In the latest edition of the miniVAN, festival performers Betty Beour, Polina Shapkina, and Nicole Martin, discuss their work as cabaret artists, fire spinners, and light sculptors in a series of interviews exclusively for Visual Artists Ireland!  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] [Top left]: Image courtesy of Betty Beour; [Top right]: Image courtesy of Nicole Martin; [Bottom]: Image courtesy of Polina Shapkina.

Source

WRITER MAYA KULUKUNDIS INTERVIEWS FIRESPINNER, AERIALIST, AND PERFORMER, POLINA SHAPKINA.

Maya Kulukundis: Your work encompasses a wide variety of forms. I would be reluctant to pigeon-hole you into any one category, so I would like to ask how you would describe your practice.

Polina Shapkina: The way to survive as an artist in Ireland, financially, is to do a variety of different things. Officially, I’m a circus performer. I work with a variety of companies and do middle-of-the-road circus acts. Being a freelance performer is very liberating because you’re just there to have fun with an audience.

I am also the artistic director and a performer in a spectacle company called ‘VolkiDána’. We mostly do outdoor street work encompassing fire, aerial acrobatics, and storytelling. ‘VolkiDána’ is about making people mystified and bringing them into a new world. It is about experiencing joy alongside an audience.

Then, I make more experimental work, which includes aerial dance and physical theatre. For those performances, I am starting to go under the name ‘Unhinged Village’, because it feels funny putting my name on the projects when it takes a village to make them. It’s a very collaborative process.

MK: You’ve previously spoken about returning to a childhood sense of wanting to be ‘an artist’ after a long period of disconnection from art, which was at times quite destructive. How do you understand that journey now?

PS: I couldn’t be more grateful for the cards I’ve been dealt. It has taken a lot of hard work, but honestly it was by chance. I wandered into aerial arts as a hobby, and it led me away from a very self-destructive path.

I’m not sure why I was so destructive. I had a real melancholy about me as a child and as a teenager, like many people do, but it followed me into early adult life. I think that in the Western world – where we don’t have to think about starving to death, and where most of us have some form of shelter – there is a lot of space for the mind to wander. Suffering is a part of being, so if we do not have a physical form of suffering, we have a mental or spiritual form of suffering.

The physicality of aerial classes gave me a new kind of endorphin that pulled me away from the drinking, the drug-taking, the being miserable. So one addiction replaced another and then I got addicted to pushing myself physically. And then one addiction replaced another, because I got addicted to pushing myself physically. Then, I remembered that I had wanted to be an artist as a child. I had always thought that meant being a painter or a writer, but I realised: “Wait, I can express this impulse physically.”

MK: Carl Jung’s idea of the ‘shadow self’ is a recurring feature in your work. How has it informed your creative process?

PS: I first looked into Jung when I was about 14 because I loved a rock band called Tool, and they have a song about the shadow. I became obsessed with the concept, even though I didn’t fully understand it.

As I got older, I noticed I had a deep sense of shame. I was aware that I hated or despised in other people things I could also recognise in myself. So, I ended up hating both myself and the other person, because we were doing things that felt at odds with my sense of morality or fairness – things like jealousy, slyness, or aggression, traits I perceived as undesirable. These are all linked to the shadow self: repressing certain parts of yourself that feel at odds with who you think you should be. For me, engaging with the shadow was about accepting my darker instincts. Admitting that can be liberating and empowering – you have the capacity to be someone you might be ashamed of. We all do.

In my 2023 aerial performance, Makosh, which is autobiographical, I was exploring my personal shadow. Then, while I was making it, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the piece took on a societal dimension. I was born in Russia and raised in Ireland, and I have a lot of loved ones in both Russia and Ukraine, so the war created a huge internal conflict.

Growing up as part of the Russian diaspora meant being in love with where I came from and feeling proud of it. And suddenly I saw that I had been romanticising a culture that carried an immense shadow: the endless colonisation of its neighbours. I saw that this was something I had wilfully ignored for most of my life. All of this concentrated for me around the idea of a societal shadow: one that emerges when everybody agrees on one thing, and that herd mentality becomes contagious.

There’s a scene in Makosh where the characters are wearing gas masks. The masks are a symbol of uniformity, but also of protection. They protect you from admitting to the darkness within your group – because the stakes of doing so would be so high.

MK: In Cartographies of Diaspora, sociologist Avtar Brah considers ‘home’ as a ‘mythic place of desire’ rather than a physical location. As I was researching your work, I found myself returning to this idea. But it seems like the making of Makosh and the start of the war was a break for you from this ‘mythic place’. Would you agree with that?

PS: Absolutely. It’s funny you mention that; I just got a bursary to explore a project called Diaspora. The project is about mythologising a place so much that it becomes a fantasy – a holy fantasy. We’re redesigning an aerial rig as a shrine and we plan to interview diaspora members about visual and sensory elements of their culture that they would put on this shrine, to symbolise this fantastical place that lives inside them – one at odds with the actual country.

I used to go back to Russia all the time, but when work got really busy, I gradually stopped going. Then the war started, and now I’m afraid. I feel spooked by the idea of going back. In my mind, there’s still a home there, but my family members are slowly passing away. The reality is that ‘home’ isn’t there anymore, and most of those people aren’t either. I don’t like thinking about it. It’s painful. And romanticising my home doesn’t even feel soothing anymore because there is a darkness about it. There is real darkness in the world. We can all feel it.

MK: How do you feel about creating art in that darkness?

PS: I know we should always be interrogating, always fighting for change, but there’s something to be said for keeping the general morale high too. I think of art as a spectrum. On one end is existential, introspective work, and on the other is glitter and explosions and fireworks and happiness and claps. I think all of it is valid and important. But I have started to wonder whether putting out darker material is as beneficial.

What I’m questioning is the balance between the audience’s experience and my own creative desires. What do I gain from making a show, from a performance, and what does the audience take from it? Maybe the less self-indulgent approach is to focus on the giving side: what experience do you want to give someone else? But perhaps when you remain true to yourself, what you give to the world will ultimately be authentic and powerful.

Sligo-based artist Polina Shapkina is a performer and director of Contemporary Circus. Her work spans from Spectacle to experimental theatre, and disciplines include aerial dance and experimental theatre. Through her work, she relishes exploring themes around existentialism, mythology and ritual.

@apollynaria_shhh

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.

Source

WRITER RUBY EASTWOOD INTERVIEWS CABARET AND CIRCUS PERFORMER BETTY BEOUR.

Ruby Eastwood: Tell me about your journey into cabaret.

Betty Beour: I was kind of a failed drama kid. I really wanted to be singing and dancing onstage. I wanted to be in Billy Barry’s stage school, but I didn’t have the money to go. I went to a few community drama classes, but I wasn’t getting any parts in the school plays – not any good parts at least. I played a yellow brick once in The Wizard of Oz! I still remember part of the dance. That was the first time I learned how to do a jazz square, so that’s an important skill.

Then, when I was 17, I discovered hula hooping with my friends. I taught myself from YouTube tutorials and learned from the other girls in the park. I went to my first music festival when I was in fifth year and realised there was a whole community of performers. That was the first time people watched me as a performer, even though I wasn’t hired to perform. I didn’t put my hula hoop down all weekend.

I think it was when I went to that music festival that I decided I wasn’t going to stop. I met a bunch of people there and found out there were juggling festivals and circus conventions. I went to one in Belfast and became part of that community. It was such a big adventure.

I ended up kissing a boy who had been flown over to perform in the big show of the weekend. He told me he went to circus school, and I was like, “you can go to circus school? You can do a degree in circus?!” I was really amazed.

At that point I was 19 and in my first year of studying English and Culture in IADT. So, I dropped out and went to circus school at Circomedia in Bristol.

RE: What was circus school like?

BB: It was crazy. I am a plus-sized gal, and I was in a class with people who were training for the Olympics, real gymnasts. It was really disciplined, but also kooky and silly because it’s literally clown school. We studied mask and mime, which definitely come into practice now because burlesque is often a non-speaking endeavour – you’re emoting a lot with your face. I studied Marcel Marceau. We trained in a deconsecrated church, and people were playing show tunes on the organ at lunchtime. I got exposed to a lot of different people there and different ways of life. There were lots of kids who had been homeschooled. But I was just a working-class girl from Dublin.

The course was expensive because I wasn’t British; five grand for one year, and I had to pay for it myself. I was working at Wetherspoons while also going to circus school full-time. It was also my first time living away from home. It was the most broke I’ve ever been.

But Bristol is a city full of performers and artists, and I got exposed to shows that altered my brain chemistry forever. I saw a girl do a hand-balancing act about being a geologist who was sexually attracted to rocks. I thought, “I don’t know what this is, but I know it’s for me. This is where I belong.”

RE: I’m curious about the practical aspect. Is it something you’re able to do full-time?

BB: That’s an important question. The money side of it. I remember when I was in circus school, they sat us down and told us, it doesn’t matter how amazing you are, unless you go to Cirque du Soleil, which is 0.1 per cent of people, you’re going to make most of your money from stilt walking. So, you’d better get good at stilt walking. They were mostly right. It’s a lot of side gigs, and the side gigs often pay more. I do a bit of stilt walking, I teach circus workshops, and I do a lot of walkabout entertainment and fire dancing at city festivals. I was doing life modelling for a long time, which felt natural because I work with my body.

I do a lot of children’s entertainment too: face painting, balloons, glitter. Obviously, I keep this very separate from my cabaret. I have two different personas and names because I have common sense. But that overlap is actually extremely common because there are similar skillsets involved: big sparkly costumes and wanting to connect with people.

Face painting and children’s performing really prop us up. Going into cabaret is money-losing. Burlesque is expensive. I got a bursary from the Arts Council three years ago, which was amazing. But now that I have transitioned more into cabaret, it’s harder to get funding. It’s Ireland, it’s taboo, but it’s also often seen as entertainment, and the Arts Council wants to fund more traditional arts. This year I’ve taken a horrible job at a factory, working crazy night shifts and day shifts on a production line. I’m saving up for a year because I want to take my career to the next level.

RE: How do you put together a show? Who are your influences?

BB: For me, the costume comes first. That’s influenced by drag and old movies, and then I experiment from there. Once you know what the character looks like, you know who she is. Is she romantic? Is she sassy or domineering? What is her song? Is it slow and soft, or fast and sharp? Who are you embodying?

I buy the base and then bedazzle. I try to support local designers like Mary McGuinness in Kilkenny. Margaret O’Connor is a great milliner. I try to keep it Irish, interesting, and as sustainable as possible. My neighbour is Bella Agogo, the longest-performing burlesque performer in Ireland. She’s been doing burlesque for 20 years. She helped me lace up my first corset and taught me how to sew.

With burlesque, the costume is often the idea. The silhouette is very important. I’m influenced a lot by RuPaul’s Drag Race. I come from a very supportive queer family. My uncle, who I grew up with, is gay. I found out later in life that I’m bisexual. We’ve been going to Pride together since I was four years old.

My mum is a bit of a style icon as well. Any chance she gets to put on a sparkly hat and show up and show out. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I was dressed up as Audrey Hepburn as a child because my mum was obsessed. Her friends were DJs. She and my uncle spent their 20s in London as ravers.

Now my mum is an accountant. When I told her I was dropping out of college, she wasn’t super impressed. Then when I transitioned away from classic circus into taking my clothes off, she definitely wasn’t super impressed. But she came around. I think she absolutely loves it now. If I’m doing shows in Dublin, my family make signs with my name in sparkly letters. I’m very lucky to have them.

Betty Beour is a Club Kid, international Cabaret Queen and Emerging Circus Artist from Dublin,Ireland. She shares her passion for self expression with the world at many queer nights across Ireland including: Dyke night, Ping Pong Disco and her residency at Rathaus Dublin. Betty has recently started producing her own Circus and burlesque cabaret accompanied by live jazz band @wearelavery keep an eye out for ‘Climbwallscabaret’ at Jazz and arts festivals around Ireland.

@climbwallsweird

Ruby Eastwood is a writer and arts reporter.

Source

WRITER LAUREN O’NEILL INTERVIEWS NICOLE MARTIN ABOUT HER LIGHT SCULPTURES

Lauren O’Neill: How did you get into making light sculptures?

Nicole Martin: I just liked light sculptures; I really was drawn to them in the festival scene. I think they’re very impactful, beautiful, and stand out in a dark field. I love that they come alive at night. It sounds a little silly but I’ve always been drawn to lights. I’m half South African, half Madeiran Portuguese, and when I was in South Africa, I have a memory of driving outside of Johannesburg as a little kid and looking out the back window. I saw the lights of the city and then all of a sudden, lightning came down – I was just fascinated with all the lights. When I went to some festivals in Europe, I was more drawn to sculptures that were light based.

I studied Jazz and Contemporary Music Performance in DCU. I was a musician for a really long time. Being in the music scene and playing various types of gigs, including festivals, introduced me to a lot of different people. I discovered that art installations for festivals were a thing when I went to a drum and bass gig, and this girl (now a best friend), Chloe, was DJing. She was so good, and after her set, I asked her to jam. We had a really good time playing music. Then I met her at a party a couple of weeks later. I asked her, “what do you actually do?” And she said that among a few things, she builds art installations for festivals. I didn’t realise that that was a career and something sparked inside of me.

I was with Chloe at Fuinneamh Festival in Dundalk and she told me about another festival in Galway called Éalú Le Grá. She said if you want to build an art installation, you should talk to Tommy, the founder. She pointed him out to me. I beelined for him and I said, “hi Tommy, my name’s Nicole Martin and I want to do an art installation for your festival.” I had some paintings up in a festival gallery space, run by an art collective called VisionÉire. I literally grabbed his hand and pulled him into the gallery and said, “this is my work.” He enthusiastically replied, “sure, let’s make it happen.” I went to the Éalú Le Grá workshop for a month and that’s where I built the illuminated owl sculpture. I learnt so much during that time.

LON: During the creative process, do you consider the warmth or colour of light?

NM: I tend to do warmer colours. In theory, I could programme my lights to flash, but I don’t because I want to create this glowing, ethereal creature. With the owl, I always tend to use warm colours because they suit her personality. The snail is a bit cheekier, so I’ve put hot pink lights in her at times. I did the moon blue, which I thought was really beautiful. The colour of the lights is mainly chosen onsite, based on what will fit. You’re also consulting with art directors about what kind of lights or colours work well in the space. I’m very versatile.

LON: What do you think attracts people to your pieces?

NM: I feel the reason they’re successful within festivals is because they create a different atmosphere. There’s flashing lights everywhere; it’s kind of chaotic. Then you go into the forest and walk by a giant owl, snail, moon, or delicate flowers that are glowing with light. You can have a moment to sit there by yourself and stare for a little while before returning to madness. I have videos of people sitting in front of the owl. There’s a funny one of a guy dancing to the owl. The first year, someone put a feather in a rock and left it behind the owl. People were going there and maybe doing some good intentions, manifestations, or leaving little notes. I love that interaction – that space to think. It’s fun to see the differences in how people interact with my sculptures and use them in different ways. As an artist, you need to allow people to have their own connection with your work.

LON: Does the exhibition of your work influence the creative process?

NM: I’m sure people would have the same conversations in front of my pieces at a wedding as they would at a festival. I like the impact of it. I love that feeling of awe as a festival goer, standing in front of giant illuminated art. I want to bring a bit of joy to the passerby and bring people together. At a wedding, my sculptures are a connection point – something for people to talk about. I love doing weddings and am always honoured to be a part of someone’s special day.

LON: What draws you to explore natural themes through the medium of light?

NM: Studying jazz was extremely fundamental to my creative process. One of my college exams involved composing a piece of music in response to an abstract variable, like a squiggle, or the colour orange. It was fantastic because it taught me how to create my own inspiration. I have developed so many sculpture ideas using this method.

For example, when I had made the structure for the owl sculpture, I was trying to think of what to paint on its surface. It’s a lantern, so I wanted to block some of the light with a design or pattern. I was sitting outside, drinking a coffee, and this tiny black and white bird scurried past me on the ground. I thought, “I love the texture of this bird,” so I knew I wanted it to be black and white. I tend not to overthink too much; I feel like perfectionism kills creativity.

LON: Are there any upcoming projects that you’re developing and where will they be exhibited?

NM: I’ll be at various festivals this summer, including Kaleidoscope (3 to 5 July, Russborough House, County Wicklow), All Together Now (30 July to 2 August, Curraghmore Estate, County Waterford), and Electric Picnic (28 to 30 August, Stradbally Hall Estate, County Laois). I’m also doing the RDS Wedding Show from 5 to 6 September in Ballsbridge, Dublin.

Nicole Martin is a Light Artist. She brings spaces to life with her giant lit up lantern sculptures. She will be performing at Culture Night, 18 September 2026, with Motion Chapel, an artist residency space in Roscommon.

nicowlmartin.com

@nicowl_art

Lauren O’Neill is a writer and reporter.

Source

We invite you to have your voice heard in this update to our surveys into Artists Workspace needs. Over the past two years we have been conducting research into the supply and demand for workspaces cross the country. Last year, over 700 artists participated in the survey where we asked about their current and future needs. We wish to update this information and see what the current demand is country wide. The purpose of this, in combination with other surveys and research, is to provide a report, which has been commissioned by the Arts Council, with an overview of the current supply versus demand and the status of studios and artists’ needs. We understand that you may not need a studio, may currently be satisfied with your current set up, or are actively looking, and so we ask that you fill out the survey to best represent your own current and future need. The survey will take around 10 – 20 mins max. I want to encourage everyone to participate so that we can offer a comprehensive overview. To complete the survey please follow this link: https://forms.gle/6gmvH77vvoJn8V239 The deadline for submissions is 17th June 2026 at 5pm If you have any questions along the way, then don’t hesitate to call or email us. (01) 6729488 or helpdesk@visualartists.ie with the subject line: Survey 2026 Thank you for taking the time to read this post and we hope that you will have time to complete the survey.

Source

Joanna Hopkins discusses her art practice and a recent community ecology project at Nephin National Park. Check it out now by clicking here! Image: Joanna Hopkins, Palimpsest, 2025; film still © and courtesy of the artist.

Source

SO Fine Art Editions

5 March – 4 April 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Lordan is a writer and art 

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

tomlordan.com

Source

Sinéad McCormick discusses the evolution of the BAVA programme on Sherkin Island.⁠ ⁠ Check it out now by clicking here! ⁠ Image: BA in Visual Arts student, Mary Sullivan, At Home At War, 2018, installation on Sherkin Island for the BAVA graduate exhibition, ‘A Dialogue with the World’; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artist and TU Dublin.⁠

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joannahopkins.com

Source

The Dock

21 March – 30 May 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAKE IT DO

WEAR IT OUT

USE IT UP

DO WITHOUT

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

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

Source