SO Fine Art Editions

5 March – 4 April 2026

Michael Corrigan, a Dublin-based photographer and former Chair of Visual Artists Ireland, presented his new exhibition, ‘Margins’, at SO Fine Art Editions. ‘Margins’ reflects on the evanescent borders between land, sea, and sky.

On first encounter, the exhibition presents a wide array of black-and-white landscape photography, focusing largely on the shorelines of Sligo, south Dublin, and Wicklow. Coastal photography has an immediate attraction: poised between the organic and the sculptural, the forms of the shoreline blend upper vastness, tidal patterns, and mineral formations shaped by millennia of erosion. It is no wonder that Immanuel Kant, father of modern aesthetics, felt that beauty and sublimity were registered most eloquently in nature – the monumental forms, and raw energy they embody, stirs an ancient fascination.

By chance, I happened to bump into Corrigan during my visit to the gallery, and our conversation turned to method. First, he explained that his instinct is to use a wide-angle lens, drawing background and foreground into a single field, in order to foster a sense of forces held in balance. In some of his work, this balance is fraught – in others, magisterially tranquil. 

Take the imagery of Strandhill, Sligo. The elements seem to abide one another tensely, almost in open hostility, as though each are vying for dominance. Skies loom, clouds race, coastlines tilt, and the horizon becomes a metamorphic seam where earth melts, and water evaporates into the air. These monochrome stills convey a sense of turbulence, of struggle, and this effect is amplified by Corrigan’s technique of turning into the light. By defying standard photographic guidance, the artist is able to render clouds as luminous, backlit masses within the frame, thickening their presence with an internal, threatening intensity.

Yet other landscapes seem to convey the opposite – freezing time in a delicate, harmonious composition. The Booterstown, Dublin, imagery may be the zenith of Corrigan’s efforts in this direction: meditations on the co-existence of disparate elements, each component residing peacefully, though forcefully, in its own plane. These photographs, perhaps more than any others in the series, employ signature stark contrast to dramatic effect. To achieve this feat, Corrigan was required to adopt an early morning routine. By working at dawn, the artist could take advantage of that time of day when clouds are haloed by sunlight, and the ground remains in relative shadow. 

We should reflect a moment on the title. The word ‘margins’ entered the English language sometime in the 14th century, and names spaces that are at the edge, the periphery. By their nature, such spaces have no fixed location – they are beyond the centre, but lack the definitional clarity of a border. Margins, consequently, blur boundaries: coastline dissolving into ocean, sky into horizon, water into air. As Sarah McAuliffe suggests in her accompanying text, Corrigan’s landscapes are also spaces that are marginalised – pushed aside, treated as unimportant or unglamorous – by our contemporary, image-saturated culture, which is so attuned to spectacle.

To my mind, the title also productively evokes the borders of a page or text, those blank spaces where notes and personal reflections accumulate – small interventions within an impersonal surface. More specific to analogue photography, print margins allow space for handling without touching the image during the chemical developing process. And, in the popular phrase ‘margin for error,’ the term is associated with a sense of accommodation, or permissible deviation – imperfection without catastrophe. These allusions, nestled within a single word, draw the audience further into the artist’s perspective on his subject matter.

Corrigan’s work sits in dialogue with the photographic tradition, and, in our conversation, he explicitly cited Bill Brandt as an influence. Brandt, a German-born British photographer apprenticed to Man Ray, was deeply shaped by photographic modernism. His work ranged from stark social documentary during the Second World War to later experiments with the female nude. Corrigan’s use of the wide-angle perspective and his sensitivity to tonal contrast echo aspects of this legacy. In ‘Margins’, Corrigan demonstrates that the periphery is not a site of absence but of intensity.

Tom Lordan is a writer and art 

critic, motivated by contemporary European philosophy and its historical inheritance.

tomlordan.com

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The Dock

21 March – 30 May 2026

For Helen O’Leary’s exhibition ‘Soft Spot’, an artist’s studio has been installed. Surfaces are bestrewn with tools, jars, buckets, piled canvas, wood scraps, and balls of yarn, while improvised constructions are laid down by the artist, as if in mid-contemplation. Discrete works are hard to discern. In the accompanying booklet, a list of materials is provided in lieu of artwork titles: soil, iron, linen, wood, charcoal, crushed eggshells, oak galls, oyster shell, spun nettle, reclaimed and recycled objects from the artist’s life, and more. It’s an alchemical inventory. I spot powders and potions, mortars and pestles, pitchers and whittled spoons – elements required for processes known only to the magic-maker.

What’s certain is that these are the materials of a life of making, sometimes obscure in origin, accumulated by accident or curiosity, and driven by peculiar passions. The exhibition emerged from what O’Leary calls ‘studio archaeology’ in which her studio becomes an “archaeological site, a dictionary of the savage of age, a compendium of erasures, renovations, and restorations.” It’s an excavation of process and of the artist’s impulses, recalling Louise Bourgeois’s declaration that “[t]he studio of the artist is really the self-portrait” of the artist.

In The Poetics of Space (Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), Gaston Bachelard wrote that a house is more than an architectural form, it is an abode of the human soul, mediating between the self and its longings. Organic and intimate, it is a space for reverie. Similarly, a studio, much used, is that mediating space between the artist and their dreams. Over time, it becomes a cosmos of objects, attached to memories; from them, a thickness of feeling emerges. O’Leary’s objects proliferate, spreading and accreting across space, like fungi unfurling through a forest’s understory, the mycorrhizal network by which trees communicate with each other. They manifest reverie, that inward rearrangement of materials into forms dreamt by the artist.

At first, the plinth and the frame, mainstays of conventional art display, seem absent. It is up to the viewer to search for meaning within the jumbled gallimaufry of objects, to query the commonplace idea of art as transcendent object, rather than process. There is a sense of provisionality – of forms in the process of transforming into others, caught in the struggle between chaos and possibility, intrinsic to making.

Nevertheless, frames and paintings, nascent and actual, become evident. O’Leary is also known for her ‘history paintings’. Considered the most prestigious genre in Western art tradition, history painting was a form of narrative art that applied classical and idealised conventions to the dramatisation of subjects drawn from classical Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, and modern history. O’Leary’s history paintings abandon myth and allegory for the messy reality of paint and canvas. Precariously propped, they are shaggy, sutured together, and plastered in paint, conjuring connotations of wounds and their repair, accomplished with simple materials from the artist’s immediate environment. Nearby staves of wood, bone-like, await rehabilitation. On the floor, a crumpled muslin cloth lies in a plate, soaked in crimson dye, like a post-surgery remnant. If violence is a concern of traditional history painting, then its aftermath is O’Leary’s.

History’s grand events are far from the childhood farm where O’Leary learned of, in the economic precarity following her father’s early death, “staunch practicality, material efficiency, and insistence of self-determination.” O’Leary knits with wood, a practice echoed by the cross-stitch sampler, made circa 1890 by an unknown artist, which hangs above the mantle, emblazoned with the incantation:

MAKE IT DO

WEAR IT OUT

USE IT UP

DO WITHOUT

This is a variation on the American mantra, popularised during the Great Depression and World War II, that promoted extreme frugality and resourcefulness. In the context of this exhibition, the saying complements and foregrounds O’Leary’s ethos of repurposing. A ‘soft spot’ is a strong liking for something or someone, marking a vulnerable point of emotional susceptibility – in this instance, perhaps highlighting the artist’s emotional connection to certain objects and materials that she cannot part with. Soft spots are also fontanelles, those diamond-shaped areas on an infant’s head where the skull bones have not yet fused together. Made of tough membranes, the soft spot can be touched, tenderly. Similarly, a studio could be described as a soft spot, where over time, things are knitted together by a subtle and careful magic.

Phillina Sun is an American writer based in the Northwest of Ireland.

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Backwater Artists Group

13 March – 24 April 2026

The recent group exhibition, ‘MOTH’, at Studio 12 in Backwater Artists Group in Cork, uses the adaptive evolution of the moth, following the Industrial Revolution, as a case study to consider the impact of capitalist systems on human identity and behaviours. The exhibition is curated by Emma Quin, the second recipient of the Backwater Artists Emerging Curator Award, whose curatorial framework gathers artists Andrea Newman, Lynn-Marie Dennehy, and Pádraig Spillane, in precise and generative ways. 

Architectures of surveillance and imperial power structures are foregrounded in Lynn-Marie Dennehy’s sculptural installation, Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for barbarian souls (2026). Tape and paper combine to create an image of caryatid – an architectural support carved in the shape of a female figure – superimposed over a classical Ionic column. The wall-sized print extends, in part, across the ceiling and floor, its papery ephemerality parodying the idea of the monumental. The patchwork nature of Dennehy’s image making calls to mind Hussein Mitha’s essay ‘The Wretched of the City (An Excerpt)’ for Strange lands still bear common ground, the publication for the 23rd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, curated by Beulah Ezeugo. They ask if the bodies depicted in caryatids have been ‘anthropomorphised’ or ‘petrified’, highlighting the very real human labour involved in their creation and in the upholding of our contemporary institutions and social structures. 

Dennehy’s greyscale caryatid, evoking a sense of a shadowy, even nefarious, influence, is suggestive of the unseen role of colonial artefacts in defining our current value systems. The artist is interested in the overlooked Ionic column as a metaphor for disregarded histories. The pale pink highlights that surround the figure and pillar made me think about the ‘gynaopetican’. This term, coined by theorist Alison Winch, is a gendered, neoliberal variation on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, that enacts perpetual surveillance, disciplinary power, and regulation by women upon the bodies of other women. This in turn prompts reflection on the complex behaviours that see women upholding aggressive capitalist power systems while simultaneously being oppressed by them. 

Pádraig Spillane’s grid of photographs, Image Notes (2026), is an immediate manifestation of perhaps the greatest panopticon of all: Instagram. Indeed, the images are a selection from the artist’s social media platform over the past ten years. The effect is, at first, mildly disorientating. The reality that 45 images – three rows of 15 – presented against a white wall, could disrupt my senses, seems absurd, considering how easily I scroll past thousands of images on my screen every day. Once I make a concerted effort to engage with each image individually, the rewards are endless: a curious image of a light fixture reflected in a window that frames a pink sky; a surreal image of a child’s toy car washed ashore; the tanning salon I pass daily, presented within a composition of technical excellence. The presentation draws into question modes of image circulation in a time of intense moral quandary regarding artificial intelligence. Interestingly, in spite of technological advancements, we still think of images in photographic terms – in fixed, framed moments. There is something quite poignant about Spillane’s ‘eye’ creating social and aesthetic connections that resist the ever-changing ratios of online formats.

One and Three Shutters (2024) by Andrea Newman also elicits strong emotion – this time, rage. In a nod to conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965), Newman arranges a metal shutter alongside a photographic print of the object and its linguistic definition on separate sheets of aluminium. The latter cites a statistic relating to the high-cost Cork City Council have incurred in ‘shuttering’ vacant and derelict properties in recent years. Newman’s three objects combine to resemble a row of headstones – an apt metaphor for the dereliction and socio-economic impact that emerge from the state’s neglect of social housing. The artist also alludes to the role of language in denoting such hierarchies. 

In the context of the broader exhibition, it is interesting to consider the shutter more expansively, in relation to the class dynamics of classical architecture referenced in Dennehy’s work, and in the mechanics of photography explored by Spillane. Returning to Quin’s curatorial enquiry, which uses the adaptive behaviours of moths as an analogy for the self-surveillance we reinforce, reproduce and perform under capitalism, ‘MOTH’ is an exhibition that is at times poetic, often polymorphic, and deeply political. 

Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in Cork.

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Queen Street Studios + Gallery

12 March – 16 April 2026 

‘Watching a sunset, 8.49 pm’ is an exhibition at QSS in Belfast of new work by Sligo-based artist, Andy Parsons, created over the last two years. This is the first iteration of a touring exhibition that will change and adapt to six different venues around Ireland. The time in the exhibition title will gradually increase with each presentation, culminating early next year at Esker Arts Centre in Tullamore with ‘Watching a sunset, 8.54 pm’. The exhibition comprises nine paintings, mostly acrylic on canvas, all sharing the title Watching a sunset, as well as a large group of objects called Sculptures of watching figures. 

Watching a sunset (red quartet) shows four figures seated on the ground – striped forms indicating towels or picnic blankets – with knees drawn up or in various states of recline. Facial features are evoked in shades of cobalt blue, mixed wet on wet, with scarlet undertones. One figure smokes; another smiles. The figures seem at ease, all facing in one direction, as if waiting for something to take place – a ceremony, spectacle, or initiation. 

Watching a sunset (after Henry Moore) and Watching a sunset (through a phone) act as a pair; both are acrylic on canvas and are hemmed and fitted with eyelets. Each features a supine figure, with knees raised and legs crossed at the ankles. The Henry Moore reference could denote any of the sculptor’s reclining forms, yet it is the foreshortened body in Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1480) that first springs to mind, despite details like shoelaces that indicate modernity. The figure opposite, painted almost entirely in yellow apart from the white trainers, holds up a smartphone that obscures the face, engrossed in the virtual world or in a mediated version of reality, while a yellow wax sculpture, one of the ‘watching figures’, mirrors the painting in miniature. In total there are 42 figures, striking every conceivable pose, and fabricated in multiple styles, using an impressive array of materials – from clay, plaster, and acrylic, to wire, wood, card, and 3D-printed elements.  

Watching a sunset (after Michelangelo) takes the voyeuristic theme of ‘red quartet’ to a monumental scale. Populating the upper half of the five-metre-wide canvas is a group of some ten figures seated on the ground, some only partially visible, alone or in groups, while several engage with mobile phones. They are delineated in earthy tones, blocked in with yellow, and outlined in darker greens, blues, and mauves. A lot is left to interpretation, the loose brushwork suggesting half remembered things. The lower section is an abstract swathe of washes and broad brushwork indicating a body of water. Again, the group has the air of relaxed expectancy of music festival goers waiting for a performance to begin. The work’s title references Michelangelo, and perhaps specifically his fresco for the Sistine Chapel, The Last Judgement (1536–1541), yet my thoughts also drift to the huddled coven of Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath (1798).

Watching a sunset (Love’s easy tears) (2026) is of a similar scale but employs a very different colour palette and composition. To the right, a large figure in silhouette raises a hand to screen their eyes to view the sunset. The rest of the unstretched canvas is filled with colour fields of orange, red, purple and yellow that conjure up a riverbend or natural amphitheatre. On closer inspection, this section reveals small groupings, reminiscent of the cavorting couples in the desert scene of Antonioni’s 1970 film, Zabriskie Point. In fact, there is something quite nostalgic about people gathering in nature, yet the appearance of smartphones grounds these works in the contemporary era.

Punta Cometa is a headland on Mexico’s Pacific coast where people gather to watch the sunset. I remember a person there beating a drum, the tempo slowly increasing as the sun dipped ever closer to the horizon. Parsons, speaking of the “human need for fellowship and beauty through interactions with the natural world,” sums up this memory for me perfectly. Even if elements of the modern experience of this simple activity might, due to the ubiquitous smartphone, lean towards the performative, or be mediated by screens, surely now, at a time of imminent environmental collapse, the communal act of celebrating a beautiful natural phenomenon, free and open to anyone, is worth commemorating. 

Jonathan Brennan is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Belfast.

jonathanbrennanart.com

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CCA Derry ~ Londonderry

17 January – 14 March 2026

As I explored the group exhibition, ‘IT’S NOT CLEAR FROM HERE’ at CCA Derry ~ Londonderry, I experienced a peculiar sense of nostalgia. It stemmed from seeing old technologies that were familiar from my childhood and early adulthood – such as overhead projectors, TV monitors, and slide carousels – installed in the gallery space. This sensation is not surprising when we consider research on the phenomenon of ‘tech-nostalgia’, which involves a fondness or longing for outdated technology. 

Curated by Ashleigh Wilson, ‘IT’S NOT CLEAR FROM HERE’ features Thomas Hunter, Sabi Nicholson and Lucy Tevlin, whose work is presented across all three gallery spaces at CCA. The exhibition taps into shared associations with outmoded devices, while the artists’ adaption of archival and found materials creates subjective, often autobiographical, narrative threads. Through lens-based media, they explore the precarity of images, which are shaped by time, technology and the act of looking. Each artist brings analogue technologies to our attention by reanimating them within the gallery setting, which begins to function more like a testing laboratory. Wall-based artworks and film projections share the space with installations of TV monitors on metal shelves. In many contemporary exhibitions, the mechanisms and means of display are often hidden away; however, here, these devices assume a sculptural dimension, becoming a visible and active component of the art. 

Thomas Hunter presents a two-screen installation that combines his own footage with archival newsreel footage from the later years of The Troubles. The artist grew up in Belgium, so his experience of Ireland was largely mediated through family trips and news reportage of conflict. His projections feature idyllic imagery of rural landscapes in Sligo and Connemara, layered with news material from the North of Ireland. For example, a bright vista of Benbulben mountain is interrupted by the changing imagery of a press conference. A series of small monitors on shelves, positioned centrally in the gallery, features archival reference material, accompanied by a singular screen of flickering static, placed at a low level. Through our experience of the installation, we become active participants in distorted understandings of history and memory. 

Sabi Nicholson’s dynamic installation addresses the ecological crisis at Lough Neagh. Nicholson’s projection is akin to a large-scale science experiment in which warped imagery (sourced from archival fishing documentaries) is projected onto the gallery wall through a suspended glass vessel, containing contaminated lough water. The visual and sound effects echo that of an ultrasound, with nature treated as a patient requiring urgent medical intervention. Lumen prints, made using local flora, are also shown. 

Lucy Tevlin’s projected acetates feature works titled ‘The structure of a second’. These are texts which the artist writes after she has ordered 8mm film online, and while anticipating its arrival, to chart her sense of expectation. These are poetically charged staccato phrases and short sentences, designed to activate our visual awareness; they are numbered 1 to 24 to signify the standard of 24 frames within a filmed second. “Light falls over buildings in the distance/ Cascading/ Cascading/ Cascading/ An arrangement/ An expansion/ Cracks of white snow/ Dark clouds…” Alongside these text works, Tevlin presents the unopened rolls of film, which are exhibited as a finished artwork, and serve to perpetuate the mystique of the analogue process. 

‘IT’S NOT CLEAR FROM HERE’ transforms the gallery into a space of shifting personal and collective narratives. Across photography and film, the presented works harness dislocated and elusive imagery to address shifting technologies and environmental crisis.

Dr Marianne O’Kane Boal is a critic and curator based in Donegal. She is President of AICA Ireland. 

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Mermaid Arts Centre

17 January – 28 February 2026

An archive often results from fortuitous luck, foresight, or both, and its true value tends to emerge with time. Happily for posterity, a comprehensive collection of documents and ephemera relating to the Women Artists Action Group (1987 – 1991) is held at the National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL). It was donated by chair and founding member of WAAG, Pauline Cummins. A selection of this material, which includes correspondence, newsletters, a draft constitution, catalogues, and media clippings, was recently on display for the exhibition ‘WAAG: An Archive’ at Mermaid Arts Centre. Its curator Helena Tobin commented, this material facilitates an understanding of “what happened, how it happened, who was involved” and gives “a sense of the time, the context, and the labour.”¹

Formed in 1987, around a farmhouse table in Clonmel, County Tipperary, the group – made up of artists, art historians, critics and curators, including Breeda Mooney, Veronica Bolay, Jenny Haughton, Patricia Hurl, Patricia McKenna, Louise Walsh, Alice Maher, and Kathy Prendergast – was outraged by the hostile environment for women practitioners. Their bold determination and unshackled ambition were bolstered by a backdrop of growing feminist and queer activism in Ireland and overseas in the late 80s.

Encouraged by Medb Ruane at the Arts Council, the group’s first task was to assemble a slide library to show the extent and range of women artists in Ireland. In July of that year, 91 artists were represented in a slide exhibition at Project Arts Centre, as part of the Third International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women in Dublin. ‘WAAG: An Archive’ is a fresh iteration of an exhibition last year at South Tipperary Arts Centre (2 May – 21 June 2025), organised in partnership with NIVAL. 

The exhibition curators, Helena Tobin and Iris Vos, attended the launch at Mermaid Arts Centre alongside core WAAG members. The opening took place on a cold and wet January evening but was enthusiastically attended. As with archives, activism also resonates through time, often with contemporary and far-reaching impacts. Among the crowd that gathered were diverse generations for whom the notion of a small collective taking on an obstructive establishment was inspiring and, in some cases, emotional. 

WAAG members’ testimonies and the material on view recall an era when typewriters and photocopiers were the height of technology. But, more forcefully, they revisit what Pauline Cummins considers “a decade of horror” in which tragedies such as the ‘Kerry babies’ case, and Ann Lovett’s death had occurred.² It was a time when, all too often, the responsibility – and the blame – for reproduction was foisted on women within a repressive patriarchal regime. 

For older visitors, the exhibition was an occasion for reminiscing. One woman commented that it acted as a bridge to a different past. Veronica Heywood took part in the inaugural WAAG show at the Guinness Hop Store in 1987. [‘WAAG II: Art Beyond Barriers’ was held at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in 1989]. She recalled having the chilling realisation that a Dublin gallery willing to show the work of a female artist was the exception at that time. It was indignation at this kind of mindset, she said, that sparked a movement that burned very bright for its duration.

Incredulity at the scale of WAAG’s actions was tangible at the launch. Alannah Henry, who was using the collective as a case study in feminist action for a teaching placement, was delighted to be attending an event that highlighted the group’s tireless work and accomplishments. Summing up its legacy, she and a companion noted how much more accessible the art world is for women now, while stressing the need for ongoing vigilance and responsiveness to ever-changing times. 

The group’s activity culminated with ‘Women Artists and the Environment’, an ambitious WAAG event in June 1991, hosted in partnership with the International Association of Women in the Arts (IAWA) to celebrate Dublin as European City of Culture. It included site-responsive works by artists from abroad and a symposium at IMMA that was opened by President Mary Robinson, with a keynote speech by renowned American art activists, the Guerrilla Girls.

From small beginnings, WAAG developed as an entity with international reach. With NIWAG as its Northern Irish branch, membership of IAWA since 1988, and links within the US, work was also shown and events held overseas. By the time the collective ceased activity in 1991, its primary aims had been achieved.

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

¹ WAAG Symposium, Part 1: WAAG Legacy, Dr Sarah Kelleher in conversation with artists Pauline Cummins and Louise Walsh, South Tipperary Arts Centre,10 May 2025, youtube.com.

² Ibid.

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VISUAL Carlow

31 January – 10 May 2026 

The Digital Gallery at VISUAL Carlow presents ‘DRILL’, a newly commissioned exhibition of moving image and sound installation by Naomi Sex. The artist has written and directed a suite of scripted performances that unfold across six large monitors, dispersed throughout the darkened space. The screens are positioned so that viewers must move between them, navigating the room as if traversing a court. Anchoring the installation is a wall-length photograph of a badminton post, shot side-on. The image implies an invisible boundary, inviting the audience to imagine the net extended across the room. 

The films are populated with the paraphernalia of sport: free weights, gym mats, rackets, branded sportswear, and resistance bands in primary colours. The artist works with a combination of professional actors and non-actors, whose performances oscillate between heightened theatricality and awkward naturalism. We observe them in conversation with one another and, occasionally, with themselves. The gym becomes a site of rehearsal in which speech and social comportment are subjected to the same rigorous repetition as a forehand swing. 

Across a single cycle, the six screens drift in and out of synchronisation. Distinct but interrelated micro-scenarios unfold: a character hesitates before speaking; another argues that they are made to apologise too frequently; someone fixates on how exposed they feel in their gym outfit; others confess to a persistent awkwardness in social situations. The scenes are absurd and faintly comic, their dialogue looping and misfiring with a Beckettian cadence. Language is stretched to reveal its gaps. Exchanges falter, apologies proliferate, intentions are misunderstood. The humour is dry, but the undercurrent is one of vulnerability. 

This precariousness of speech is juxtaposed with the confidence of bodies in motion. When the performers rally a shuttlecock or engage in a choreographed drill, their movements are assured and elegant. In contrast, when they stand face to face, attempting ordinary conversation, their gestures stiffen. Arms fold defensively; gazes slide away. In one vignette, a group stands in formation, pulling taut, yellow, red, and blue resistance bands between them. The bands create literal lines of tension, stretching and vibrating as the performers lean back with controlled force. The image operates as a diagram of social strain: connection is maintained, but only through pressure. 

The dialogue in these micro-scenarios suggests a deficit in social fluency, prompting the question of whether these conversations are themselves drills: attempts to practise intimacy, apology, or confrontation. If so, the characters appear caught in a loop where rehearsal never quite becomes mastery. Sports sociologist Henning Eichberg posited that in the West, games have been so intensely codified in the form of sport that the playful impulse from which they sprang has almost been extinguished. Sex’s work may lead us to question whether the same has become true of human relations more broadly. In a society increasingly inclined to instrumentalise visual and verbal communication as a means of advancement, have we obscured the authentic self from which the impulse to communicate first emerged? 

The work also resonates with theories of speech acts articulated by J. L. Austin and later expanded by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Austin proposed that utterances do not merely describe reality but can enact it. He distinguished between locution (what is said), illocution (what is done in saying it), and perlocution (the effects produced by saying it). Butler and Sedgwick mobilised this framework to examine how language performs and regulates gender, sexuality, and social power. In ‘DRILL’, apologies, accusations, and confessions operate as tentative speech acts. The characters attempt to reshape their relational realities through language, yet the perlocutionary effects are unstable. Words are issued, but their consequences remain uncertain. 

Sex’s installation situates bodies in close proximity, engaged in choreographed exertion, while simultaneously foregrounding the fragility of verbal exchange. The badminton net becomes a central metaphor. In itself the prototypical symbol of connection, the network, it nonetheless marks division between two sides. It is also the necessary structure that enables play. Similarly, the resistance bands require mutual tension to function; without opposing force, they slacken. ‘DRILL’ suggests that social cohesion may depend on a similar dynamic – an ongoing practice of negotiation, repetition, and strain. The exhibition leaves the viewer suspended between the promise of improvement through rehearsal and the recognition that some gaps in communication persist, no matter how diligently we train.

Ella de Búrca is an Irish visual artist and lecturer at SETU Wexford College of Art. 

elladeburca.com

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Naughton Gallery

4 December 2025 – 29 March 2026

‘Disasters and Interventions’ is an exhibition at Naughton Gallery of over 50 works by visual artist, and hugely successful children’s book author, Oliver Jeffers. This is the first exhibition of his work to take place in his home city of Belfast in over 20 years. It features a series of painted and collaged interventions on different surfaces and found materials – a treasure trove of schlocky paintings, antique engravings, and vintage photo albums. Visually, the work is closest to Jeffers’ charming book, There’s a Ghost in this House (HarperCollins, 2021), in which the artist paints his child protagonist onto archival photographs as she goes in search of hidden ghosts (which appear periodically on translucent pages, overlaying them onto the background imagery). 

In the exhibition, there are specific references from the author’s oeuvre, not least the Hergé-inspired red space rocket from his book, How to Catch a Star (HarperCollins, 2014). It makes an appearance in A Point of Light in the Dark (2012), embedded nose first, having crash-landed in a reproduction landscape painting, originally hoked out of a Chinatown trash can. The rocket reappears next to a lake in Down on the Range (2025) – another dramatic landscape of distant, snow-capped mountains that could have been lifted from National Geographic. The spacecraft is one of a litany of crashed vessels and machines that includes blimps, jets, cars, buses, unexploded bombs, and Sputnik itself. Their juxtaposition emphasises the incongruity and absurdity of chance encounters. 

Some of the titles incorporate humorous statements like “just give me a minute…” (emanating from a burning house); “I’ll be back in two min” (trailing from the cockpit of a flaming fighter-jet); or “I’m fragile right now” (next to a porcelain variant of the crashed rocket). These pithy one-liners are deliberately silly, funny, and inventive, serving to trivialise disaster while exemplifying a typical Northern Irish black sense of humour – or indeed, a coping mechanism. 

There are local references too: a DeLorean car is depicted, and an old Belfast bus is partly submerged in a lake. The Titanic makes several appearances: sinking impossibly into a small stream in Lost at Snow (2018) and embedded in rolling hills that resemble undulating waves in Lost at Hills (2025). In one torn painting, a crash-landed Concorde peeks through frayed canvas. The disaster works are clustered together over a custom-print wallpaper backdrop, showing a blown-up detail of an ideal Italianate landscape at sunset, serving again to highlight the irony of Jeffers’ drastic intrusions. 

In many pieces, there is a distinct sense of characters remaining oblivious in the face of the artist’s interventions. For example, in There’s Nothing to Worry About (2019), a father and son driving two horses through a stream take no notice of the fire blazing in the back of their trap. 

There are instances where the superimposed disaster replaces the perceived focal point of the original image: a flying DeLorean plunges into the sea, perhaps replacing a shipwreck in Rescue the Future (2018); while skiers surround a crashed Sputnik in flames in Moscow, We Have a Problem (2025). Like many of the artist’s additions, the latter shows beautifully observed details, such as the peachy-pink glow of the burning satellite being picked up in the tonality of the surrounding snow and skiers. Yet this trompe-l’œil illusion is sabotaged by deliberately cartoonish flames and scribbly smoke plumes. 

This kind of contrast appears in Shoe Shopping (2023), where the source image – a black-and-white photograph of a smiling child, seated in a shoe shop – has been doctored so that her outstretched leg appears to be severed at the shin, leaving a neon pink cross-section, from which juts a classic cartoon bone. Other works include tiny details, such as radioactive cleaning products in a kitchen, or a smoking figure, oblivious to the burning lump of lava about to hit his house. 

Overall, in ‘Disaster and Interventions’, there is a sense of the artist’s freedom from the usual constraints imposed by his young readership. However, Jeffers is not one to hold back on geopolitical commentary – from Gaza and Ukraine to Minnesota and Iran – with American imperialism critiqued through elliptical and blackly humorous references. In one scene, tiny figures peep, like inmates through prison bars, from the crown of the Statue of Liberty, which is submerged to the shoulders in a vast sea. The caption simply reads: “Send help.”

Jonathan Brennan is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Belfast.

jonathanbrennanart.com

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Sirius Arts Centre 

24 January – 14 March;

Triskel Arts Centre

4 November 2025 – 30 April 2026 

Emerging artist Elinor O’Donovan is a self-proclaimed digital native. Her work spans filmmaking, digital collage, installation, drawing, and sculpture. Across her current solo exhibition ‘Metametamorphosis’, curated by Miguel Amado at Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, she permits herself intuitive freewheeling and playful association with disparate technologies, blending them with analogue aesthetics and cultural tropes to pose questions about knowledge, memory, myth and truth.

The exhibition includes a series of framed digital photographic collages, which are flanked by sketchy, almost fugitive unframed drawings, all mounted on black gallery walls. The installation feels cavernous and resembles a giant mind-map, clustering around a large, floor-based, plywood-mounted screen. O’Donovan’s process is to assemble a broad array of elements and to focus on their interconnectedness, exploring how stories can shape understandings of ourselves and our environment. She reworks the genre of landscape, countering a post-digital reliance on screens by hand-building surreal and utopian environments, full of child-like wonder. There is a sense of fun and enclosure within these landscapes, into which cultural tropes, museum artifacts, scribbles, thought bubbles, and sigils converse and circulate. 

The digital collages and drawings were inspired by and extend the HD video Metametamorphosis (2024), which is 5 minutes and 34 seconds in length. It begins with the mischievous invocation of Gregor Samsa, cockroach and protagonist of Kafka’s 1915 existential novella, The Metamorphosis. Samsa awakes after a restless night to discover that he’s turned into The Beatles – all of them at once. John, Paul, George and Ringo are loosely profiled, their likeness simulated using deep-fake software, dance moves and location association. 

The faltering narrative dissolves into a soundtrack of groans and humming, emerging finally into the strains of The Beatles song, Here, There and Everywhere, sung by busker Jules Avalon in Central Park, New York. The imagery glitches until the viewer is forced to contend with a four-channel screen. Simultaneously, we are in India, New York, and a bedroom in Cork. There is a sense of entropy as we flit between these microcosms, puzzling over real and imaginary elements. Meanwhile, shipping traffic from Cork Harbour, framed in the gallery’s beautiful Italianate windows, flows by and is drawn into the installation; it all feels equivocal in a post-modern world, shaped by hyper-connectivity and economic and political insecurity. 

O’Donovan also created the installation Winter Sun (2024), currently projected onto the façade of the Triskel Arts Centre for the winter months as part of Island City – Cork’s Sculpture Trail. Funded by Fáilte Ireland, with support from the National Sculpture Factory, the sculpture trail was initiated by Cork City Council in 2023 to commission six temporary public artworks for Cork city centre.

Winter Sun is a moving-image work that projects – and seasonally extends – the intergenerational practice of communal sundown worship. It depicts city dwellers gathering for summer sunset high on Patrick’s Hill at Bells Field in Cork – described by the artist as an iconic place of respite, with the best views of the city. A painting by John Butts, A View of Cork from Audley Place (c.1750), depicts the same scene and was the inspiration behind O’Donovan’s projection. In both works, time collapses as figures lounge in the gloaming, analogous silhouettes dissolving into glorious pink, green and golden tones. It’s a spiritually uplifting scene which recalls both Michel Foucault’s enigmatic concept of ‘heterotopia’ and Martin Heidegger’s ideas on ‘poetic dwelling’ – to live deeply by finding hope, wisdom and beauty in one’s surroundings. In winter darkness, Cork citizens are thus enriched and can comprehend why art is vital to their lives.

Jennifer Redmond is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Cork. 

jenniferredmond.com

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Ormston House 

20 November 2025 – 21 February 2026 

From 1916 to 1920, an engineering lecturer, William J. Crawford, regularly visited Kathleen Goligher’s Belfast home, conducting elaborate experiments to investigate her apparent psychic powers. As Goligher and her siblings sat hand-in-hand in a circle, the table between them levitated and tilted. Rapping was heard and footprints were found in bowls of damp clay that Crawford had placed on the floor. Clay appeared on Goligher’s stockings, even when her feet had been encased in tight boots. Emanations ‒ ectoplasm? muslin? ‒ were photographed appearing from under her skirt. Crawford concluded that these were physical traces of what he called ‘psychic rods’. He theorised that, when acting in concert with her circle and with her spirit ‘operators’ these projected from Goligher’s body, manipulating the table, touching the participants, and dabbling in the clay.

Three of Crawford’s books are included in Susan MacWilliam’s exhibition of new work, ‘Table Turning’, at Ormston House in Limerick. MacWilliam’s work in a range of different media emanates from her own fascination with late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century mediums and the men who probed their powers. Addressing “phenomena contested by orthodox science such as clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition,” MacWilliam reminds us of the “gendered relations of mediumship” in that “in many cases, the mediums were female, while those ‘investigating’ them were men,” who attempted either to reconcile science and the supernatural or to debunk the powers of those claiming psychic talent. (ormstonhouse.com) 

The vitrines forming part of several exhibits are sturdily and simply built (by the artist) and recall the tables of the table-turners. The first contains photos of the mediums and works of psychical literature, open to pertinent passages. In The Three Arts Clubs with Fifty-six Telepaths (2025), images of the female telepaths (imprinted on table-tennis balls) hover over an enlarged photograph of women reading in the comfortable library of the London Three Arts Club, which provided accommodation and facilities to women engaged in art, music, and drama and literature. From the start, MacWilliam suggests reading as a metaphor for telepathy, a means of intellectual exchange, and a force for female liberation. Art and sculpture can perform similar functions: for MacWilliam, “the realisation of ideas and objects in the studio” resembles “the manifestations and materialisations of the séance room.” 

Ormston House is an ideal space for this work: ‘Table Turning’ responds to the gallery’s ornate columns, both in the ways the viewer’s movement is directed, and in some of the sculpted elements. Book Reader with Leaves (2025) – a series of wall plinths featuring books, hands, and spheres – echoes the building but also invokes funerary sculpture and the attention paid by investigators to the hands of their mediums.

A wall of different configurations in Telepathy Hoops (2025) prompts consideration about what or who those versed in scrying might find beyond. Nearby, in Apparatusphere (2014) fragments of surfaces, set at different heights, tilt, rise and subside. Spheres ‒ some marbled or clouded and others with glimpses of “images of experimental testing apparatus from the laboratory of parapsychologist Dr. J. B. Rhine” ‒ balance, seemingly precariously, like a model of an orbiting solar system. In Geraldine C: Rocks and Vortex (2025), the vortex is sewn into felt, as spheres, hands and sculpted ‘rocks’ merge, collide or, perhaps, fly apart. In her ‘automatic writing’ Geraldine Cummins, a Corkwoman, claimed conversations with historical figures and described alternate planes of existence. I found myself circling this piece several times, and the layout of the exhibition in general encourages the viewer to encircle both the room and the presented works. 

Throughout, MacWilliam manipulates her materials to create impressions of both lightness and weight. Appropriately, the viewer finds themselves wondering at the sleight of hand involved. The table-tennis balls, from which the faces of the ‘fifty-six telepaths’ peer, as if from another dimension, aptly represent the interplay of materiality and immateriality that MacWilliam invokes so deftly. If so inclined, you could follow this exhibition with a visit to the ancient crystal ball / luck stone on display down the road in the Hunt Museum. 

The most striking of MacWilliam’s works is Séance Room, 1931 (2025), a large felt wall hanging stitched with cotton thread, which (almost) faithfully renders a Canadian parapsychologist’s map of a séance, meticulously marking where the medium and the circle sat, the location of the table, and the cameras and ‘phonograph’ set to record. Loose threads, like tendrils of psychic ‘stuff’, wend across the surface, and between the sitters. Viewed alongside the rest of MacWilliam’s conjurings, it is as arresting an act of invoking other worlds as any of the 1931 circle might ever have hoped to experience.

Clodagh Tait lectures in History in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.

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