.

⁷ Valerie Connor, ‘‘Brown Studies’ and Artist-Led Enthusiasm’, Artist-Run Europe, p49.

⁸ Connor, p53.

⁹ ‘Entangled Life’, 14 May to 18 December 2025 [See pallasprojects.org] 

¹⁰ Patrick Bresnihan, ‘The more-than-human commons: From commons to commoning’, in Space, Power and the Commons: The Struggle for Alterative Futures, edited by Samuel Kirwan, Leila Dawney and Julian Brigstocke (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016) p104.  

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THE ÁIT COLLECTIVE OUTLINE THEIR COLLABORATIVE ETHOS AND RECENT ACTIVITIES INCLUDING AN EXHIBITION AT THE DOCK.

The Áit collective (previously ^) cultivates collaborative research, experimentation, and dissemination by working with the north County Leitrim community and landscape as mutual co-creators. To achieve this, we organise and host events in our workspace in the centre of Manorhamilton that we run together. This has taken multiple forms, such as social gatherings, symposia, rituals, workshops, walks, shared meals, and the exchanging of knowledge and stories. 

Áit translates from the Irish language as ‘place’ or ‘position’. Our workspace is situated within a strong farming community, close to the border with Northern Ireland. It is ideally located to engage with audiences not usually reached by conventional art spaces. The collective was initiated by our outgoing member Shane Finan, and currently has four members: Tara Baoth Mooney, James Kelly, Laura McMorrow, and Sonya Swarte. 

Our workspace is always in the shadow of Benbo Mountain – a constant, mutable presence in the town. The studio allows the collective members and community to explore art in a rural context. We believe that the creation of work rooted in place and the local landscape can enable innovative and meaningful collaborative work. The Áit collective is dedicated to creating collaborative works of art in the context of wildness. Our work within the space and beyond uses worlding practices that bring human and non-humans into community, conversation, encounter, and care.

 Leitrim is distinct for its thriving ecosystems, supported by small-scale, low-impact farming and traditional land stewardship that allow wildlife and agriculture to co-exist. Meadows are the result of a very intentional balance of care between humans and the land. In comparison to other parts of Ireland, Leitrim has a much lower uptake of intensive farming practices, which has resulted in a unique habitat of semi-natural grasslands and rich biodiversity. However, due to the vulnerable nature of this land and the low population and rurality, Leitrim and surrounding areas have had to be defended over the years from hydraulic fracturing (fracking), immense wind turbines, overabundance of Sitka spruce forestry, and, most recently, gold prospecting in the Five Glens – distinct glacial valleys of the Dartry Mountain Range. 

The work for our recent exhibition, ‘Waking The Land’ at The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon (22 November 2025 – 14 February 2026), began with the potential loss of Benbo Mountain to extractive goldmining. We created a wake for the mountain to celebrate its life and liveliness and highlight its presence. We  moved between ‘waking’ and ‘awakening’, presenting work that aimed to both wake and ‘waken’ the land and ourselves. 

In ‘Waking The Land’, Áit collective honoured symbolic, spiritual, and poetic relations as much as material, ecological, and political ones. Our practice and discourse are shaped by this plurality, opening space for gestures that are not about solving or mastering, but about living-with, un-learning, and attuning to the more-than-human in all its complexity. The work was informed and led by encounters with Benbo Mountain, the meadow (five small meadow patches that we each tended and observed over the last nine months), and plant material from these different sites. 

The main plant material used was Yellow Flag Iris, feileastram. Once used for fodder, bedding, dyeing and medicinal purposes, it is now relegated to the category of ‘weed’. It both thrives on and creates water-logged ground and reproduces quickly.

All of the materials used in the exhibition were found, collected or were already at hand. Wool was collected from the barbed wire fences; old bed sheets and a worn woollen blanket were dyed with yellow flag iris root, dock root, and iron. A found piece of silk was presented as a mutable framing for the rhizome that dyed it. Hazel and Sally rods, a cow skull, rocks, seeds, plants, bones and other found entities accompanied us into the gallery space. The stitches in the banner bale covers follow the guidance of the materials themselves; the threaded paths are intuitive and purposely untethered from formal cartographic systems. In these gestures, land is reimagined as relationship rather than cartography, unfolding through tending and attention, as opposed to measuring and territory.

The outside world was invited inside to inhabit the former courthouse, a building once bound to order and judgement, now reimagined as a site of porous encounter. In this assemblage, we actively juxtaposed the building’s previous and current uses, co-locating histories of colonial order and classification with chaotic immediacy and unpredictable encounter. 

An ‘opening ritual’ procession for ‘Waking the Land’ – acknowledged the potential loss of our beloved Benbo Mountain while also celebrating the reawakening of the vast life it breathes into our land. 

The ÁIT Collective is based in Manorhamilton, County Leitrim.

@wakingtheland

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AENGUS WOODS CONSIDERS THREE RECENT PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITIONS IN DUBLIN. 

In 1947, having lived through the rise and fall of National Socialism, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer posited that “myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to mythology.” The idea that science constituted progress or conversely, that the authenticity of cultural storytelling might provide some antidote to the scientific mindset, were both false in their view. The triumph of rationalism was just as much a tale as the wanderings of Odysseus, and both charted an equivalent obfuscation of lived experience by the forces of dogma. Put more simply, when myths run their course, we tend to just replace them with another.

‘The Last Balkan Cowboy’, an exhibition of 23 photographs by Dragana Jurišić at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (15 January to 1 March) seems to document scenes, locations, and characters connected to the artist’s larger project of the same name, a full-length documentary about the Yugoslavian filmmaker, Hari Džekson. A close friend of Jurišić’s father, himself a photographer, Džekson made eccentric cowboy movies in the wild landscapes of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the manner of a Balkan spaghetti western. 

Much as that filmmaker used local people as crew and cast, Jurišić populates her photographs with folk whose status as actors, locals, or passers-by are unclear. The artist herself, and also her father, appear in the images, giving us the sense that she is documenting a road trip while hunting for traces of the elusive filmmaker and the seeds of her own western mythmaking all at once. Yet there are also elegiac undertones, the sense that we are witnessing fragments of a Yugoslavia now committed to the pages of history, and in this, we see how mythologies can compete with each other – the myth of the nation and the myth of the rugged individual; country vs cowboy. Nonetheless that same history teaches us that both can perish and the remnants will look surprisingly similar. As the old Irish proverb goes: imíon na daoine ach fanann na cnoc – people leave but the hills remain. 

‘Urban Myth’ at Kevin Kavanagh gallery (8 January – 7 February) brings together a disparate set of photographic works, unifying them, albeit somewhat unevenly, under the idea that the unending flow of imagery from our devices constitutes a kind of real-time folklore – an incessantly shared record of human engagement whose very sharing seems to influence the trajectory of that flow. 

It’s a rich and provocative idea but in the context of this group exhibition, one feels that it might be more fruitfully brought to bear on a larger show that incorporated a broader range of image-making. Here, in an exhibit of tastefully presented photographs by professional practitioners, that sense of a new mythmaking seems to be confined to a general moodiness running through the works, as exemplified by the likes of Pine Needles (2021) by Adrian O’Carroll or Fog Vico Road (2005) by Gary Coyle. Nonetheless, an absorbing trio of works by Michael Boran are not so much photographic documents as they are compositions created through precise manipulations of scale and juxtaposition of imagery. As such, they point to those uncanny and unforeseen results of incessant image production where strange inlays, parallels and visual relationships appear on our screens constantly, combining and recombining ad infinitum. 

In the end however, it is another trio of photographs that sit most comfortably within the thematics of the show. Sean Lynch’s enigmatic works from his 2015 project, Adventure: Capital, present three views of a half-buried steel sculpture by John Burke. Originally commissioned for and located in a Cork housing estate in 1988, the sculpture, entitled Uniflow, was eventually removed from its site due to public concern over its apparent attraction of antisocial behavior. Its final location in a dumping ground was subsequently traced and documented by Lynch. The photographs presented here, offered with little in the way of explanatory material, are,  like gossip and hearsay, wonderfully suggestive and mysterious, encapsulating both the end of one story and the start of a new one.

The most expansive exercise in mythmaking is offered by ‘AS IF’, a three-person collaborative show at the International Centre for the Image (6 February – 5 April). Eamon Doyle is a techno DJ and founder of D1 records, turned photographer, Niall Sweeney, is a designer and theatre-maker, while David Donohue is a composer in the broad field of electronic music. Weaving video, photography, animation, painting and text, they have created an immersive installation that is impressive in its scale and unified vision. 

The viewer journeys through multiple rooms displaying large sets of framed and grouped gelatin prints, while multiple videos play, and numerous different sound sources bleed into each other. The imagery veers from stark abstractions to shots of human figures moving in restricted spaces and a series of grotesquely distorted faces. The sense of collaboration is strong, and the contributions of each artist come together in a remarkably seamless manner. 

Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord, the artists seem to present an uneasy and foreboding vision of modernity, homing in on the tensions between individual creativity and the de-individuating forces within contemporary society.  However, the whole show does seem to be packaged within a particular aesthetic, reminiscent (for this reviewer at least) of late 90s electronic music – The Designers Republic record sleeves, Chris Cunningham music videos, and minimal techno clubs. From this perspective, despite the exhibition’s tense and unsettling vision, it feels infected with a certain nostalgia. Sometimes the new stories just mask a hankering for the old. Nonetheless, as a collaborative installation by three artists displaying a fine sensitivity towards each other’s approaches, ‘AS IF’ is genuinely compelling and extraordinarily well achieved.

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

@aengus_woods

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EMMA BATTLEBURY OUTLINES A SCREENING PROGRAMME OF EXPERIMENTAL FILM ORGANISED BY AEMI. 

‘Desire Lines’ is a touring programme by aemi – a Dublin-based initiative that supports and exhibits moving image works by artists and experimental filmmakers – that premiered at the Irish Film Institute on 22 January. As stated by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006), desire lines “describe unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow.” The aemi programme brings together the work of contemporary Irish and international practitioners exploring forms of deviation and resistance, both individual and collective. 

The city of Paris provides a seductive patina for Irish artist Chloe Brenan’s short film, Verdigris (2025). A mercurial blue-green oxidises the city’s monuments; it is a colour, the film notes, that resists regulation. In palimpsest-like layers, Brenan isolates Parisian infrastructure, revealing how spatial order has been historically shaped. Beginning with French architect Hector Guimard’s standardised Métro interiors, the film rises to street level, where this logic of uniformity finds its precedent in Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s 1853 redesign of Paris, which imposed linear order and funnelled movement along controlled axes. The film situates Parisian space as historically contingent, referencing the 1961 curfew imposed on Algerian residents, including psychogeographer and Situationist International member, Abdelhafid Khatib. Brenan’s closely cropped shots accumulate with textural fluidity and conclude with a desire line in Porte Dauphine, located in the 16th arrondissement, which subverts Haussmann’s rigid vistas. 

While Verdigris traces the city’s circulatory systems, Morning Circle / Morgenkreis (2025) by Basma al-Sharif, a filmmaker of Palestinian heritage, turns inward. In the apartment he shares with his son Adnan, Mr Abrahayman is interrogated by a disembodied German authority, which questions his origins and compliance: “Are you Muslim? Have you formed an attachment to our way of life?” The camera tilts with cloying surveillance as Abrahayman confronts an environment that conveys openness but denies expression, while Adnan experiences separation anxiety at school. The film climaxes with an emulsion-burned montage, blending footage of Gazans returning home with classroom scenes that dissolve into psychedelia, as Adnan escapes the kindergarten morning circle. The song Benhayyi Al-Baghbaghan (Salute the Parrot) offers a satirical nod to the obedience and mimicry of the exilic condition.

Speech for a Melting Statue (2023) by Collectif Faire-Part, an ensemble of Belgian and Congolese artists, unfolds across dual timelines, with two nations and a monument to King Leopold II eliciting opposing responses: a colonial history in stasis, and a Congolese refusal to sanction its commemoration. Located within walking distance of Matongé, a Congolese neighbourhood in Brussels, the statue undergoes a charged reappraisal amidst the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Meanwhile, footage shot in the early 2000s in Kinshasa (the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) shows another statue of Leopold II, long removed from public display, dangling from a crane. The film’s mise-en-abyme deepens geographically; near to Kinshasa lies a district called Matongé, after which the Brussels municipality is named. “Names usually travel in the other direction,” notes poet Marie Paule Mugeni, as she prepares a speech anticipating the statue’s removal. Archival footage of Kinshasa’s dismantled monument is projected onto the Belgian plinth – an act of quiet futurity, signalling that the colonial presence is no longer frozen in authority.

Irish artist Olivia Normile’s stop-motion animation, as above, so below (Limits and Demonstrations) (2025), presents a scaled-down world in which time is composed rather than captured. Cut-out shapes form shifting constellations, which multiply and disperse within the frame. This mediation between language and abstraction reappears in a second film by Normile, titled Body Diagrams (Limits and Demonstrations) (2025). Adopting a diptych form, a handwritten term appears on the right-hand side of the screen with a drawing on the left. Normile’s drawings reinscribe visceral experience, mapping embodied sensations and the limits of language. 

In Eóin Heaney’s Parish (2024), the suburban landscape of Dublin’s Sandyford is rigged with psychological cues, revealing a republic stratified by religion, mythology, and imperial residue. Sites of previous Anglo-Irish authority sit in uneasy proximity to remnants of Republican violence, while folklore is punctured by accounts of contemporary crises. An ensemble cast “beats the parish bounds,” in a ritual used to conserve borders and memory. Flitting between Euro-trance and industrial soundscapes, the film’s dexterity of tone is held in tension through slippage between historical fact and pastoral surrealism. As the group surveys the land, history is activated. For one of the members, Pat, the journey becomes an excavation of memory, engulfing him in episodic dissociation. Ultimately, he finds solace in the group, just as Parish offers a detour from the privatised coping of modern life – less a lament for lost tradition than a reassertion of community. 

Emma Battlebury is a multi-disciplinary artist and painter based in Dublin.

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BRENDA MOORE-MCCANN DISCUSSES A RECENT EVENT BY NA CAILLEACHA IN ROME FOR ST BRIGID’S DAY. 

Two schools, two different times and sensibilities: The School of Athens (1509–11) by Raphael and The School of Hibernia (After Raphael) (2024) by the Irish art collective, Na Cailleacha. Ireland-Italy Projects was founded by Jane Adams and I in 2024 to promote cultural exchange. We saw Na Cailleacha’s project as an exciting, innovative and provocative artwork to bring to Rome, the site of Raphael’s famous fresco in the Vatican.¹ While The School of Hibernia attracted much international and Irish media attention in 2024, there has been little written about its recent iteration in Rome.

The appropriation of well-known art from a different age is a well-established practice in contemporary art since the 1970s. While not as common in Irish art, there are some precedents, such as Robert Ballagh’s The Third of May (After Goya) (1970) and John Byrne’s Last Supper, Dublin (2004). The School of Hibernia follows Ballagh’s lead in using historical artworks to make a political statement – in this case, a feminist challenge to the patriarchy underpinning Western art and its history.

The original tableau vivant was staged in the Museum Building at Trinity College Dublin, with 41 women from all walks of Irish life, including art, music, medicine, art history, poetry, science, theatre, sport, politics, dance, film, and activism. The work exists now as a photographic print, brilliantly captured by Ros Kavanagh, that is simultaneously an image rooted in art history, and a group portrait of contemporary women of significance. They include Mary Robinson, Linda Doyle, and Caroline Campbell, respectively, the first woman President of Ireland, Provost of Trinity College Dublin, and Director of the National Gallery of Ireland. The print has since entered the collections of Dublin City Council, the Office of Public Works, the Royal Irish Academy, the Arts Council of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, University of Limerick, and the Contemporary Irish Arts Society. 

Never intended as an exact replication of The School of Athens, in relation to the number of participants, The School of Hibernia referenced the original fresco in terms of colour palette, architecture, and antique costume, in order to point out an overarching difference – that all of the participants are high-achieving women. Their toga-like outfits were recycled curtains bought in charity shops. Modern references included the substitution of Euclid’s geometrical instruments with a portable computer in the foreground, and trainers worn by the young woman sprawling on the front steps, the place occupied by the barefoot Diogenes in the original fresco.  

In Rome, the work was presented through an eclectic range of events to mark Ireland’s female patron saint, St. Brigid. A symposium was held on 2 February in the beautiful crypt of the Chiesa Santa Brigida, located in the spectacular Piazza Farnese. It was organised by Ireland-Italy Projects and supported by Culture Ireland, the Embassy of Ireland in Rome, and Trinity College Foundation. The event included such distinguished speakers as Professor Arnold Nesselrath, former deputy director of the Vatican Collections; Catherine Marshall, art historian, Na Cailleacha member, and curator of The School of Hibernia; Professor Rachel Moss, Trinity College Department of Art History; Professor Emma Teeling, Zoologist and Director, Centre for Irish Bat Research, University College Dublin; and Caroline Campbell of the National Gallery of Ireland – all participants in The School of Hibernia. 

The talks were delightfully diverse, ranging from a revision of art history education to a comparison between The School of Athens and The School of Hibernia, and the various contexts for the creation of the latter. The symposium finished with a talk on women, science and bats – extraordinary ecological research furthering an understanding of human aging. 

The second part of the event took place a short walk away in the Cinema Farnese Arthouse on Campo de’ Fiori. Here, the Irish-Italian connection was emphasised with a bilingual presentation of extracts from Articoli per Signore /Articles for Women, a one-woman theatrical show written, devised, and performed by actress and feminist Elisa Pistis, which wittily critiqued traditionally discriminatory accounts of women’s achievements by the Italian press. Prior to this, a wine reception, sponsored by Ireland’s Dunne & Crescenzi, was accompanied by background jazz music by Na Cailleacha member, Carole Nelson. An interview with director and Na Cailleacha member, Therry Rudin, by Irish-Italian filmmaker, Vittoria Colonna (a descendant of the eponymous muse of Michelangelo), was followed by the première of Rudin’s charming film, Rootstock (2024), a documentary charting the evolution of the School of Hibernia through participant discussions, interviews, fun and laughter.

Brenda Moore-McCann is a medical doctor, art 

historian and founder, with Jane Adams, of Ireland-Italy Projects.

¹ Ireland-Italy Projects’ first event in 2024 presented research on the work of long-neglected Renaissance painter, Suor Plautilla Nelli, at a symposium in Trinity College Dublin.

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CIAN DUGGAN DISCUSSES THE ART SCENE IN VIETNAM. 

In 2017, I first travelled to Ho Chi Minh City – a place I love that inspires me. It has been home ever since. The city itself is a shapeshifting entity; the skylines morph while buildings appear, disappear, and reappear on a daily basis. Entire streets change. It is a beautiful sprawling city in a state of constant metamorphosis. During my time here, Vietnam has gone through a significant period of rapid economic development and growth.

From 17 January to 28 February, I presented my exhibition ‘THINSPACE’ at Galerie Quynh (galeriequynh.com). Founded by Quynh Pham and Robert Cianchi, Galerie Quynh is the longest running contemporary art gallery in the country, having just recently celebrated its 23rd anniversary. Curated by Anh Dao Ha, ‘THINSPACE’ is the first ever solo exhibition by an Irish artist at the gallery. The exhibition explores ideas central to my practice, including the unsettling of anthropocentric narratives and the blurring of boundaries between the real and fictional, the body, the environment, and the mutability of time. Specifically, this body of work uses the Celtic concept of “thin places” to look at modes of co-existence between the human, non-human, and more-than-human.These themes of thresholds, in-flux states, and non-linear modes of co-existence that I have long explored through my practice can also be found within the independent art scene in Vietnam. While the economy grows and investment in industry and infrastructure surges, the art scene here remains largely supported by private individuals and community-led initiatives.

A big reason for moving here was to better understand the contemporary cultural landscape and the kind of art being made by new generations of artists. I don’t believe you can be passive in this regard; you must go, be there, and be part of it. After a couple of months, I joined A. Farm – an international artist residency based in a repurposed factory in District 12 of Ho Chi Minh City. The residency programme was a collaboration between three organisations: the Nguyen Art Foundation (NAF), one of Vietnam’s largest contemporary collections (nguyenartfoundation.com); Sàn Art, an independent artist-founded space (san-art.co); and MoT+++, an artist-run space centered on sound, video, and performance (motplusplusplus.com). 

I was initially meant to stay in Vietnam for three months, but it turned into six, and I’m still here today. Through my time here, I have connected with an artistic scene that feels particularly immediate, true, and vital to me personally. Integral to the scene is a ‘multiverse’ of interconnected artist-run spaces and initiatives. These aren’t just alternatives to a system; they are the system. Because there is little funding for contemporary art, the infrastructure is largely built on collaboration. It is a DIY scene in which physical spaces are often in flux. You can see this in the work of the Nhà Sàn Collective (NSC), for example, which evolved from the Nhà Sàn Studio – an artist-run space founded in 1998 in Hanoi. NSC supports artist members to push experimental boundaries with or without physical space (nhasan.org). 

In central Vietnam, A Sông in Quảng Nam-Đà Nẵng focuses on grassroot art and community-building, while in the central highlands of Đà Lạt, the Sao La collective runs Cù Rú – a hybrid art-bar, library, and garden that brings artists together with botanists and farmers (saolacollective.weebly.com). Other projects embrace impermanence by design, such as 3năm studio in Ho Chi Minh City, founded with a three-year lifespan to experiment with co-living and art-labouring (3namstudio).

You find this collaborative spirit everywhere, from the interdisciplinary poetry and sound happenings of Tắm Đêm (tamdem_nightswim), to queer club collectives like Vấp Cục Đá (@vapcucda.sg), Gái Nhảy (@gai_nhay.vn), and Bung Lon (@bung_l0n). Also in Ném is a studio run by artist Dương Gia Hiếu. Using upcycled objects, Ném focuses on rethinking the relationships between people, objects and space through design. Ném has a physical space, but one that is conceptually malleable. It is simultaneously Hiếu’s studio, a cafe, a cocktail bar, and a furniture store. It hosts workshops, screenings, talks, exhibitions, and even karaoke (nemspace.info). 

While the independent scene is artist-driven, institutional and diplomatic support remains a key bridge for external funding. My exhibition at Galerie Quynh was supported by the Irish Embassy in Vietnam. It is a significant moment, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Ireland and Vietnam, and serving as an example of how cross-cultural collaboration can create whole new meaningful connections.

In Vietnam, collaboration is a way of being and a deeply ingrained attitude: if it doesn’t exist, you make it; if it’s broken, you fix it. Waiting for someone else to do it is not an option. When the New York-based Montez Press Radio visited last year, they were struck by how collectives seem to be more prevalent across contemporary culture here, than in the west. As the global art world seeks new models of sustainability, the same questions of adaptability and togetherness are being asked here in Vietnam.

Cian Duggan is an Irish artist based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. ‘THINSPACE’ was supported by the Embassy of Ireland, Vietnam.

cian-duggan.com

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