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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Butler Gallery 

22 November 2025 – 8 February 2026

To begin with, a confession: I didn’t know Brian Harte’s work until I wandered into his show at the Butler Gallery in November; however, I have been living in a sea of his primary colours ever since – yellow and blue, especially. Other artists use colour in powerful ways, but what is transportive about Harte’s painting is that the colour seems to have attached itself to the linen ground effortlessly, like the softest snow, falling onto an already saturated landscape. 

When asked to talk about his work, both Harte and the critics who write about it tend to go straight to content; references to his domestic life in Clonmel (where he grew up), Kinsale (where he lives now), or other elements that inform his consciousness, are filtered through knowledge of Philip Guston, Georg Baselitz, and other historic painters. But for me, Harte’s use and application of colour is the primary experience against which all other references must be positioned.

It’s not easy to be a painter these days, but being difficult is its own reward for those who can handle it – and Harte certainly can. While unprecedented change is happening around us – in terms of artificial intelligence, the climate emergency, and political power-grabbing – it takes courage to stay with the banalities close to us, knowing that those grounding forces are simply the familiar vehicle through which the ultimate aesthetic challenge is presented. How do you remain alive to the potential of personal experience in the face of overwhelming forces? You remind yourself that you are a painter and must create magic, like an alchemist, from the ingredients to hand, since it is their very ordinariness that forces understanding of the issue of representation itself. 

Since graduating from Crawford College of Art & Design in 2002, Harte has been shown widely around the world and is currently represented by three commercial galleries: the MAKI Gallery in Tokyo, GNYP Gallery in Berlin, and the Simchowitz Gallery in Los Angeles. But global recognition doesn’t impinge on his mission as an artist; he has the good sense and courage to embrace the local. Patrick Kavanagh noted that: “[All] great civilizations are based on parochialism… To be parochial a man needs the right kind of sensitive courage and the right kind of sensitive humility.”¹ Harte values the local and makes it the centre of his work.

Painting has its origins in magic, and that is key to Harte’s practice. There is magic in the glittering vitality he brings to his domestic springboards, brought out in the careful installation on the walls of the Butler Gallery, but there is a new element too. A mixed-media sculptural arrangement, Corner Piece (2025), occupies the centre of the show, extending the world of the paintings in its accumulation of different objects: insulation boards, dangling electricity wires, Italian marble, and a polystyrene head. 

For his previous exhibition, ‘To The Harbour Place’ at the Molesworth Gallery (13 March – 11 April 2025), Harte anticipated this “movement towards more ambiguous spaces, towards landscapes and the outer world.” (molesworthgallery.com) Corner Piece is in a process of becoming, partially constructed in dull brown chipboard and tatty silver-grey insulation material. In its drabness, apparent state of incompletion, and angular arrangement, it directs the eye back to the paintings, playing with the same fragments of ambiguous narrative which artist and audience must decipher for themselves. 

Looking at the future of painting at the end of the twentieth century, Stephen McKenna presciently claimed that the invention of photography made painting indispensable. “For it is painting that paradoxically reaffirms its own spiritual reality and that of the viewer by stressing the physicality and abstraction of its method of representation.”² Harte’s latest artworks deeply assert this connection between the self and the other. For this viewer, the takeaway sensation was like Angus Fairhurst’s beautiful three-colour screenprint, When I Woke Up in the Morning the Feeling Was Still There (1992), in which the artist tries to hold onto a sense of colour that hovers within reach, but cannot be held down.

Catherine Marshall is a curator, art writer, and founder member of the Na Cailleacha art collective.

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¹ Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Parish and the Universe’, Collected Pruse (London: MacGibbon & Kee,1967)

² Stephen McKenna, ‘Introduction’, The Pursuit of Painting (Dublin: IMMA, 1997) p 15.

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Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

16 October – 15 November 2025

Across Geraldine O’Neill’s latest solo exhibition at Kevin Kavanagh, there are spatial, temporal, and linguistic dualities at play. The first, relating to scale, is immediately apparent upon entering the gallery. At over two metres square, the painting that informs the exhibition title, Flicker, Flicker, Age of Unreason (2025), is by far the largest work, and occupies a wall on its own. 

Here, we see a multitude of animals and manmade objects, including a vacuum cleaner and a pair of helium balloons, that root the work in the domestic and the everyday. Due to its commanding size and composition, this painting dominates the space, even when not being directly looked at. The other three walls contain a dozen smaller oil paintings, which vary slightly in size. With their tighter framings, these smaller works feel like microcosms of the more expansive ecosystem shown in O’Neill’s titular work. 

The exhibition title references a scientific paper on how ecosystems are at a tipping point; rapid alternations in climate, known as ‘flickers’, are warning signals of potentially catastrophic effects.¹ Acknowledging the urgent critical debate surrounding the climate crisis, O’Neill engages with the Anthropocene, a term describing humanity’s role as the driving force of planetary change over the last century. 

The binaries of contemporary and historical time also manifest across this exhibition. The backgrounds of several paintings draw inspiration from the art historical cannon of past masters. These landscapes serve as sedimentary and layered backdrops, onto which the artist adds various motifs and objects. In the smaller works, objects, often depicted in pairs, include children’s toys, ice-cream cones, and squeezed tubes of oil paint in modern, saturated colours, understood as byproducts of petrochemicals, which contrast with the muted tones of the historical underlayers. Depicted throughout are dead animals, fish, and birds, as well as skulls – common motifs within seventeenth-century European painting, particularly the hunting still life and vanitas genres, where they symbolise transience and the fragility of life. 

Across the exhibited works, permanent and transient things are captured by the artist. Fluctuations of pace reflect both the urgency of the climate crisis, and the artist’s slow process. Her works are exquisitely and meticulously painted, and the time required to complete them contrasts with the ephemeral moments they simultaneously represent. Several paintings feature the addition of rough linear forms, including box structures and rainbows, rendered in the style of children’s chalk drawings. Plastic toys with elongated lifecycles exist alongside moments perceived as fleeting – namely, childhood itself. 

A further dichotomy is evident in the artist’s use of dual languages. Nine of the works have Irish titles, providing a rich history of their own. Some are descriptive – for example, Cre Mharbh (2025), meaning ‘Dead Bird’ – whilst others denote places, both tangible and intangible, such as Gort Na Fola (2025) and Alltarach (2025) respectively. Others highlight forgotten phrases, like ‘bothántaíocht’, meaning to visit houses to play games or gossip. Through these works, we are reminded of the fragility of language. Scéadamán Pangur Bán (2025) draws on an anonymous ninth-century Old Irish poem called Pangur Bán, which tells the story of an Irish monk and his cat who find contentment in their respective tasks of studying and hunting. 

Some of the backgrounds, objects, and motifs can be observed in past works. For example, in Bothántaíocht (2025), we can see a variation on the background of Macnas Balbh (2022), previously exhibited in O’Neill’s show, ‘Solastalgia’ at Kevin Kavanagh in 2022. This self-reflective method suggests that alongside the wider canon of art history, O’Neill is also continually revisiting and interrogating her own painting lexicon.

Aidan Kelly Murphy is an artist and writer living in Dublin. He is co-editor of OVER Journal.

¹ Trauth, M.H., Asrat, A., Fischer, M.L. et al. ‘Early warning signals of the termination of the African Humid Period(s)’, Nature Communications, 15, 3697 (2024).

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