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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@aengus_woods

Aleana Egan is an artist based in Dublin. 

aleanaegan.com

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

interfaceinagh.com

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

kerlingallery.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eileen Mac Donagh is a sculptor based in Sligo. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christine Prescott is a visual artist and forest bathing guide.

christineprescottstudio.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in Cork.

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

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Aengus Woods discusses the participation of Irish artists at the 61st Venice Biennale.⁠ ⁠ Check it out now by clicking here! ⁠ Image: Alice Maher, Les Filles d’Ouranos, 1996/2025, Marine gelcoat, glassfibre reinforced polymer, moorings, weights, 12 elements, 50 × 60 × 50 cm each, installation view, 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys; photograph by Marco Zorzanello, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.⁠

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Phillina Sun is a writer based in County Leitrim. 

@phillina.sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@aengus_woods

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In the latest edition of the miniVAN, writer Maya Kulukundis reviews The Alice Project, a five-part immersive theatre experience created by Asylum Productions that took place as part of Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2026. Check it out now by clicking here! The miniVAN is the online magazine published by Visual Artists Ireland. With uniquely commissioned content, The miniVAN explores the visual arts with an accessible view of all aspects of careers and practice that make up our visual community. [Image] [All images]: The Alice Project, Episode One, 2026; image courtesy of The Kilkenny Arts Festival and Asylum Productions, photograph by Davi Matheson.

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When I was eight, I summoned a group of friends to my house for a ‘Cluedo dinner’. We had apple juice in champagne flutes, silver cloches over our dishes, and were served by ‘waiters’ – friends of my parents. Then, in the middle of dessert, there was a scream. We followed it into the kitchen, where my mother informed us that one of the waiters had been murdered. Our new quest was to be detectives; we needed to find the killer. It was thrilling. And even though I knew that everything was staged, when I followed a trail of ketchup-blood into the basement, on some level I believed that a murderer was lurking in the shadows. I screamed for my father; I clung to his legs. Children are particularly good at inhabiting the space in between fantasy and reality. Immersive theatre, at its best, promises to reopen this space in adults: to provoke the uncanny sensation of straddling two realms. 

It is this kind of experience I am hoping for when I go to see Asylum Productions’ The Alice Project at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. The Alice Project (6 – 16 August 2026) is an immersive theatre event, split into five ‘episodes’ that unfold across several days and multiple spaces across Kilkenny that involves 150 performers, mostly drawn from community theatre, but with some professional actors. Billed as an “epic reimagining of the Kilkenny Witch Trials”, it is based on the story of Alice Kyteler, a wealthy Kilkenny moneylender who became the first woman in Ireland to be accused of witchcraft by Bishop Richard de Ledrede in 1325. Whilst Kyteler escaped, her maidservant, Petronella de Meath, was burned in her place. It is a complex story of class, wealth, gender and persecution: rich material, then, for a project of this ambition.

Alice Kyteler, or rather, the Alice Kyteler brand is all over Kilkenny. I pass Kyteler’s Inn, a pub that sells ‘Witches Brew’ and a restaurant on the Butterslip called ‘Petronella’. I find myself in an art exhibition that attempts to connect the artist’s recent house fire and Petronella’s burning. It strikes me that the Kilkenny witch trials would look good on a funding application: repackaged to suit even a vaguely tangential contemporary narrative. I wonder how The Alice Project will contend with this impulse. The Alice on the posters wears a red pantsuit, a headscarf and sunglasses. Perhaps because I am thinking of the modern ‘witch-hunt’, she reminds me of Amber Heard.

The first episode, ‘The Demon Dance’, is the preliminary showdown between Alice and Bishop Richard de Ledrede. I gather as part of a large crowd on The Parade, where we are welcomed to Alice’s ‘Lughnasa Ball’ by ‘John Clynn, roving reporter’, played by Kevin Mooney. Clynn acts as our narrator/MC, introducing the principal characters and telling us what to think of them. There is the fey William Outlaw, Alice’s stepson and mummy’s-boy (Ryan Costelloe); Arnold Le Poer (Michael Somers), the seneschal of Kilkenny who has attached himself to Alice and her money; a skittish Petronella (Mary Whitty); and the ebullient Alice, (Muireann Ryan), crowned with a wicker headdress who, like a tabloid queen, bats away suspicions that she may have had something to do with the death of her four husbands. It is an efficient pantomime sequence, but the commentary can feel overpowering Because Clynn repeatedly warns us that the bishop intends to shut down the ball, his eventual arrival is less intimidating than it might have been. The pleasure of the confrontation is instead in its slapstick humour. The bishop appears in a transparent box atop a crane, like a makeshift popemobile. When, after a battle of insults, Le Poer calls for the bishop’s arrest and he is slowly lowered to cries of “lift me up!”, it is a hilarious vision of hubris.

The episode’s strength lies in its visual sequences. The major action is a magnificent ensemble dance, choreographed by Cindy Cummings, which blends traditional sequences with modern inflections, such as tabletop vogueing. This ‘demon dance’ was advertised as ‘participatory’, the steps posted on social media. While the audience is, in fact, stuck behind a railing, the atmosphere is still infectious, and as people point out friends and family in the cast, the boundary between actors and audience begins to blur. There is also a bit of technical witchcraft. A camera broadcasts a live feed onto a large screen at centre stage, and I find myself straining to catch my own face, reflected as part of the party. At the end of the episode, flames appear on the screen. The camera cuts between the flames, the audience, and Petronella, who stands alone on a raised platform. It is a beautiful, prophetic sequence, more powerful for being left unexplained.

Episode One introduces many competing ideas – pagan traditions, religious influence, political corruption, modern media culture, queerness and ‘the witch’ archetype – but none are yet developed enough to fully bring us into the world. I wonder about this presentation of Alice as a vital Kilkenny It Girl – and hope it will be complicated.

Episode Two, The Words of Dred’, is written by Clare Monnelly and set within the Parade Tower at Kilkenny Castle. We, the audience, are reporters, summoned to a press conference, in which the imprisoned bishop (a standout John Rice) lays out his case in the form of a brilliantly leery sermon, shifting between fierce severity and a slippery, camp appeal to the audience. At a press conference given by someone this narcissistic and tyrannical – Rice’s de Ledrede is like a more eloquent Trump – genuine interaction would hardly be welcome. As such, when audience members are invited to ask questions but instead read from planted question cards, it is an effective commentary on the role of the press and the audience throughout the production: our affective power is illusory.

Episode Three, ‘The Words of Alice’, written by Medb Lambert and directed by Dónal Gallagher, is only ten minutes long and delivered to a single audience member in the graveyard at the Medieval Mile Museum. I am told that I am a reporter from The Daily Words, here to interview Alice, but that I cannot actually ask questions. I am given a notebook, which I can write in but will not be allowed to keep – an amusing riff on who does and doesn’t get to author history. I am ushered into the graveyard and Alice (Delia Lowry), strides out from behind a headstone and launches into a defensive monologue at lightning speed. Two narrative strands emerge: Alice and the bishop’s contest to dominate Kilkenny, and the more interesting unpicking of Alice’s self-mythology. She tells us that she was married very young to a man her father’s age; that she is forever defined by the societal obsession with her “four dead husbands.” In Lowry’s hands, Alice’s vanity is painfully self-destructive, her deeper trauma is masked by a determination to control how she is seen.

What interests me is how much I dislike Alice. This is a welcome advancement on her initial portrayal as a vibrant heroine. Regardless, even if she did murder her husbands – The Alice Project skirts around this question – what must it have been like to be married to them, or to discover that the young girls she had employed were being sexually abused by them? I think again of Amber Heard, and of the difficulty in getting an audience to care about the stories of women it finds ‘unlikeable’. I am, however, moved by Sarah, Petronella’s daughter who leads me out at end of the episode as Alice rushes off. When she insists that I write her name down and that I remember her, I have the urge to speak – and am frustrated at not being allowed to. Although I compliantly hand my notebook in at the end, I note Sarah’s name down in my phone.

I have a week before Episode 4 and the finale, which allows me to reflect on what I have seen. Perhaps I had been approaching The Alice Project in the wrong spirit. I was looking for a slick, solid construction of Alice Kyteler’s Kilkenny, but what was being offered instead was the world of a local community that had spent three years developing, inhabiting and personalising a period of its history. Some of what I had read as failures – such as competing dramatic visions – might instead be understood as the marks of a collective act of invention.

Episode Four, ‘The Words of the Accused’, written by Fern Kealy and produced in collaboration with Barnstorm Youth Theatre, plunges the audience into the panic of the ten ‘accused’ by the bishop: Alice’s ‘coven’. I am ushered into a pub in the Home Rule Club, which we are told is run by Mrs Kyteler. The youth performers are committed and compelling, and perhaps because of their age, their desire for the infuriatingly selfish Alice (an excellent Muireann Ryan) to guide them, is heartbreaking. Particularly good is Emily Green’s Eve, a nervous client of Alice’s who is late with a payment. Through Eve, we understand that the defining factor in who is condemned here is money, class. When Alice flees, barking instructions about when to wash the sheets, we arrive at an unexpected and prescient conclusion: there is no overarching female solidarity here. This is a narrative of the rich versus the poor.

Petronella (Violet Butler) is the episode’s emotional centre. In a surreal twist, she speaks to the fire in a mechanical voice, and it ignites. Is this witchcraft, or is Petronella glimpsing her own future? The question of ‘magic’ is underexplored across The Alice Project, which makes the appearance of a wounded man, whom Petronella heals with a peacock feather, particularly intriguing: traditional healing practices often gave rise to accusations of witchcraft. It is in moments like these, which encourage us to look closely at the scenes unfolding around us, that The Alice Project is most immersive. When the bishop’s henchmen, the ‘doves’, pull up in a grey van and arrest everyone, it is stressful and intimidating. A girl screams as they drag her away from underneath my feet, and I am troubled by my passivity – by my not stopping them.

Set in the grounds of St Kieran’s College, the final episode, ‘The Burning of Petronella’, is a magnificent spectacle. We are welcomed by a now-sombre John Clynn into the ultimate, twisted form of entertainment: a public execution. Visually, it is stunning. The bishop is illuminated in a Gothic window; the seneschal and William Outlaw gather on the steps of the college, while a large, local choir stands in the arches, singing.

I had wondered how Petronella’s death would be handled, whether The Alice Project would shirk its brutality in favour of something more abstract. I am pleased to find myself part of something that feels genuinely horrific: Petronella’s screams, when she is dragged in and tied to a pyre-structure, are terrifying. There is also a meta play-within-the-play, in which children, monitored by the doves, perform a strictly controlled version of Alice Kyteler’s story: the story of Alice as an evil witch. The scene evokes both state censorship and indoctrination, as well as widespread social inaction in the face of violence and injustice. “Are you just going to watch her burn?” someone screams at us. And yes – we are.

There are hopeful moments too. An aerial acrobat twirls defiantly up the pyre, like a form of Petronella’s escaped spirit. All the Alices and all the Petronellas gather together, and although The Alice Project never quite tackles the complexity of the Alice character, it is a compelling meditation on storytelling: these histories will live on in whoever tells them. When the whole cast assembles at the end, many of them emotional, it is a poignant tribute to Petronella, a woman failed by Kilkenny and now resurrected by it. I could argue that it is all too neat. Why should a story of brutality and division end with a note of false solidarity? But what strikes me instead is how unifying it must have been to be part of this project: to act alongside people from your community whom you might not otherwise have known, to take ownership of and insert yourself into the history of your home.

Out in the town afterwards, almost everyone I meet has been involved in the project. They tell me excitedly about Alice Kyteler, the false narratives they heard growing up, and how much The Alice Project has enhanced their understanding of not just the witch trials but the place they are from. I feel I have been part of that moving, thrilling discovery – even though I have never been to Kilkenny before.

The next day, before my train, I go to mass in St Canice’s Cathedral. I am not religious, but I am with a friend who is, and feel the service might be interesting. When we sit down, we realise that we have accidentally become part of a baptism. Too late to leave, we stay and keep quiet. The priest makes a joke about the small congregation, how close he is standing to all of us. “Could you come and help?” he asks a little girl in the front row, who does. And when we leave, I do not feel like an imposter; I am just happy to have been a part of it all.

Maya Kulukundis is a fiction writer and critic whose work has appeared in outlets including Banshee, The Irish Times, The Lilliput Press, Books Ireland and The Irish Examiner. She is the assistant curator at the Festival of Writing and Ideas.

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VAN Sept/Oct 2026 issue contains the Event Guide for VAI Get Together 2026 – Ireland’s annual networking event for visual artists, happening on Friday 11 September at TU Dublin, Grangegorman. This year’s programme includes a keynote lecture by feminist art collective, Claire Fontaine, The After Sessions with art historian Hettie Judah, panel discussions, and Artists Speak, as well as the ever popular Speed Curating, Specialist Clinics, and VAI Café. As part of the Get Together 2026 programme, VAI is hosting the international curatorial conference, Navigating Power in Contemporary Curating on Thursday 17 September. This online event will explore the impact of shifting political, social, and economic conditions on contemporary exhibition-making. Six esteemed international curators will each present their research exploring how institutions can maintain criticality in response to the increasing pressures and responsibilities they face today. In Career Development articles for this issue, Aengus Woods interviews Aleana Egan about her motivations, processes, and materials, Tom Lordan interviews Eamon Colman about his latest paintings, and Cherry Smyth reflects on the sensory connections between poetry, painting, and curation. There are Member Profiles on the work of Christine Prescott, Tom Doig, and Reuben Brown, while international coverage includes Nan Goldin’s survey exhibition at Grand Palais in Paris, and a triple-page feature article on the participation of Irish artists at the 61st Venice Biennale. On The Cover: Aleana Egan, ‘A maritime child’, installation view, Interface, Inagh, July 2026; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist. ON THE COVER Aleana Egan, ‘A maritime child’, installation view, Interface, Inagh, July 2026; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist. FIRST PAGES  6          Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months. 8          News. The latest developments in the arts sector. COLUMNS 9          A Couple of Birdhouse Painters. Cornelius Browne discusses a recent joint exhibition with his wife Paula Corcoranat An Gailearaí. Out Walking in All Weathers. Lian Bell considers ideas emerging from the Dissident Paths project in Berlin. 10        Cornafulla Bog. Meg Linton reflects on Amanda Ralph’s wetlands project in the midlands.  Entangled Life. Cristina Nicotra discusses her programme exploring ecosystems where climate, art and community intertwine. 11        Philosophy of Abstraction. Anna Liesching outlines the colour philosophy of the late Austrian artist Alice Berger Hammerschlag. From the Heart of Leitrim. Iarlaith Ní Fheorais outlines recent training as part of the Kunstverein Projects’ Creative Producers Programme. FESTIVAL/BIENNIAL 12        Linguistic Threads. Aengus Woods discusses the participation of Irish artists at the 61st Venice Biennale. GET TOGETHER 2026 EVENT GUIDE   15        Event Overview 16        Keynote: Claire Fontaine 17        The After Sessions with Hettie Judah 18        Panel Discussions 19        Artists Speak 20        Speed Curating 23        Specialist Clinics 24        Event Timetable 25        VAI Café 26        Curatorial Conference CAREER DEVELOPMENT  28        A Gestalt Thing. Aengus Woods interviews Aleana Egan about her motivations, processes, and materials. 30        Curated by Rain. Tom Lordan interviews Eamon Colman about his latest paintings. 31        Something from Anything. Cherry Smyth reflects on the sensory connections between poetry, painting, and curation. INTERNATIONAL 32        Phantom Carousel. John Graham reviews Nan Goldin’s survey exhibition at Grand Palais in Paris. SOCIALLY ENGAGED PRACTICE 33        Bones of Contention. Marie Brett highlights the need for health and wellbeing supports for socially engaged artists. EXHIBITION 34        These Four Walls. Rachael Gunning discusses a recent group exhibition installed in Sadbh O’Brien’s home in Dublin 8. 36        Another Kind of Freedom. Phillina Sun responds to a recent exhibition byPhil Collinsat The Model in Sligo. 37        Dungannon Tropicana. Michaela Razafima Nash considers a new film recently shown at the MAC. 38        Panorama Europa. Sarah Long reviews the current exhibition at The Glucksman in Cork. 40        Reading Sideways. Tanad Aaron interviews Blaine O’Donnell about his recent exhibition in Wexford Arts Centre. MEMBER 41        Rites of Homing. Christine Prescott reflects on her recent solo exhibition at Custom House Studios + Gallery. 42        The Sum and Its Parts. Benjamin Stafford discusses the collage work of Cork-Based artist Tom Doig. 43        A Space to Be Constructed Within. Reuben Brown discusses his research and the ephemeral archives of queer nightlife. PUBLIC ART 44        Ghost Riders in the Sky. Eileen McDonagh outlines a sculpture restoration project in Hazelwood, Sligo. 45        Public Art Roundup. Site-specific works beyond the gallery. LAST PAGES 46        VAI Lifelong Learning. Helpdesks, cafés, and webinars.

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