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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EMMA STROUDE OUTLINES THE TRAJECTORY AND ONGOING CONCERNS OF HER FIGURATIVE PAINTING PRACTICE.

In 1991, with a foundation course under my belt, I made my way from the North of England to London, where I later graduated with a BA in Painting from Chelsea College of Arts and a Postgraduate Higher Diploma from The Slade School of Fine Art. My third-level education was guided by extraordinary artists. Clyde Hopkins, Mali Morris, Freya Perdue, Brian Dawn Chalkley, and Noel Forster were among my tutors at Chelsea, while Tess Jaray, Ian McKeever, Lucy Jones, and Jock McFadyen tutored at The Slade. I wasn’t taught to ‘draw’ or to ‘paint’ through theory or demonstration; learning came from conversations with tutors and peers, who guided me on where to look and who to read. They challenged me to try harder, dig deeper, and fail better. I learned the necessity of committing to the work – something that proved a serious challenge in following years.

Once in Dublin, the need to make ends meet, and a sincere interest in young people, led me to teaching. While rearing a young family, I worked for Youthreach for 12 years before my body refused to continue. Vicarious trauma. Compassion fatigue. Burnout. I realised I had denied myself my own identity as an artist and this was the price. In 2012, I committed myself fully to my art practice. Some may see such a hiatus as a negative thing, but I don’t – the years in between shaped me.

Life drawing re-engaged me with my practice and, although it took a while to surface in my painting, curiosity of the human body emerged as my central focus: how we experience it, how we communicate, and our responses to the bodies of others. Being awarded the Irish Arts Review/Ireland-U.S. Council Portraiture Prize at the RHA in 2021 led to commissions in King’s Inns (Ireland’s oldest school of law) and the Seanad, honouring women in Irish history. 

Collaboration with performing artists became key to my process. Together with acrobats and actors, I have explored bodily expression of themes of uncertainty, taking up space, potential, reframing shame, vulnerability, and power. Source materials developed in sessions are starting points for investigations in charcoal and paint. Researching links (suggested by pose and theme) to archetypes, narratives embedded in our cultural DNA, or other artists’ work, leads to further learning, enriching each piece. The resulting work explores embodiment of emotions, describing the challenges of women who face the restrictions of a patriarchal society. 

Lively conversations with my mentor, Dr Tamsin Cavaliero (Department of Social Sciences, ATU Sligo) and her guidance towards a deeper understanding of my themes have become integral to my practice. My recent solo exhibition at Claremorris Gallery, ‘Slow Heat’ (27 September – 25 October 2025), took its title from Virginia Woolf’s use of heat as metaphor for the energy necessary for transformation. I painted the performed experiences of three female bodies, exploring questions of women’s potentiality, their ability to endure, acknowledgement of their innate capabilities, and the need to move beyond preconceptions. In the work, young women undergo transformation, while protecting each other and themselves. They experience love, loss, and hope without shame, and they invite the viewer to do the same.

With thanks to Custom House Studios + Gallery and Sligo Arts Service, I am currently on residency at AIR Niederösterreich in Austria, where I have collaborated with a dancer from Vienna to produce a new series of drawings, titled ‘Room to Become’. These works are included in the group exhibition, ‘Kulturpreise des Landes Niederösterreich’, which continues at NÖDOK, St. Pölten, until 11 January. 

Three decades their senior, my own experience is poured into the youthful bodies of my subjects. My understanding of the challenges that may await them informs the content of each piece. The figures experience the necessity of enduring discomfort, uncertainty, fear, the lure of the void, collapse, and loss. Emotions are expressed unashamedly and without apology. A purposefully unfinished aesthetic suggests their potential to develop and evolve further, offering hope and room to become.

Emma Stroude is a visual artist based in County Sligo. 

emmastroude.com

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DR KATE ANTOSIK-PARSONS REVIEWS THE HAYWARD GALLERY TOURING EXHIBITION CURRENTLY AT VISUAL.

Motherhood is a subject often idealised or hastily dismissed as unworthy of critical attention within contemporary art. However, ‘Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood’, curated by Hettie Judah at VISUAL Carlow (27 Sep 2025 – 11 Jan 2026), offers an important corrective. This impressive, large-scale, group exhibition brings together over 60 international artists from the 1960s to present day. Organised thematically by Creation, Loss, Maintenance and The Temple, it considers the richness and complexities of motherhood through art. A Hayward Gallery touring exhibition, staged at four UK venues over the past two years,¹ in its current iteration for VISUAL, it includes additional works by Irish artists, which help to anchor the curatorial inquiry within the immediate landscape. 

In Creation, wonderous and strange, sometimes monstrous, maternal bodies are imagined, as new selves emerge and interdependent relationships develop. Angela Forte’s tapestry, Birth of Two Selves (1994), envisions birth as a rupture and a continuance of the self. In Hermione Wiltshire’s vinyl images, Nicola Preparing for Birth (2008), pregnant bodies assume athletic labour poses, with birthing understood as both an event and a process. The Frankenstein-esque altered bodies of Annegret Soltau’s photographs evoke birthing interventions like episiotomies and c-sections. Liss LaFleur’s digital audio libretto But they can’t steal my joy (2022) queers maternal embodiment by translating spoken word into synthesised sound, encapsulating the experience of (m)others. 

Inspired by neonatal intensive care experiences, Pauline Cummins’s video Becoming Beloved (1995) deals with autonomy, survival, and the unfolding connections between maternal and infant bodies. Similarly, Fani Parali’s Incubator/Flight (2022) – a delicate pencil drawing of a pre-mature baby resting solemnly in an iron-framed incubator – hovers between fragility and resilience. Other works, like Lea Cetera’s womb-shaped hourglass, and time-lapse textile images by Tabitha Soren, skew temporalities, with maternal time running counter to linear time.

In Loss, artists sensitively explore miscarriage, forced adoption, abortion, and death. In the unflinching Annonciation (2009-13), Elina Brotherus’s photographs navigate her journey through infertility treatments. Emma Finucane’s sculpture, Politics of the Womb (2017/2025), charts the legal restrictions of the (since repealed) Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution and its consequences for reproducing bodies, including maternal deaths and terminations for medical reasons. Patricia Hurl’s Study for Jingle Bells (1987) depicts a haunting emptiness in the aftermath of a stillbirth. Dealing with stigma, Paula Rego’s stark etchings, Abortion Series (1999), and Tracey Emin’s confessional video How It Feels (1996) offer candid insights into the lived experiences of abortion. Nearby, Rachel Fallon’s Aprons of Power (2018) gesture to the absences, and invisible (re)productive labour, of the women and girls sent to Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes.

In Maintenance, named for Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969), the labour and responsibilities of motherhood become a generative force. The stunning, large-scale images of Clare Gallagher’s photographic series, Second Shift (2019), elevate the mundane daily minutia of domestic care. Billie Zangewa’s exquisite hand-stitched collage of a sleeping child, Temporary Reprieve (2017), is a moment of quiet beauty amidst the chaos of childrearing. Rachel Fallon’s Maternal Chain of Office – Order of Our Blessed Lady of the Food Bank (2018) raises issues about class and the impact of economic austerity on mothers’ abilities to provide their children basic necessities. The absent body of the child from Cassie Arnold’s school uniform, constructed from bulletproof vest material, calls to mind maternal fears for school-attending children in the United States, where gun violence is sadly normalised. Alongside this, Christine Voge’s black and white images in the sanctuary of a women’s shelter contemplate mothering in difficult circumstances. 

The ‘kitchen table’ area in VISUAL’s main gallery space suggests a matricentric activism, reframing the mother as a force for societal change. The archival documents and photographs that represent the interventions of second wave feminist collectives, like The Hackney Flashers and Polvo de Gallina Negra, scrutinise the conditions of artists and mothers in the 1970s and 80s. However, this section may have benefitted from the inclusion of a contemporary feminist art collective, to give a sense of current maternal art activism. Situated at waist height, the small touchscreen displaying Bobby Baker’s Timed Drawings (1983-84) offers glimpses into brief moments in which an artist mother must eke out her creativity. Marlene Dumas’s collaborative mother-daughter works subvert the separation between art and life, the parent-child relationship becoming a creative, artmaking force. 

The Temple offers sensitive and nuanced self-portraits of motherhood. Renee Cox’s portrait of Black maternal power, Yo Mama Series (1992-94), is flanked by Leni Dothan’s Sleeping Madonna (2011), and Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), upending classical Madonna and Child imagery and complicating dominant notions of motherhood. The composition of Ishbel Myerscough’s family portrait, All (2016), is evocative of nesting dolls, its intimacy and realism revealing a mother’s emotional labour, just as Trish Morrissey’s Eupnea (2023) entwines memories and dreams with maternal hopes and anxieties by focusing on breath. It highlights the fragility of life, and for this writer, it recalled the intense realisation of the impossibility of protecting a child from every potential harm. Overall, this exhibition complicates patriarchal or simplistic understandings of motherhood, instead offering numerous thought-provoking and challenging engagements with the messiness of art and motherhood. 

Dr Kate Antosik-Parsons is a contemporary art historian and a mother of four, who writes about reproductive justice, feminist art and embodiment. 

kateap.com

¹ Past exhibition tour venues and dates: Dundee Contemporary Arts (19 April – 13 July 2025); Millennium Gallery, Sheffield (24 October 2024 – 19 January 2025); Midland Arts Centre, Birmingham (22 June – 29 September 2024); Arnolfini, Bristol (9 March – 26 May 2024).

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HOLLIE KEARNS DISCUSSES A NEW ARTIST’S DYE GARDEN AND ASSOCIATED WORKSHOP PROGRAMME AT WORKHOUSE UNION.

In December 2024, friends of Workhouse Union gathered in a community meitheal to clear a small section of an adjacent paddock. It was the first public moment of the Colour Field – an artist’s garden cultivated to nurture colour-giving plants for use in art and textile practices. Many plants that we know as pervasive weeds are in fact colour-giving and medicinal companions that our ancestors would have been in relationship with. The Colour Field is already home to dock, nettle, willow, hawthorn, and yarrow plants, and our plan was to enhance the plot with an abundance of colour-giving plants.

The Colour Field weaves many long threads of practice and connection together; environmental, community, art, and practices of place. Workhouse Union is home to PrintBlock Callan, established there by Liz Nilsson. Last year, artist facilitator Michelle McMahon, Rosie Lynch (Creative Director) and Noortje van Deursen (Creative Producer & Co-Design Facilitator), were rethinking the ongoing Pattern Makers programme, and ways to reduce toxic art materials, when the idea of the Colour Field emerged. I was invited to develop the Colour Field and to share my personal practice in natural dyeing, textiles and nature connection. I am, by training, an art historian, but natural dyeing has always felt close to alchemy, combining my research into the colourful, pre-colonial, textile history in Ireland, with intuitive nature connection and just the right amount of scientific process to achieve strong colours from plants on cotton and linen.

Luke, a young grower in our community, grew the plants from seeds which we sourced from Irish companies and friends. Our plant list is long but includes traditional dye plants such as woad to make blue, weld to make yellow, and madder and Lady’s Bedstraw to make red. We are growing introduced plants, such as Dyer’s Coreopsis and Dyer’s Camomile, and lesser-known dye plants, such as native medicinal St. John’s Wort, and novel colour-making plant, Black Knight Scabiosa. 

A free public workshop programme launched in April 2025 with GREEN, a full day spent with nettle. We gathered, drank and ate nettles, dyed on cotton, and embroidered nettle motifs with naturally dyed threads. The response to the programme launch was immense, and we have been blown away by the diverse and engaged participant group across the year. The natural dyeing process is long and slow, and the workshops were intended as introductory skills for working with natural colour on textiles.  

Workshops in RED and YELLOW in May and June explored further printing and dyeing techniques with madder, weld, onion skins and fresh flowers. Finally, at Skill Share in September, Michelle and I finished the public programme with BLUE, a two-hour workshop using fresh indigo leaves, which thrived in our polytunnel, to achieve a range of turquoise and teal on lengths of silk. Throughout the workshops, our conversations explored the plant connections that can inform contemporary artworks. The process of producing colour on textiles has been a sacred practice across cultures and across time until the exploitative fashion industry practices of the last 150 years took hold. What layers of meaning can natural colour produce in a contemporary cultural context?

Making Colour was an open-call supported residency programme last July. Marielle MacLeman, Annie Hogg and Sylvia Maher undertook a week of rich and experimental dye research in the new outdoor dye studio, exploring deep questions of process, labour, and care. In August, I led the Open Studio Workshop, a three-day collaboration with six artists, which allowed us to go through the process from preparation of fabric to finished dye together. We chose three plants to work with: madder, dock seeds, and dyer’s camomile, which we then modified with iron, alkaline, acid, and copper solutions. By the third day, we laid out a beautiful spectrum of strong colour on cloth.

Many dye plants in the Colour Field will take a few years to mature – a natural cycle that ensures a long-term commitment to the place and the practice. For the coming year, we have commissioned two artists to make new work which will explore plant colour stories and support the development of the garden. Our workshop and event programme will deepen our connection with natural colour and the sacred, ancient, and innovative potential of plant-based colour for artists. More information can be found on the Workhouse Union website.

Hollie Kearns is Co-Founder of Workhouse Union and an independent curator.

workhouseunion.com

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PÁDRAIC E. MOORE CONSIDERS THE CURRENT EXHIBITION AT THE COLLEGE OF PSYCHIC STUDIES IN LONDON.

Recent years have seen a profusion of institutional exhibitions foregrounding occultism as a vital catalyst for cultural progress. A noteworthy example is the major show, ‘The Medium is the Message’, featuring over 40 artists, which continues at London’s College of Psychic Studies until 31 January. As the McLuhanesque title suggests, the emphasis here is not on any theme or subject but rather upon the methods of producing art via psychic means. 

Artists featured can be divided into two groups. Deceased historical figures from the mid-twentieth century onwards, who actually engaged in forms of artmaking via channelling. Then there is the smaller group of living artists, whose work demonstrates the contemporary renaissance of interest in the esoteric. Of the contemporary artists, the work of  Ireland-based artists, Samir Mahmood and Susan MacWilliam, is worthy of mention. MacWilliam’s work focus upon female luminaries from the history of mediumship, while Mahmood’s delicate, juicy watercolours resemble thought forms or tulpas – a term originating from Tibetan Buddhism relating to the visualisation of sentient beings through spiritual practice. 

A notable aspect distinguishing this exhibition is the synergy between the venue and the material on display. Since 1925, this ostentatious, six-storey Kensington townhouse has been a locus for research into spiritualism and has amassed an impressive archive. Some of these holdings are on permanent display and are literally part of the furniture, such as the portraits of luminaries associated with the history of psychical research adorning the stairwells. Two years before her death, the clairvoyant painter, Ethel Le Rossignol (1873–1970) donated her visionary artworks to this organisation, and they constitute a vital foundational element of the show. Like many, Le Rossignol sought solace in spiritualism during the unprecedented trauma of World War I. In collaboration with her spirit guide (who was named J.P.F.), she cultivated a distinctive visual language that merges prismatic mandalas with whirling art nouveau motifs. 

The clustering of artists into thematic categories (such as Between Worlds, The Mediums, Messages from The Unseen, and so on) lends cohesion to what would otherwise be an unwieldy multitude. Affinities and causal connections are emphasised, and art historical lineages are drawn between individuals that were previously positioned as solitary outliers. This is demonstrated by the protean Ann Churchill, whose visionary and intuitive work has recently been the focus of greatly-deserved attention. Represented here via drawings that possess a filigree quality, such as the jewel-like Iamblicus from 1975, Churchill’s works resonate with that of Le Rossignol. One of several enlightening wall texts punctuating this exhibition reveals that Churchill encountered Le Rossignol’s paintings during a visit to this organisation in the 1960s and clearly found the work of the older artist instructive.

In the 1980s, Churchill was an active participant in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) at the Women’s Peace Camp in Greenham Common, where she created textile artworks that embellished fences of the military base. This instance exemplifies how artists, invested in exploring unseen worlds and spirit realms, are frequently also committed to social and humanitarian issues. Indeed, the history of modern esotericism is replete with individuals who were active within causes such as women’s suffrage, anti-vivisection, and pacifism. This is attested to in the permanent display in the President’s Room, where, amongst the many photographs of past luminaries, is Charlotte Despard (1844–1939), the Anglo-Irish Sinn Féin activist and founding member of the Women’s Freedom League.

Utopian tendencies are also certainly present in the work of polymath Paulina Peavy (1901–1999), one of several artists in this show with a room devoted to their work. This is the first time Peavy’s work has been presented in the UK, and she is represented here via several works on paper and two videos, all of which were created under the direction of a nonhuman entity known as Lacamo. Peavy’s work draws heavily from New Age philosophies and is infused by the conviction that humankind was on the brink of an epoch in which feminine intelligence and ‘ovarian wisdom’ would flourish. The presented videos are visually scintillating, merging images of ancient Egyptian edifices with geometric graphics. Through these works, Peavy promulgates her conviction that we are all moving towards – and must aspire to – the state of androgyny as a means of achieving spiritual enlightenment. 

Aside from the contributions of contemporary artists, most of the work in this show would once have been designated by that problematic but nevertheless useful term, ‘outsider art’, coined by Roger Cardinal in the early 1970s. Only recently has art historical scholarship become equipped to interpret such art, the makers of which were invested in practices beyond the purview of academia. This points to the importance of shows such as this one, which emphasise the seriousness of the devotional, didactic, and in some instances, even scientific intentions of these artists. And so, the most exhilarating aspect of this exhibition is the unselfconscious and assured nature of the presented work. It is gratifying to encounter artworks that have been created according to criteria that transcends any trends or art market forces and are instead the outcome of a creative union between an artist and their kindred spirit.

Pádraic E. Moore is a writer, art historian, curator, and Director of Ormston House. 

padraicmoore.com

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GRACE O’BOYLE REVIEWS MYRID CARTEN’S AWARD-WINNING  DEBUT FEATURE FILM, SET IN RURAL NORTH DONEGAL. 

Myrid Carten is an artist and filmmaker from the Gaeltacht region in Donegal. A graduate of Central Saint Martins and Goldsmith College in London, her practice utilises documentary and fiction to examine the struggle for intimacy and how the past continues to shape us. Carten’s debut feature film, A Want in Her (2024), is an immersive, first-person account of her relationship with her mother, Nuala, who is embroiled in the struggles of mental illness and addiction. 

Carten interweaves prophetic camcorder footage from her youth with 16mm shots of Northwest Donegal, intimate phone calls, and previous artistic projects, into an aesthetic tapestry that is strikingly original. The 81-minute documentary is not didactic, nor is it an inquiry into the source of her mother’s condition, but rather the artistic expression of a daughter navigating an impossibly thick world of responsibility, guilt, and unconditional love. 

After the death of the family’s matriarch 20 years prior, the family home becomes a contested site as Kevin, Nuala’s brother, solely inherits the house. Isolated and brooding in the Donegal terrain, the home is the first character we meet. It is an anthropomorphic entity – correlating with the interior lives of the family members who inhabit it. Carten does not present the home as a static object or set design; instead, she renders the domestic space alive through a surreal and haptic treatment of everyday materials. 

The camera follows water droplets fall from the ceiling; it shoots from ashes in the fireplace, and tunnels lace curtains. Its oneiric imagery takes on a ghostly quality, suggesting that an energy remains at large in the house. Within the home, the film’s central container, certain constants persist; boiling the kettle, smoking cigarettes, and gathering around the fireplace become grounding, life-sustaining rituals. 

With a camera in hand, Carten makes a clearing through thick foliage to access an abandoned caravan just outside the family home. Her other uncle, Danny, is sheltering, but the natural world has already crept in. It is now reclaimed – wild, rotting, and unruly. Danny’s presence makes familial conflict visible to the viewer, allowing Carten’s diaristic exploration to unfold. Fractured and non-linear, the film’s timeline relies on Carten’s intuition and technical skill to construct the contours of her and her mother’s complex dynamic. She resists straightforward explanation and embraces a form of filmmaking that thinks through trauma.

A woman wearing a grey hoodie is collapsed on a public bench in Belfast city. She clenches a bottle of wine, her legs crossed, as a pink double-decker bus passes with the words “You Can Get Through This,” pasted on an advertisement. It feels scripted in its cosmic irony. Carten identifies her mother who has been missing: “I knew straight away it was mammy because of the heels.” She films at a distance, preserving the quiet, implicit agreement to remain discreet whenever Nuala is drinking. In this moment, as with many throughout the film, the viewer is an participating subject, who must reckon with themes of consent, trust, and the necrotic forces at play within the human experience.

Although systemic issues are not directly addressed in the film, they inevitably linger. As a Donegal native, Carten’s depiction of Errigal, the Muckish Mountains and Gortahork evoke familiar feelings of desolation and disadvantage. They are mythic in their presentation, but those who live at the foot of Errigal understand the ominous ambiguity of this landscape. Carten’s debut is a profoundly vulnerable account of mental illness, addiction in rural Ireland, and the tension between survival and responsibility.  

Grace O’Boyle is a curator and writer from Donegal, based in Dublin. 

Myrid Carten’s film, A Want in Her, premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival 2024 (IDFA) and won several awards during its festival run, before winning three British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs) in November 2025.

myridcarten.com

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