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.

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SO Fine Art Editions

5 March – 4 April 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Lordan is a writer and art 

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

tomlordan.com

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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.⁠

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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

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The Dock

21 March – 30 May 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAKE IT DO

WEAR IT OUT

USE IT UP

DO WITHOUT

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

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

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Sinead Mc Cormick DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF THE BAVA PROGRAMME ON SHERKIN ISLAND.

Over the past 25 years, the BA in Visual Arts (BAVA) programme on Sherkin Island has become known for its unique, evolving model of art education. The community-based, four-year, honours degree programme is fully accredited, managed, and delivered by the School of Art and Design at TU Dublin in partnership with Sherkin Island Development Society (SIDS), and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. It is part-funded by the Department of Rural and Community Development and Cork County Council. The programme provides an artist-centred, place-responsive education that embraces uncertainty, independence, and lived experience.

Far away from the infrastructures typically associated with art schools, BAVA Sherkin does not really have a specific purpose-built studio, or fixed workshop facilities, and no clear boundary between campus and community. Instead, Sherkin itself becomes both the place and the subject that shapes how students work, and also how they will come to understand what it means to be an artist in the real world. This is a course created in the real world for those who want to leave as fully-fledged, working artists, and is most likely the reason why BAVA graduates have won some major awards over the past number of years. 

Spanning just five kilometres, Sherkin’s scale has never been a limitation; instead, the land itself and the islanders who inhabit it become the focal point of the course in so many more ways than could even be imagined. For BAVA, Sherkin is not a backdrop; it is a collaborator with students developing work in kitchens, sheds, fields, and along the shoreline. Student exhibitions have emerged over the years in response to the landscape with installations in domestic spaces, on beaches, or within working environments. The relationship between art and place has always encouraged students to work both practically and conceptually with material choices shaped by availability. Ideas and concepts are tested by and against weather, terrain, and time.

While much has been written over the years about the programme, what isn’t always captured is how the students themselves become so embedded in the island that many of them choose to make Sherkin their permanent home after graduation, earning it the title as the Island of the Arts. BAVA students become part of the wider Sherkin community and there is an understanding that if aid is needed for anyone, it is given. This resonates with how people reminisce about the old days of villages and what community was once built upon. 

Because of this, students are not only learning techniques; they are learning how to situate their practice within real conditions, while solving real world problems along the way. Being on an island demands adaptability and forces students to foster artistic resilience that extends far beyond graduation and benefits them in their lives as working artists, says artist and course facilitator, Majella O’Neill Collins.

At the core of BAVA is a model that is entirely different from conventional art education courses. Alongside the curriculum, the programme emphasises mentorship, peer learning, and self-directed practice. Speaking of the course, lecturer Sinead Mc Cormick says: “Tutors are themselves practising artists, actively engaged in exhibition-making and research. This creates a learning environment grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction. The relationship between student and tutor is closer to apprenticeship than instruction, with knowledge shared through dialogue, critique, and example.”

Due to smaller class sizes, peer critique is central to the course. Students are encouraged to articulate their ideas, challenge one another, and develop critical frameworks together. The absence of a large institution is what pushes students to be extra accountable and to engage in more tangible ways with their peers, tutors and the islanders, who they come to rely on during the course of their four-year degree programme. BAVA is a model of how art education is imagined for the future, yet it has been happening on Sherkin for decades.  

One of the most unique aspects of BAVA is its integration within the island community. Sherkin is not simply a location for the programme; it is a participant and so too are the people who live there year-round. While students draw from the community, they also contribute to it, bringing new perspectives and creative energy to the island. This has helped to establish Sherkin as a site of ongoing artistic activity, with an international reputation that belies its small size. The result is a model of art education that is not isolated from the world but deeply embedded within it.

As BAVA moves into its next phase, its significance lies not only in its longevity, but in what it suggests about the future of art education in Ireland. Over the course of the programme, participating students have come from Sherkin and other West Cork islands; elsewhere in Ireland, including Dublin; Ukraine, Poland, Germany, and the UK. A number of graduates of the programme now live permanently on Sherkin Island. At a time when rental costs are rising and accommodation is a constant struggle, Sherkin offers an alternative: a decentralised, community integrated model that prioritises sustainability and community living, both artistic and social. Students rent accommodation on Sherkin for the weekend blocks, staying in shared houses and the island hostel. The programme’s evolution reflects a shift towards recognising the value of diverse educational ecologies that are responsive to place, grounded in practice, and open to experimentation. 

The MA Art and Environment (MAAE) is a TU Dublin School of Art and Design master’s programme that combines post-studio art practice, interdisciplinary research, virtual teaching, island studies and community engagement. It is located in the West Cork archipelago and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. Like the BAVA programme, this archipelagic master’s is a significant arts and cultural resource for the region and has extended the range of creative opportunities not only for islanders, but for the broader West Cork community. With its focus on environmental art practice and community art-related knowledge, the students, led by Programme Chair, Dr Glenn Loughran, are actively involved in contemporary culture as organisers, makers, and commentators.

Recruitment for the 2026 intake signals not just the continuation of BAVA, but the renewal of how art education is perceived and received internationally. It is a course that understands learning as something that happens not only in studios or lecture halls, but in landscapes, in communities, and in the spaces in between. On Sherkin Island, art education is not removed from life. It is inseparable from it. 

Sinead Mc Cormick is an artist based on Sherkin Island. She is a graduate of BAVA and MAAE and is now lecturing on the BAVA programme.

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Séamus McCormack discusses the UK-based organisation supporting emerging and early-career artists for over seven decades. Check it out now by clicking here! Image: ‘New Contemporaries 2026’, installation view, South London Gallery; photograph by Oli Cowling, courtesy of the artists and New Contemporaries.

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RACHAEL GILBOURNE INTERVIEWS ALBERTA WHITTLE ABOUT HER TWO-PERSON EXHIBITION WITH CAMILLE SOUTER CURRENTLY SHOWING AT IMMA.

Rachael Gilbourne: When we first met in 2019, we spoke about our shared experiences of caregiving, and the difference between empathy and compassion. Your work carries this too – a deep sense of healing and hope in a brutal world. How do you speak about trauma and violence through your practice without it sinking into despair?

Alberta Whittle: Thinking of that time reminds me how lonesome being an artist can be, but also how global crises can bring people together in affinity and hope. My heart was sore then, and I was trying to figure out my voice. I was disturbed by the grief and rage of that socio-political landscape, which in hindsight, seems much calmer than today. I am the child of two trade unionists, and I’ve learned that community is what stops me from sinking into despair. Community can come from kith and kin, or from the chosen family I am lucky to work with. Isolation can narrow one’s thinking, and we need people to remind us of what is at stake when we lose touch with our individual softness. Togetherness keeps us intentional. 

RG: You’ve previously mentioned that you think of yourself as a self-taught artist. How do you reconcile academic achievement with your authentic, organic, and intuitive approaches to making? 

AW: Whilst I think art education is an indispensable place of thinking and community-building, I am a reluctant student. Academia and education in the UK, Europe, and North America is incredibly colonial, and insists on following conservative parameters of judgement and curricula that ignore and obfuscate the global majority’s experience. The systems of education I participated in rarely fit my needs. Coming from a family of excellent teachers and artists, I am aware of their tremendous role as pastoral caregivers, questioners, and educators. However, we still need to change the system itself. I look forward to reimagining arts education as a lecturer or teacher myself someday. For me, education has always been a foundational instructive space, but the important work can happen outside of these environments. 

RG: How representative is the selection of your works within ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’, your two-person exhibition at IMMA with Camille Souter (1929–2023)?

AW: I am always curious about what will unfold when working with a new curator and institution. I’m genuinely delighted with how you have brought works into conversation with one another for the first time. For instance, it’s exciting that the RESET installation sits alongside key watercolour suites. I think the exhibition gives a good flavour of my practice, while also speaking to Camille’s work. This is very much a two-person show, and it’s been intriguing to see how the pairings of our works complement and ask different questions. It speaks very clearly on our shared concerns of environmental catastrophe, whilst also thinking about grief, family, and other healing practices. 

RG: The works of key thinkers and philosophers have been significant in the development of your practice. Can you share some of those research influences with us? 

AW: Studying for my PhD was indispensable in encouraging me to balance my making practice with researching thinkers and philosophers like Edwidge Danticat, Kamau Brathwaite, Christina Sharpe, bell hooks, Maud Sulter, and Saidiya Hartman. Crucially, this taught me that the humanities are indispensable for imagining different futures and opened my eyes to my responsibility as an artist. For instance, reading Maya Goodfellow’s Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats (Verso Books, 2019), was important in understanding the fundamental structures of racism and anti-blackness that have continued to stoke the fires of British imperialism and fracture the safety of global majority folk. I see the traces of this book in my Autumn Equinox paintings and in the wateriness of my coil sculptures. 

RG: Your beaded works, referred to as ‘coils’, are woven hanging sculptures with cowrie shells, pearls, bells and other materials, streaming vertically from ceiling beams to the handcrafted frames of your paintings. In ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’, you’ve created your longest coil sculpture to date, at over 11 metres. Can you speak about coils as a recurring form in your practice? 

AW: I first began making coils as a response to the collective reading of Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’. I was part of a wonderful interdisciplinary group exhibition, ‘Sex Ecologies’ at Kunsthall Trondheim curated by Stefanie Hessler in 2022, and by reading Lorde, I found myself gravitating to the power of pleasure and inter-species love. It still feels like a massive change in direction to remember how this manifested. The coil is a way for me to think about intergenerational connections, but also interspecies relations. It is a naval string; a line from the land to the bottom of the ocean. It is a transmitter of intertidal knowledge as well as memory work. When I string the beads, I count them and order them in particular permutations linked to prime numbers. Threading these beads into a coil becomes an act of meditation and a way to remember. 

RG: This is the first time your work has been shown in Ireland. What has become apparent for you, in thinking about audiences here?

AW: Whenever I am invited to show my work in new contexts, I always try to imagine what existing conversations I am entering into, but also what knowledge might be missing for my audiences. I don’t take my audiences’ knowledge or instincts for granted and try to give them clues into my thinking. This is the first time I have been able to work with a curator to develop such a full-some timeline of my work. Some of these details are intensely personal, such as my parents’ reasoning to return to the Caribbean to raise their children family. Other details reveal the historical, social, and cultural issues I am drawn to in my work. I wonder whether audiences here will be interested in the interlinking colonial histories between the Caribbean and Ireland.

RG: Can you share your experience of working on ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’? 

AW: It has been an honour to get to know Camille’s two children, Tim and Natasha, who have shared time and personal stories with me. In particular, it was so special to visit her studio in Achill with you and Natasha, and to toast her with a wee whiskey. Since returning to my studio in Glasgow, I’ve kept thinking of Camille and her vigorous practice, pushing me on as part of a new generation. But one of the most special times, in preparation for this show, was working with Camille’s son, Tim Morris (and his assistant Gem) in his foundry, on Summoning Spirit – Experiments in Alchemy. There was something so magical about the process. We talked about so many things, from Benin bronzes to memories of Camille, to love and grief – it’s all present in those bronze sculptures. This making process became a bit of a rebirth for my practice, to try something completely different, while emphasising the presence of love, friendship, and labour in this collaborative work. I am forever changed. Thank you. 

Alberta Whittle is a Barbadian-Scottish multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow.

albertawhittlestudio.com

Rachael Gilbourne is the curator of ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’ and Assistant Curator: Exhibitions – Projects & Partnerships at IMMA, where ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’ continues until 13 September.

imma.ie

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SÉAMUS MCCORMACK DISCUSSES THE UK-BASED ORGANISATION SUPPORTING EMERGING AND EARLY-CAREER ARTISTS FOR OVER SEVEN DECADES. 

At New Contemporaries, we believe that creating environments where artists feel supported from their first point of contact with the art world is essential to building a more diverse, inclusive and sustainable system. Founded in 1949, by and for artists, we continue that sprit today to be led by our values that artists change us, and that everything can be reinvented. 

Over the decades, our programme has included artists such as Ed Atkins, Monster Chetwynd, Phil Collins, Tacita Dean, Antony Gormley, Sophie von Hellermann, Mona Hatoum, David Hockney, John Hoyland, Isaac Julien, Anish Kapoor, Mark Leckey, Rachel Maclean, Haroon Mirza, Richard Mosse, Mike Nelson, Laure Prouvost, Paula Rego and Gillian Wearing, among many others. What connects these artists is not a shared style, but the moment at which they were supported, at a formative point before wider recognition.

During the 1970s and 1980s, our annual exhibition operated as an artist-led initiative, organised and selected by students and artists themselves. In 1988, we re-established as an independent organisation and registered charity, creating a more sustainable structure while retaining a commitment to artist-led selection, strengthening our role between art education, professional practice, and public institutions. We are a small core team of five staff, with a Board of Trustees, and are funded by Arts Council England as a National Portfolio Organisation. 

While formats and contexts continue to evolve, our purpose remains the same: to support artists at the point where new work, new thinking and new practices emerge. We co-curate an exhibition and public programme with leading London-based institutions including South London Gallery, ICA, and Camden Arts Centre, and nationally including most recently at Grundy Art Gallery (Blackpool), KARST (Plymouth), Humber Street Gallery (Hull), and upcoming at MIMA (Middlesborough) and Focal Point Gallery (Southend). By partnering with each of these institutions, we want to celebrate the particular art ecosystems in that locality. We build programmes to extend from the exhibition with artist-run spaces or other activities in each region. 

Artists are selected for participation through an annual open call, which is selected by a panel that includes our team and established artists. For 2026, this panel includes Joy Gregory, Florence Peake, and Abbas Zahedi, who represent an exciting cross section of contemporary practice. To apply, artists need to be based in the UK, be over 21 (with no upper age limit), and we actively encourage applications from artists who are underrepresented in the sector, including those who experience barriers linked to ethnicity, class, disability, gender and sexuality. 

Over the last few years, we have expanded our eligibility remit, which now is self-defined by artists wanting to participate in our programme as ‘emerging or early-career’ and have removed the need to have graduated from formal art education. This is in recognition of the variety of trajectories for artists to start or even maintain a practice. We have seen an increased growth in pathways for artists, including informal, non-accredited learning programmes such as Open School East, Syllabus, and the Turps Studio Programme, as well as artists returning to practice later in life. In response to this expanding and increasingly diverse landscape, we are keen to support artists who are developing their practice outside of traditional routes of education. 

Our work takes place across a year-round programme of artist development. This programme is shaped by the approaches, needs and ambitions of artists working today, and includes mentoring, workshops, talks, residencies, and commissions. Currently, we work with organisations such as FORMA and Hospitalfield to create opportunities for studio residencies, and this is something we are keen to grow, as access to studio provision becomes increasing challenging for artists. 

Our remit is to support artists across the four nations of the UK, and we are actively working to create stronger relationships and visibility for artists working in all areas of the country. We have recently received a curatorial grant from Art Fund to undertake some research with practitioners and organisations in both Belfast and Derry/Londonderry, as a way of understanding the needs of artists in the Northern Irish context. 

The UK, particularly the city hubs, still attract many Irish or Ireland-based artists to either study or practice. Over the last number of years, we have worked with artists from the island including Christopher Steenson and Aaron Alexander Smyth (2025); Síomha Harrington and Hazel O’Sullivan (2024); Alannah Cyan and Anne McCloy (2023); Aoibheann Greenan (2021); and Cáit and Éiméar McClay (2020). We have seen their individual practices benefit from inclusion, leading to more opportunities, visibility, and connecting with new networks. 

Artists can participate in our programme in two ways: either by applying through our annual open-call programme, which opens in the spring of each year; or through attending our online or in-person events, advertised on our website or social media channels, that address topics and issues to support the next generation of artists. What excites me about working at New Contemporaries is the variety of artists we get to collaborate with, along with the range of UK-based partners we programme with. Our programme is agile, adaptive, and able to create meaningful change by responding to artists’ needs, while remaining new and forward-looking.

Séamus McCormack is an Irish born London based curator and Senior Curator at New Contemporaries.

newcontemporaries.org.uk

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MAEVE CONNOLLY CONSIDERS THE VALUE AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF PALLAS PROJECTS/STUDIOS AS THE ORGANISATION CELEBRATES 30 YEARS. 

Pallas Projects/Studios (PP/S) is 30 years old this year. Established by artists Mark Cullen and Brian Duggan in 1996, with Gavin Murphy joining ten years later, its first home was the former Pallas Knitwear factory on Foley Street in Dublin. Since 1996, PP/S has moved many times, occupying 16 different premises around the city, and running off-site projects across multiple locations.¹ A long-term lease was finally secured on an old school building in Dublin 8 in 2012, where Cullen and Murphy now lead the organisation, with Eve Woods as curator. In addition to the gallery and studios in The Coombe, PP/S now encompasses studios in The Digital Hub and a community and workshop space in Newmarket Yards, due to open in early summer. 

In his introduction to Artist-Run Europe: Practice/Projects/Spaces, a collection of texts published to coincide with 20 years of Pallas, Gavin Murphy highlights the struggle for space in the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and 70s. Arts organisations, he notes, “opted to locate themselves as groups in spaces: spaces for production, thought, exhibition, and debate, and spaces which lay outside commercial or cultural zones […] situating themselves in run-down inner-city areas […] largely ignored by commercial, cultural and political interests of the time.”² This history of run-down spaces repurposed by artists is also a history of profit accrued over time through land ownership, inaccessible to artists and other tenants. 

Exposed to the ebb and flow of public funding, artist-run organisations cannot always afford to ignore the temporality of capital investment and return. As observed by UK-based arts consultant Sarah Thelwall in 2011, small-scale visual art spaces often support the early practices of artists who go on to achieve career success, but the “artistic, social and societal value” generated by this investment is not realised until much later.³ Thelwall describes this delayed return as ‘deferred value’, a term used in financial reporting when profits fall outside reporting cycles, and she advocates a shift from annual comparisons to lifecycle assessments.⁴ While this might be transformative, it would require an ongoing commitment to tracking and reporting, alongside the demands of everyday operations.

Despite modest resources, PP/S excels at its everyday operations, with a programme that maximises the gallery’s potential for events and exhibitions. While larger institutions have extended the duration of their shows, Pallas maintains a brisk pace, especially in the case of the Artist Initiated Project (AIP) programme. But the rhythm of artist-run time at PP/S is more complex than the fortnightly turnover of high quality exhibitions. In fact, Cullen and Murphy work with time in ways that are complex and distinctive. In 2011, when the gallery was briefly housed in Dominick Street, Cullen and Murphy initiated the first instalment of what has become their annual ‘Periodical Review’. Generally selected with invited collaborators, each iteration reflects on the artistic output of the previous year, or an even longer time period, with a decade of practice reviewed in ‘PR X’ (2020). 

‘Periodical Review’ is an explicitly future-orientated project, described as a “discursive action, the gallery proposed as a journal, a magazine-like layout of images that speak, the field talking to itself.”⁵ This annual ‘discursive action’ is documented on the PP/S website, providing a useful resource for exhibition researchers.⁶ The website also includes details of ‘In the making’ (2015–ongoing) an almost annual presentation of work in progress by IADT BA in Art students. The form of ‘In the making’ has been revised to account both for lengthening commutes and changing patterns of social media use. In recent years, students have become more interested in the experience of being together in time and space, and apparently less interested in performing their sociality for platforms.

In her contribution to Artist-Run Europe, Valerie Connor analyses photographs of artists who appear to be at leisure but are actually at work. An image of Eve Hesse in the 1960s, featuring objects made by artist friends as well as Hesse herself, prefigures the sharing economy and the “instrumental use of down-time […] in adding value to oneself (through the curated consumption of digital media) and monetising of mass ‘browsing’ patterns.”⁷ Affective labour and the “work of enthusiasm” is performed by groups as well as individuals. This situation requires artist-run organisations to adopt carefully considered strategies of self-representation, and it also requires researchers to expand their analytical paradigms to include visual methodologies.⁸ 

How can the value of artist-run organisations be recognised and sustained without resorting to metrics determined by platform media and capital investment? I have focused here on relations between humans, but PP/S has also explored the ‘more-than-human’ world, most recently through ‘Entangled Life’, a series of events curated over seven months by Cristina Nicotra.⁹ The more-than-human ‘commons’ describes a complex of relations, emphasising continuities between the material and the immaterial, the natural and the social, which are clearly of relevance to artist-run organisations. But simply categorising the work of artist-run organisations as a kind of ‘commoning’, because this work involves complex relations of care, use and conflict, does not solve the problem of visibility. As noted by Patrick Bresnihan, it is precisely the “practical, situated nature of commoning that makes it hard to see”, to the extent that it might be “recognized and valued only after it has disappeared.”¹⁰ Hopefully, in deepening its ongoing engagement with time, through the exploration of what is more-than-human, PP/S can engage others in the shared work of recognising value beyond dominant metrics, and in the process, sustain its own survival.

Dr Maeve Connolly is a Dublin-based researcher, focused on changing cultures and economies of art and media practice. She is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Film, Art & Creative Technologies at IADT.

maeveconnolly.net

¹ For the full list of previous locations see pallasprojects.org and also Mark Cullen, ‘Zones of Contention – Two Decades in the life of Pallas’, in Artist-Run Europe, Practice/Projects/Spaces, edited by Gavin Murphy and Mark Cullen (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2016) pp56–71. 

² Murphy, ‘What makes artist-run spaces different? And why it’s important to have different art spaces’, Artist-Run Europe, p6 [italics in original]

³ Sarah Thelwall, Size Matters: Notes towards a Better Understanding of the Value, Operation and Potential of Small Visual Arts Organisations (London: Common Practice, 2011) p7. [Available at commonpractice.org.uk]

⁴ Thelwall, p35.

⁵ ‘PR X’ press release, 2020 [See pallasprojects.org] 

⁶ PP/S has also supported archive-focused projects. See Megs Morley, ‘The Artist-led Archive: Sustainable Activism and the Embrace of Flux’ in Artist-Run Europe, pp72–77.

⁷ Valerie Connor, ‘‘Brown Studies’ and Artist-Led Enthusiasm’, Artist-Run Europe, p49.

⁸ Connor, p53.

⁹ ‘Entangled Life’, 14 May to 18 December 2025 [See pallasprojects.org] 

¹⁰ Patrick Bresnihan, ‘The more-than-human commons: From commons to commoning’, in Space, Power and the Commons: The Struggle for Alterative Futures, edited by Samuel Kirwan, Leila Dawney and Julian Brigstocke (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016) p104.  

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