Artist Talks & Screenings

All of our talks are open to public and free of charge.

For Culture Night, Wexford Arts Centre will facilitate a late gallery opening from 5-8pm, offering more time to enjoy the current exhibition of Edge of Range by artist Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. The exhibition focuses on the cotton weed plant and traces the story of its near extinction through a sculptural installation and wall-based works. 

Laura Ní Fhlaibhín is an artist from Wexford. She is a Gilbert Bayes Royal Society of Sculptors Award U.K. recipient 2024 and has been awarded the 2025 Derek Hill Foundation residency at the British School of Rome. She was the recipient of the Goldsmiths Almacantar Bursary 2019, and was awarded the Next Generation Award 2020 from the Arts Council of Ireland.

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All are welcome to this free event, but booking is required.

Join us for a special screening of The Quickening, a powerful new artwork by ground-breaking artist Deirdre O’Mahony which responds to urgent issues facing farming, food production and the environment. Developed over three years, this unique work gathers voices which together communicate the reality of farming life and the centrality of soil to human, animal and insect life.

We are delighted to welcome “Farming for Nature” Ambassador Suzanna Cramptonto Blackbird Cultur-Lab to respond to The Quickening in relation to regenerative farming, the importance of dung beetles, amongst other soil creatures, and what makes a healthy soil ecological soil biome. Light refreshments will be provided.

The Quickening is presented at six rural locations, including Blackbird Cultur-Lab, as part of a Walls & Halls tour. This tour sparks conversation about the local environment in recognition of the multiple voices and perspectives at play in our communities. It coincides with an ambitious exhibition at The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art, Trinity College, Dublin, from March 29 to June 23, 2024.

The Quickening

Artist Deirdre O’Mahony’s The Quickening is a sound and moving image work, commissioned by The Douglas Hyde, that has emerged from a series of gatherings to talk about the issues faced in food production and farming today. O’Mahony’s Sustainment Experiments feasts held in Kilkenny and Dublin generated open and frank discussions between farmers, scientists and politicians which, transcribed, have become a libretto for this impactful new work. Developed by O’Mahony and writer Joanna Walsh, the libretto is voiced by singers and musicians, Branwen Kavanagh, Michelle Doyle, Siobhán Kavanagh, Ultan O’ Brien and Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, each with a distinctive pitch, style and pace. This aural feast is accompanied by moving imagery captured across rural Ireland, showing varied viewpoints of the land and its many inhabitants affected by the unseasonal droughts, floods, and erosion, brought on by accelerating climate change. As O’Mahony states, “The Quickening represents a polyvocal response to the most urgent questions affecting land and its inhabitants, giving voice to the invisible protagonists that shape our earth’s future and an idea of being-in-common that encompasses all earthly inhabitants.”

Deirdre O’Mahony

Deirdre O’Mahony has an impressive 30-year track record in making work across sculpture, painting, installation and participatory projects. At the centre of this work is her interest in the politics of landscape, rural/urban relationships, rural sustainability and food security. She has investigated the political ecology of rural places through public engagement, exhibitions, critical writing, and cultural production. From setting up community spaces amongst a charged local conflict to her large-scale paintings produced by tracing the shadows of boulders on Mullaghmore Mountain in the Burren National Park, she deftly considers the role of art in bringing together diverse communities, forming alternate forms of knowledge, and embraces art as a critical space to help us see things differently.

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LOOP by Emma Roche, recipient of the 2021-22 EMERGENCE Visual Art Award, is currently on view at Wexford Arts Centre. A response to the work written by novelist and essayist Sophie White accompanies the show. Join Emma and Sophie in a conversation about the work on view on Friday 24 November at 10am. After the discussion, there will be a Q&A session. This event is supported by Wexford County Council Arts Department and admission is free but booking is recommended.

Emma Roche lives and works in Gorey, Wexford. She was a 2023 Artist in Residence at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, New York. She recently received the inaugural Lady Grantchester Prize as part of the John Moore’s Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2023. She is the 2021 recipient of the EMERGENCE Award, Wexford Arts Centre; Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Award, 2021 and 2020, and the Creative Ireland Bursary Award, 2020.

Recent exhibitions include Lined Out, Mermaid Arts Centre, Wicklow (2023); Spiders and Cheerleaders, The Complex, Dublin (2021), Ochre, a two-person show with Ciara Roche, Wexford Arts Centre (2021); and Forward Slash at the LAB Gallery, Dublin (2018).  Her work is in private and public collections including the Office of Public Works, Dublin, Arts Council of Ireland, Butler Gallery, The Crawford Gallery, Wexford Arts Centre and Wexford County Council.

Sophie White is a novelist, essayist and podcaster from Dublin. She also holds a First-Class Honours degree in Sculpture from NCAD and she is currently the Arts Council Writer in Residence in DCU. She is the author of seven books. Her first four books, Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown (Gill 2016), Filter This (Hachette, 2019), Unfiltered (Hachette, 2020) and The Snag List (Hachette, 2022) have been all bestsellers and award nominees. Her fifth book, the bestselling memoir Corpsing (Tramp Press, 2021), was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction. Her sixth book, Where I End (Tramp Press, 2022) was described as “brilliantly visceral” by the Guardian and “exquisite and disturbing, brutish and beautifully crafted” by The Irish Times. It won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Her seventh book and fifth novel, My Hot Friend (Hachette, 2023) has just landed in bookshops.

The talk is free of charge but booking is recommended. To book, please clink here.

For more information on LOOP by Emma Roche, please click this link. 
For more information on the EMERGENCE Visual Art Award click this link. 

Image:
LOOP by Emma Roche in-situ at Wexford Arts Centre. Photography: Claudio Nego, Photojournalist

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Tanad Aaron is a visual artist based in Dublin who works with material production processes, linguistic theory and architectural form, and is a co-founder of Forerunner, a collaborative visual art and architecture practice. Over the past two years, he has begun to develop a critical process for teasing out both notions of permanence and semi-permanence. Taking issue with today’s paradigm of cycle implied in excess, waste and recycling in a notional sense, his work undermines exhibition makings’ transience by creating texts, wall works, sculptures made of permanent elements alongside or within fleeting architectural interventions.

Tanad is a recipient of the Arts Council’s Next Generation Award 2021, Fire Station Studio Award 2019 and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios 3 Year Membership 2020.  Recent solo exhibitions include core is concrete, Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2022), Where is George Bulfin?, Glandwr, Wales (2022), Portico with Mark Swords, Complex, Dublin (2021), Ask the Dust, Rua Red, Dublin (2019), Staring Forms, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2019). 

Tanad has been an Associate Artist with Grizedale Arts since 2017 and is currently being mentored artist Céline Condorelli.

Recent collaborations include Granite Leap, Kunstverein Aughrim, Wicklow (2022), Y O U N G F O S S I L, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2021), The Future and Stuff, TULCA, Galway (2020), Architecture of Change, Void, Derry (2018), and Museum of Mythological Waterbeasts, Ormston House, Limerick (2018).

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How do we know the Rural? Where do our ideas of the Rural come from?

Art historian and farmer, Karla Sánchez Zepeda, will touch upon the various prejudices and misunderstandings regarding the “Rural”, based on the ideas of human geographer Michael Woods. She will also include a number of local examples of combinations of farm life and the arts. 

In her presentation, Karla will mention regenerative agriculture practices and the impact she believes such practices can have in culture at large.

Karla Sánchez Zepeda is an art historian, curator, and cultural producer. She has participated in numerous educational, research and curatorial projects in Ireland. Her research interests are the environment, art education, the role of art in contemporary society, interdisciplinary collaborative practices, and the construction of the rural.

Karla, who is also a farmer (regenerative agriculture), is the co-founder of Blackbird Cultur-lab, an experimental culture-laboratory that aims to provide a space for agriculture and the arts to meet.

For further information on Blackbird Cultur-lab log onto www.blackbirdcultur-lab.com.

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Els Dievorst is a Belgian visual artist and filmmaker based in County Wexford. Her work has been featured in several exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the MUHKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2020). In 2021, she won the Belgian Art Prize and recently hosted two exhibitions concurrently – This is what you came for – in Bozar and CENTRALE for Contemporary Art, both in Brussels.

Dietvorst’s work focuses on communication, collaboration, and social conflict. For the artist, works of art can leave the representative, symbolic domain and provide strategies for actions in society. In a world dominated by capitalism and inequality, she searches for alternatives in terms of social connections and dialogue. 

The artist’s practice is remarkably diverse and comprises drawings, prints, sculptures, installations, films and documentaries, performative actions, and one-act plays. The motivating factor behind all of this activity is the desire to connect, develop relationships, and collaborate with others. As Dietvorst states ‘For me, creation is a collective process, inclusive and permeable to the world, to the living and the dead, to small neglected objects as well as to each other’s ideas.’ Towards this end, she uses dialogue, experiment, intuition, and collaboration as artistic strategies.

Top Image:
Dooltocht I A desperate quest to find a base for hope, installation view, Muhka, 2020

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At the newly refurbished Wexford Arts Centre, artists Laura Fitzgerald (currently exhibiting in the Centre and 2019 recipient of the EMERGENCE Visual Art Award) and Emma Roche (2021 recipient of the EMERGENCE Visual Art Award) join Ruth Carroll in conversation about their work and practice. After the discussion there will be a Q&A session. This event is supported by Wexford County Council Arts Department and is free for County Wexford-based artists.

Laura Fitzgerald is a visual artist working in drawing, painting, installation, video, and text. A graduate of both the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and the Royal College of Art, London, she is a recipient of the Visual Arts Bursary Award (Arts Council of Ireland) for 2021- 22. Recent exhibitions include participation in the 39th EVA International with Fantasy Farming (2020) at Limerick City Gallery of Art, the site-specific mountain-based artwork Cosmic Granny (2019) in Inch, Co. Kerry, and Lucian’s Neighbours (2018) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. She received a 2021 Golden Fleece Award to create a studio on her father’s land in Kerry.

Emma Roche lives and works in Wexford. She is the 2021 recipient of the Emergence Award, Wexford Arts Centre; Visual Arts, Arts Council Bursary Award, 2021 and 2020, Creative Ireland Bursary Award, 2020 and is shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait Prize, National Gallery, Dublin, 2021. Recent exhibitions include Ochre, two-person show with Ciara Roche at Wexford Arts Centre, 2021, Forward Slash at the LAB Gallery Dublin, 2018 Selected group shows include Small Night Zine, Catalyst Arts, Belfast and Garter Lane, Waterford, 2022, VISUAL Carlow, 2020 and 2019, Turps Gallery, London, 2018 and Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, 2018.

Ruth Carroll is a curator and project manager with over twenty years’ experience in the visual arts sector. Formerly Director of the Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon, she has a particular interest in work made in and around the rural and how visual art practice can be considered  as a way of agitating and disrupting the preconceptions of the rural. Projects include Cliodhna Ni Anluain, Harry Walsh Foreman, Adam Gibney, Bennie Reilly, Celina Muldoon and a major research project looking at the North West as a place of production. She was previously Curator at the RHA in Dublin. She is also an expert in the contemporary art market, advising key private and public collections. She holds a BA Int. in Italian and English, a H.Dip. in Art Administration, a H.Dip. in Management Practice and a Diploma in Project Management from the IMPA.

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Emma Roche’s works shift between the figurative and abstract, combining the methodologies of knitting with paint to create layered and textured works. Roche’s preparatory drawings, made quickly and obsessively, are informed by the humdrum of repetitive daily tasks. In contrast, the processes employed by Roche in the knitted paintings are slow and arduous, where long lines of paint are prepared and dried to be used like wool or thread. The ‘should be’ liquid material is forced to behave in a seemingly impossible but measured way. Ideas concerning how we structure and organise time are highlighted through these painted forms as the labour involved in their production is apparent.

Emma Roche is the 2021 recipient of The EMERGENCE Award, Wexford Arts Centre; Visual Arts, Arts Council Bursary Awards, 2021 and 2020, Creative Ireland Bursary Award, 2020 and was shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait Prize, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 2021. She has recently been selected for the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation Residency, New York, 2023.

Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Lined out, Mermaid Arts Centre 2023, Spiders and Cheerleaders, The Complex, Dublin, 2021, Ochre, a two-person show with Ciara Roche at Wexford Arts Centre, 2021 and Forward Slash at the LAB Gallery Dublin, 2018.  Selected group shows include Generation ‘22, Butler Gallery, 2022, We Are Fetishists, Small Night Zine, Garter Lane, Waterford, 2022, Artworks, VISUAL Carlow, 2020 and 2019, Women Can’t Paint, Turps Gallery, London, 2018 and New Beginnings, Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, 2018.

For further information on the EMERGENCE Award please log on to: www.emergenceaward.ie.  The EMERGENCE Visual Art Award is a partnership initiative between Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford County Council, and South East Technological University supported by the Arts Council.

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Join Curator Anya von Gosseln on Saturday, May 14^th at 11am as she leads an online discussion with Dr. Noelle Campbell-Sharp and artist Anne Martin Walsh on what it means to be an older woman in art. Drawing on her own experience of being an older curator, Anya will lead an enlightening discussion with like-minded female creators, who ignore the antiquated concept of retirement and believe their best work is yet to come. The talk will also touch on issues surrounding women’s full and equal participation in all facets of society. While the roles ascribed to women have changed, there is still much more to be discussed in order to fully break with patriarchal norms and traditions.

The talk is presented by Wexford Arts Centre as part of the Roots and Shoots Programme run by the Bealtaine Festival.

Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford

Tel: +353 (0)53 9123764 / Email: info@wexfordartscentre.ie / Web: www.wexfordartscentre.ie

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Wexford artist Rachel Rothwell interviewed eight artists, educators and curators working in the field of socially engaged art practice over the summer of 2021. In this publication, they discuss their experiences of working in the field, their questions on this practice and their hopes for the future as socially engaged art continues to grow and expand in Ireland. Brought together under a series of topics, these conversations are an informal stroll through the field, providing points for reflection and a great starting point for those curious to know more.

Talking Out Loud includes conversations with William Bock, Jessica Bonenfant, Helen Carey, Mary Conroy, Clodagh Emoe, Hollie Kearns, Gareth Kennedy, and Fiona Whelan.

Talking Out Loud was supported by an Arts Council’s Agility Award.

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In Conversation with Curator Anya von Gosseln

Hosted by Curator & Visual Arts Advisor Eamonn Maxwell

Saturday 22^nd May at 2pm via Zoom

Join us for an in-conversation session with Curator Anya von Gosseln hosted by Curator and Visual Arts Advisor Eamonn Maxwell on Saturday, May 22 from 2pm as part of the Roots and Shoots Programme run by the Bealtaine Festival.  Throughout her career Anya has worked with national and international artists as well as distinguished museums and collectors worldwide. In 2021, she will curate an exhibition of artists working in Ireland and Germany.  Running between four venues in Berlin and Wuppertal, the exhibition links with Galerie GRÖLLE Pass Projects, and showcases work exploring the historical significance of South East Ireland and the Rhineland.

Throughout her career, Anya has worked with national and international artists as well as distinguished museums and collectors worldwide. In 2021, she will curate an exhibition of artists working in Ireland and Germany. Running between the four venues in Berlin and Wuppertal, the exhibition links with Galerie GRÖLLE Pass Projects, and showcases work exploring and reviving a historical connection between South East Ireland and the Rhineland.

Anya worked in Haute Couture in New York between 1960-69 before embarking on her career as a gallerist. She co-owned and managed Galerie de Gestlo in Bremen, Hamburg, and later Cologne participating in the Basel and Cologne Art Fairs throughout the seventies.  In 1984, after a move to Ireland, she was appointed an Administrator of ROSC in Dublin and worked with Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner and Ellsworth Kelly, David Nash, Richard Long, Leon Golub, Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg and many others.

Following this, she was entrusted with the care of the Ulrich Rueckriem exhibition space at Huntington Castle in Clonegal and worked with the renowned sculptor in placing eight related monumental pieces in the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

With an abiding passion for the life and work of Eileen Gray, Anya was one of the first to encourage a deeper appreciation of her work in County Wexford curating events on the designer’s life and work at Wexford Arts Centre and Lost Weekend as well as later in Newtown Barry House with an exhibition entitled After&Since (Eileen Gray). She founded the Eileen Gray Society of Ireland in the mid-1990s while running her Dublin gallery Art in Progress from 1992-1999.

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Artist Talk with Nick Roche

Saturday 15th August 2pm

Please note this event will take place under current social distancing measurements as per Government guidelines

Wexford artist Nick Roche will present a talk on his current exhibition Int-Roche-Spective including an overview of his practice to date on Saturday 15^th August at 2pm. Booking in advance is essential to guarantee your place.

Nick is an artist for Marvel Comics on Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows, Spider-Man & Deadpool, Machine Man, Death’s Head, and is also well known for his work on IDW Publishing’s Transformers series of comics. His most notable work in this series is the multi-part Wreckers Saga, one of the franchise’s most acclaimed works.

Nick’s most recently published work was Rogue Trooper for the seminal 2000AD, and he is currently working on various Marvel and IDW covers including a Transformers/Terminator crossover as well as his own Irish-set suburban folk horror comic due for release later this year. Other notable work includes the all-ages horror comedy comic Monster Motors created with screenwriter Brian Lynch, the forthcoming Escape From Citytron videogame, and the ‘Last Of Our Kind’ album artwork and ‘Barbarian’ video animation for British rock group The Darkness.

Booking in advance is essential to guarantee your place. Book here

As part of our commitment to the continued well-being of our visitors, team members, and in an ongoing effort to assist our community in preventing the spread of COVID-19, we have implemented enhanced protocols and procedures you will notice before and during your visit. This includes hand sanitiser dispensers placed at key points throughout the centre, promoting a one-way experience that reinforces social distancing guidelines, and additional signage to promote hand washing and best hygiene practices. We request that all patrons wear a face mask when visiting.

Int-Roche-Spective will run in the lower and upper galleries of Wexford Arts Centre until Saturday 22^nd August.

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Talk with artist Lar O’Toole

Tuesday 21st January 2020, 11am

In association with IT Carlow Wexford Campus School of Art & Design

​Lar O’Toole’s practice responds to the environment and our relationship with nature. The work examines a compression of astronomical proportions relative to the human experience; it considers the science/pseudo-science boundary, modern mythology and anxiety. He experiments with multidisciplinary methods using a wide range of media and materials. This produces imagery and forms that can evoke elemental forces or scientific inquiry, establishing a material connection with cosmic cycles and natural phenomena. By exploring this visual language, O’Toole reflects scientific reality and subverts destructive systems. By initiating a connection with nature and the cosmological, he invites the viewer to reflect upon the environment and the unnatural forces that impact upon it.

Emerging artist Laurence O’Toole, based in County Wexford, has a background in graphic design and engineering. He graduated from IT Carlow in 2014 with first-class honours in Fine Art. After securing funding from Artlinks in 2017, he undertook an MA in Art & Process at Crawford College of Art, Cork and graduated in December 2018. He undertook a student residency at IMMA in the summer of 2018 and recently completed a six-week residency at The Leitrim Sculpture Centre which was awarded by Wexford County Council. He is currently working towards his first solo show at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre this spring.

Image: A Potential for Disequilibrium, 2018, concrete, graphite, soapstone, steel, 120 x 100 x 75cm

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Talk with artist Laura Fitzgerald

​EMERGENCE Award Winner 2019

Tuesday 26th November, 11am

In association with IT Carlow Wexford Campus School of Art & Design

Autobiographical and fictional narratives are explored in Laura Fitzgerald’s practice through drawing, text and video. Her work references her own rural background and general anxieties of what it means to be an artist. Fitzgerald constructs representational spaces using models and projections, and uses text self-reflexively to consider the act of making art as a romanticized endeavor and an experience based reality. Through her video work, she draws on the nuanced differences between the documentary veracity and archival montage, generating ambiguity between what is fiction and not. Laura infuses her works with humour, presenting a self-critical commentary of how and what it is to be an artist.

Laura Fitzgerald graduated from the Royal College of Art London in 2013 and is currently in residence at the Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin. She recently undertook a residency at WARP Artist Village, Netherlands, and the Lucian Freud Residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. She has been awarded two consecutive residencies to the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York, supported by the Arts Council Travel and Training Award. In 2016, she was awarded an Arts Council Next Generation Award to support a new body of work. This research culminated in video works; Field Rearch Ctd and P45, which won the Claremorris Open award in 2017, with screenings at ISCP NYC, Towner Art UK, Crate Project Space UK and Zona Mista, London, UK with Laure Prouvost.

Find more information on the Emergence Award at Wexford Arts Centre here.

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Talk with artist Ailbhe Ní Bhriain

at Wexford Arts Centre

Tuesday 12th November, 11am
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In association with IT Carlow Wexford Campus School of Art & Design

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain is an Irish artist known for her use of film, computer-generated imagery, and photography. The work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and has increasingly involved collaboration with musicians and composers, with screenings and installations incorporating recorded sound, live performance, and improvisation. Through her work with film, computer-generated imagery, and sound, she creates immersive multi-screen installations that play with ideas of representation and displacement. Her films depict archetypal or generic locations that have been transformed into a dream-like theatricality. Whether a flooded library inhabited by birds of prey or a disused airport housing a rudimentary landscape, these works represent an altered reality in which our expectations of time and place come undone.

Recent solo exhibitions include Temple Bar Gallery , Dublin (2018); Sirius Arts Centre, Cork (2018); Domobaal Gallery, London (2017); The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon (2017); Galway International Arts Festival (2017); and RHA, Dublin (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Pallas Projects, Dublin (2018); Podroom Gallery, Belgrade (2017); The Broad Museum, Michigan (2016/17); The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2016); and Paris Photo (2016). Ailbhe Ní Bhriain is represented by Domobaal Gallery, London.

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Talk with artist Emma Roche

at Wexford Arts Centre
Tuesday 5th November, 11am
In association with IT Carlow Wexford Campus School of Art & Design

Emma Roche’s works flip between figurative narratives and abstract painting. Traditional materials are used in many different forms; some expanded and some not. Customary ‘feminine’ crafts are central to how Emma executes the works and curiosities into the potential of acrylic and oil paint properties are also part of her research. A recent series of paintings, exhibited in a solo show in the Lab Gallery – Dublin, stemmed from ideas about ‘day jobs’. Each work isolated images of past positions, self-portraits, bosses, interiors, exteriors, in-house rules, colleagues, as well as imagines occupations and invented roles. These inquiries into labour are also present in the ‘knitted paint’ paintings. Quasi-human forms, haptic qualities, familiar processes, child-like note-taking and an innate handling of materials are central to the work and all that informs it.

Emma Roche is based in Wexford and is a graduate of the MA in Visual Arts Practices, IADT, Dublin (2010), BA in Fine Art Painting, NCAD, Dublin (2006), and Turps Banana Painting Correspondence Course, London (2016-2019). Recent solo exhibitions include Forward Slash at the LAB Gallery, Dublin (2018) and group shows include Dearly Beloved, Carlow Visual (2019); Ruth Bocahard Self Portrait Prize, London (2019), Women Can’t Paint, Turps Gallery, London (2018) and New Beginnings, Green On Red Gallery, Dublin (2018). Her work is in private and public collections including the OPW and Wexford County Council and she is a recipient of the Artlinks Bursary Award, 2019 from Wexford County Council.

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In Conversation with Padraig Grant
Gallery Talk
At the Wexford Arts Centre Galleries
Tuesday 24th September at 7pm

Join Photographer Padraig Grant in conversation to discover his journey form dark room enthusiast to international photo journalist.

This is afree event and all are welcome

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Sometimes street based, sometimes landscape based, Grant is most frequently found at the interface of where the street portrait meets the landscape picture. Grant’s work has been published in nine photographic book collections starting with ‘African Shadows’ in 1994 and culminating in the soon to be released ‘Wexford-Part 4’.

Grant has worked as a freelance photojournalist for international and national publications and his work is held in many private and public collections. Born in Wexford in a home surrounded by photographic history, Grant’s initiation into photography was through the dark art of traditional darkroom printing; where chemistry, artistry and magic combine to make, what the great American landscape photographer Ansel Adams would call, “expressive prints”.

Grant still photographs and prints with silver based traditional methods as seen in ‘The Actual’ his work is now produced using many different methods. The Actual aims to engage the viewer with images gathered from Grant’s collections that are portrayed in a new light and exploring and celebrating the three strands of Grant’s photographic practice. The exhibition will trace Grant’s development as an image maker from 1981 right up to the present day.

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Age & Opportunity Artists’ Residency, Cow House Studios – Wexford
26th August – 6th September 2019

Panel Discussion with Richard Gorman, Eithne Jordan, and Tamsin Snow
2pm on Wednesday 4th September
Wexford Arts Centre

Age & Opportunity and Cow House Studios are delighted to announce the 5th year of the Age & Opportunity Visual Arts Residency initiative.

The idea behind the residency is to create a quiet space over the course of two weeks for artists of different generations to consider their practices, and the changing contexts of those practices as time has moved on in their career. This year, Richard Gorman, Eithne Jordan, and Tamsin Snow have been selected as the Age & Opportunity Visual Arts Residency artists. There are no formal outcomes expected from the project other than an artistic engagement with the other artists. The residency will take place from 26th August to 6th September.

Join us on Wednesday 4th September at 2pm for a panel discussion with the artists at Wexford Arts Centre to mark the end of their residency. Presented in partnership with Wexford Arts Department, the artists will discuss their practice and the experience of working in Wexford, and there will also be an opportunity for critical engagement with the artists.

Richard Gorman is celebrated as one of Ireland’s foremost abstract artists. Primarily a painter, he has also worked extensively in printmaking and, to a lesser extent, sculpture. Gorman’s spare compositions are sharply delineated with curvilinear forms using areas of flat, perfectly pitched colour. He is known for the exceptional elegance and economy of his work in all mediums, including several series of innovative hand-made paper pieces in which the pigment is soaked into the thick surface texture of the paper. Richard Gorman’s oil paintings on linen characteristically involve clearly defined interrelated blocks of colour, creating tensions between themselves and the edge of the canvas.

Eithne Jordan was born in Dublin where she studied at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology. She was awarded a DAAD scholarship in 1984 to study at the Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin, where she subsequently lived for several years. Since 1990 she has worked between Languedoc in the south of France and Ireland. Her work focuses on the contemporary city, looking at places such as Paris, Rotterdam, Madrid, Vienna, and most recently Dublin. A member of Aosdana and the Royal Hibernian Academy, she is one of Ireland’s leading figurative painters. Recent solo shows include 2017: Tableau, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; When Walking, Butler Gallery Kilkenny; 2012:Street, RHA, Dublin. Further information on her work can be found at www.eithnejordan.ie

Tamsin Snow (lives and works in Dublin) studied at the Royal College of Art, London (2012) and Goldsmiths College, London (2008). Snow’s works derive from her ongoing investigations into the legacies of modernist architecture. She constructs large-scale built environments, sculpture and CGI animations to raise questions about the political and ideological underpinnings of architecture and social spaces.

Past exhibitions include: Spare Face, Block 336, London (2018), Cross Sections Project, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, WUK, Vienna (2018); Resort, Mermaid Arts Centre, Wicklow (2017); Multifaith, Dazed X Confused Emerging Artist Award, Royal Academy, London (2015); Lobby Part I & II, Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin (2015); and Pavilion, Store, London (2014).

Images (from left to right):
Studio shots of Richard Gorman and Eithne Jordan, and work by Tasmin Snow – Showroom, 2017, CGI animation.

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Talk with artist Dominic Thorpe

Tuesday 26th March, 11am
In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Dominic Thorpe is an Irish visual artist who has shown and performed work internationally as well as throughout Ireland including Bangkok Cultural Centre, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Performance Space London, Galway Arts Centre, SASA Gallery Adelaide, RHA Dublin, and Mobius Boston. He is a leading practitioner of performance art in Ireland and has completed a range of commissions and has undertaken residencies in the Nordic Arts Centre, Norway, and Fire Station Studios, Dublin, and was the first artist in residence at the humanities department of University College Dublin.

He has received awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, CREATE, Culture Ireland and Kildare County Council. He is currently receiving a Vice Chancellors research scholarship at the University of Ulster to undertake a PhD examining relationships between performance art and representations of perpetrators.

Throughout his practice, he has developed and engaged in a range of public art and art education projects and has worked with several artist-run initiatives. Dominic Thorpe has work in a number of public collections including the Arts Council of Ireland. While his teaching has been with third level, M.A. and PHD students, he has also taught outside Art institutions, and more recently at KCAT.

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Talk with artist Mark Garry

Tuesday 5th March, 11am
In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Rearch-driven and multifaceted, Mark Garry’s practice is concerned with the cultural, physiological, associative and perceptive characteristics that shape our understanding of the world and the subjectivity inherent in our negotiation of defined space. Garry integrates diverse media, apparatus and exhibition making strategies, often combined in a singular exhibition situation to form installations. These delicately considered, site-specific installations are measured and quiet, requiring meticulous systems of construction.

Recent solo exhibitions include An Afterwards, Luan Gallery, Athlone (2017); A New Quiet, Royal Hibernian Academy (2015); Lafayette Projects, Marseille; City Gallery, Charleston, South Carolina; The Model, Sligo (all 2014); ENart Taichung, Taiwan (2013); Cave, Detroit (2011); MiMA, Middlesbrough; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (both 2009) and Douglas Hyde Gallery (2006).

Recent group exhibitions include Hennessy Art Fund, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Dada Post, Berlin (both 2017); A Certain Kind of Light, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne (2017); Some thing as a line, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda (2016); Paper for the Sky, INTERSTATE PROJECTS, Brooklyn; Exiles, The LAB, Dublin; Island, Galleria Civica di Modena, Modena (2013); All Humans Do, White Box, New York and The Model, Sligo (2012); Unrealised Potential, VOID, Derry; De l’émergence du Phénix, curated by Caroline Hancock, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (both 2011); Reverse Pedagogy, The Model, Sligo; The Hugh Lane (both 2009) and Exquisite Corpse, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2008).
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In Conversation – How in the Arts?

A free in Conversation style talk with Visual Artist, Shane Keeling & Final year student in Sociology and Social policy in Trinity College Dublin; Ross Gavigan will be held on Thursday 31st January at 7pm.

Shane Keeling’s exhibition BAD-MAN Oh Man will be on display from 14.01.2019 – 16.02.2019

for more information email lisa@wexfordartscentre.ie
This is a free event & all are welcome!

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Creating a Response
With the Elephant Collective

An Exhibition of work by the Elephant Collective will be on display in the Print Room At the Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Co.Wexford from 14.01.2019- 16.02.2019
This exhibition will be accompanied by a free craft morning on

Thursday 31st January 2019 from 10:30am – 12:30am – Open to all crafters & free to attend.

Doreen will be in house to create some response work regarding the exhibition of work in situ, Picking up the Pieces: remaking the fabric of Care.

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In Conversation – Art in Activism

In conversation on ‘Art in Activism’ will take place on
Thursday 7th February 2019 at 2pm

With guest speakers:
Artist, Martina Hynan from The Elephant Collective
Wexford County Councillor, Tony Walsh
& Dr Orla Ryan from Wexford Campus, School of Art and Design (IT Carlow)

​We would love to hear what you think!

​Join us to celebrate the journey of the Elephant Collective and how they have found their voice through art.

This is a free event & All are welcome to Join in the conversation
This event is free to attend & all are welcome

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Artists Talk
In association with The Cow House Studios

Saturday 24th November
from 2pm -4:30pm

The Mothership & Cow House Studios will host a talk on Saturday 24th November from 2pm – 4.30 pm at Wexford Arts centre as part of the Satellite Residency.

This autumn The Mothership Project in collaboration with Cow House Studios are running a pilot artist residency programme giving 15 parenting artists supported time and space to develop their practice, including childcare and accommodation on-site for children and partners.

Michelle Browne and Leah Hillard of The Mothership, Celina Muldoon, participating Artist and Rosie O’Gorman of Cow House studios will discuss the Satellite residency in the context of being a parenting artist in Ireland. This residency aims to generate institutional change in how artists are supported throughout their careers and changing family circumstances, as well as contributing to the debate on affordable childcare, precarious work and attitudes to care work.
This residency programme for parenting artists highlights the difficulty of maintaining an art career as a parent in Ireland. The Satellite Residency is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and Wexford County Council Arts Office, and is supported by Visual, Carlow and Wexford Arts Centre.

ABOUT THE MOTHERSHIP PROJECT
The Mothership Project is a network of parenting artists in Ireland. The Mothership Project aims to support parenting artists in the development of their practice and to encourage arts organisations to make the art world a more inclusive place for artists with children. Since 2013, The Mothership Project has hosted workshops and discussions on issues facing parenting artists in Ireland. As part of the residencies, The Mothership Project will conduct research into the experience of parenting artists in Ireland that will be used to produce a publication that highlights the needs of parenting artists in Ireland in early 2019.

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About Cow House Studios:
Cow House Studios have run residency programmes since 2008 in rural Co. Wexford. The studios are designed for flexibility of use, with 4 individual spaces, and a shared open studio floor for larger group projects and alternative working methods. The studio also offers a darkroom, computer lab and lounge, with access to tools and digital equipment. For more details on Cow House Studios seehttps://cowhousestudios.com/

For more information see the https://themothershipproject.wordpress.com/
Contact: themothershipproject@gmail.com

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Josef Danek
Renowned Czech Republic artist and professor at the University of Ostrava

in association with Wexford Campus School of Art and Design (IT Carlow)

Tuesday 6th November at 12pm
at the Wexford Arts Centre

Josef Daněk belongs to the generation of authors influenced by the postmodern and at the same time growing up in a strongly conceptually oriented cultural environment of Brno in the turn of the 80s and 90s. One of the distinctive, typical features of his work is his variety: he expresses himself by drawing, painting, object, performance, literary or scenic text or expedition. The rationalized use of eclectic forms serves to express both attitude and provocation.

At the very beginning of his work, he devoted himself to a neo-expressive drawing with a neo-conceptual content frame. It is the content, postmodernly conceived work, following the central content line with the generally present paradox thematics, to become the connecting force of its heterogeneous work. The first complete set of drawings, called Significant Anatomy, dates from the mid-1980s. It captures the process of thinking about the human body and mentality. These drawings include texts that served as a source material for Daňka’s numerous, especially vernissage performances.

During the second half of the eighties, his performative approach to the creation of work on objects made of fused plastics, in plasticine painting, was perceived as a model of painting and narrative performances, which were often created in cooperation with the artist and sociologist B. Rozbořil.

In the nineties, he set up a series of monographic exhibitions commemorating nostalgia upon returning to a natural display form. This is primarily the project Endless Drawing (Moravian Gallery 1995) or author’s ongoing work on objects created by the destruction of objects from plastic materials, especially toys. At that time he also initiated and, together with T. Petišková, set up a series of art symposia, such as Plastic Painting or Animal Exhibition, produced in cooperation with the Sypka Gallery.

The extensive stage performances of Daněk took place in the open natural or urban area, but also in the HaDivadlo or Divadlo Husa na provázku in Brno. An important partner and initiator of these theatrical performances was the performer and composer Zdeněk Plachý.
At present, Josef Daněk focuses mainly on literary texts and theater, as well as on exhibition and performance cooperation with Frozen Academy, whose members come from the Art Studio at FaV Brno (in 2007 canceled).
Together with Terezie Petišková, he also prepared several symposia. His performaces were in galleries, public space, in HaDivadlo, in Divadlo Husa na provázku. He taught drawing at FaVU in Brno, later at the Faculty of Arts of the Ostrava university.

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Talk with writer, lecturer Maeve Connolly:
Actors, Peforming Bodies & the Matter of Support
Postponed until further notice
Tuesday 10th April, 11am

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Maeve Connolly co-directs the MA in Art & Research Collaboration (ARC) at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dublin. She is the author of TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television (Intellect, 2014), on television as cultural form, object of critique and site of artistic intervention, and The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Intellect, 2009), on the cinematic turn in contemporary art. Recent publications include contributions to anthologies such as Workshop of the Film Form, (Fundacja Arton and Sternberg Press, 2017), Extended Temporalities: Transient Visions in the Museum and in Art (Mimesis International, 2016) and Exhibiting the Moving Image: History Revisited (JRP Ringier, 2015). She has also programmed screenings related to her own research at venues such as Bluecoat (Liverpool), the Irish Film Institute (Dublin), LUX (London), Mother’s Tankstation Gallery (Dublin), Project Arts Centre (Dublin) and Tate Modern. Her current research focuses on art practice and the matter of infrastructural change.
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Our talks are open to public and free of charge. 

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Talk with artist Brian Maguire

Tuesday 10th April, 11 am

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

A fiercely expressive painter, Brian Maguire’s work essentially emerges from social and political situations and the artist approaches painting as a gesture of solidarity. He operates a truly engaged practice, compelled by the raw realities of humanity’s violence against itself, and the potential for justice.

Maguire has shown extensively in Europe and the US, also participating in shows in Korea, China and Japan. Upcoming solo exhibitions include War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (26 January – 6 May 2018). Recent solo exhibitions include The Void, Derry (2015–2016); Fergus McCaffrey, New York (2015); X Espacio de Arte, Mexico City (2013); European Parliament, Brussels (2012) and Cultuurcentrum de Werft, Geel, Belgium (2012). In 2000, a major retrospective toured from Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane to Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston.

Group exhibitions and biennales include the Irish Museum of Modern Art; WIELS, Brussels; VISUAL, Carlow; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; RAM Foundation, Rotterdam; National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Korea; Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Dublin Contemporary (2011); the Beijing Biennale (2008) and the 24th Sāo Paolo Bienal (1998). Maguire’s work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Art Houston, USA; Irish Museum of Modern Art; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; Trinity College Dublin; Alvar Aalto Museum, Finland; Gemeentemuseum, Den Hague, Netherlands; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK; and Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

Image: Brian Maguire, Aleppo 4, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 400cm

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Past Talks

Talk with artist Gerard Byrne
Tuesday 20th March, 11am

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

The work of Gerard Byrne (b.1969) has been shown at international exhibitions including Skulptur Projekte Muenster (2017), Documenta 13 (2012), the Venice Biennale (2011), the Sydney Biennale (2008), Gwangju Biennale (2008), and the 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003) as well as in major museums in Europe and the US. Museum solo exhibitions include Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2017), ACCA, Melbourne (2016), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2015), FRAC Pays de la Loire (2014), Whitechapel Gallery (2013), IMMA (2011), Renaissance Society, Chicago (2011), and ICA, Boston (2008). In 2007 he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. In 2006 he was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn award. His major works feature in the collections of San Francisco MOMA, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Tate Britain, London, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, MUDUM, Luxembourg, Museion, Bolzano, GAM, Torino, IMMA, Dublin, Lenbachhaus, Munich, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, Kunsthalle Bern Foundation (CH), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (CH) and the FRAC collections of Nord Pas-de-Calais and Pays de la Loire amongst others.

He is represented by the Lisson Gallery in London, Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, and Nordenhake Gallery, Stockholm. He was Professor of Time Based Media at the Royal Danish Academy for Fine Art from 2007 – 2016.
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Image: Jielemeguvvie guvvie sjisjnjeli (Film inside an Image), 2016

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Talk with artist Mark Swords
Tuesday 20th February, 11am

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

The hand-made aspect of Mark Swords’ work is clearly evident, and together with the materials, forms and use of colour relay a sense of curiosity and workmanship. The works are finely executed, and this curiosity is apparent in the artist’s self learning and even re-learning through his engagement with materials, such that a piece of work may result from the solving of a self imposed problem. Utilising materials that are often overlooked, including carpet, tent fabric, and string, and without attempting to hide the processes of making, the strength of Swords’ work resides in its fragility and careful informality.

Mark Swords studied at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. His recent exhibitions include; The Living and the Dead, Temple Bar Gallery (2017), Mystery Ewer, (two person show), ArtBox (2016); Hinterlands, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin (2014); I won’t say I will see you tomorrow (2013), a group project and multi-venue exhibition curated by Aoife Tunney, and Mosaic, Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford (2012).

Image: The Living and the Dead, Temple Bar Gallery, 2017

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Talk with artist Aideen Barry
Thursday 8th February, 11am

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Aideen Barry is an artist whose means of expression are interchangeable, incorporating performance, moving image and sculptural manifestations. Employing visual trickery to create a heightened suspension of reality, the common denominator of Barry’s work is an attempt to deal with anxiety.

At play in her more recent works is an emphasis on optical fiction to generate a sense of cognitive dissonance. The viewer experiences the work in a paradoxical fashion: attracted and yet repelled. Barry often engages with the instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, questioning an idea of phenomenology and resulting in situations of the uncomfortably strange and threatening. Feminist meditations on gynophobia and the monstrous are a McGuffin in her most recent moving image works.

Aideen Barry has a national and international profile. Projects include a solo show at the Galeria Concreta at Matucana 100, Chile, curated by Ximena Moreno (2018); The Lexicon Commission Award (2017); By Association-A Performative Response to Carol Rama, commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Lismore Castle Arts (2016).

Image: ©Aideen Barry, commissioned by the Arts & Heritage Trust, UK.

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Talk with artist Mairead O’hEocha
Tuesday 28th November, 11am

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Mairead O’hEocha’s third solo exhibition, Blackbirds in the Garden of Prisms, with mother’s tankstation limited, Dublin was held in 2016. Other notable exhibitions include A Painter’s Doubt: Painting & Phenomenology, Salzburger Kunstverein (2017), 2116: Forecast of the Next Century, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, which traveled to Broad Art Museum, Michigan (2016-2017), Coup de Ville Contemporary Art Festival, WARP, Belgium (2016), The Mud of Compound Experience, Hong Kong, mother’s tankstation in collaboration with Leo Xu Projects (2016), Whisper Concrete, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny (2011), The Model, Sligo (2012), The Hudson Franklin Gallery, New York (2008). O’hEocha’s acclaimed, second museum exhibition, via An Lár, at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2011) was reviewed in Frieze, no. 141 and selected as an Artforum critics’ picks of 2011. Her work was presented by mother’s tankstation at ‘Art Statements’, Art Basel 44, 2013 and is featured in the third issue of the survey publication of contemporary painting; ‘Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting’ (2016).

Mairead O’hEocha is represented by mother’s tankstation​ limited. For further information on her practice please click here.

Image: Mairead O’hEocha, Plant Dressage with Escaped Cobra, 2016, oil on board
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​Bealtaine Artists’ Residency, Cow House Studios Wexford
7th – 20th May

Panel discussion with Vivienne Dick, Kevin Gaffney & Kathy Prendergast.
Chaired by Linda Shevlin
Friday 19th May, 2pm

Artists Vivienne Dick, Kevin Gaffney & Kathy Prendergast have been invited by Bealtaine to take up residence in the beautiful setting of Cow House Studios in Co. Wexford from May 7th-20th. The premise for this residency is to allow this intergenerational group of artists time to consider their art practice in this rural surrounding.

Join us on May 19th for an event with the artists and a local historian at Wexford Arts Centre to mark the end of their residency. Presented in partnership with Wexford Arts Department, the artists will discuss their practice and the experience of working in Wexford in the context of this residency and there will also be an opportunity for critical engagement with the artists.
All welcome, no booking required.

One on One mentoring sessions with Vivienne Dick, Kevin Gaffney or Kathy Pendergast
We are running a limited number of one on one mentoring sessions for artists with the residents. To apply, state who you’d like to have a one on one clinic with and why (200 words). Email this along with 5 images of recent work and a statement to linda@lindashevlin.com by April 21st.

Sessions will last approximately 45 minutes and places are very limited so applying will not guarantee a place.

Image: Kevin Gaffney, still from A Numbness in the Mouth, 4K video, 2016

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Talk with artist Joy Gerrard
Tuesday 28th March, 11am

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Joy Gerrard is an Irish born artist based in London and working from a studio in Shoreditch, London. She received an MA and an Mphil from the Royal College of Art, London. Recent awards include the Ortho mid career artist award from the RHA, 2015, an Irish Arts Council Bursary in 2011 and the Man Group drawing prize in 2007.

The primary focus of Joy Gerrard’s work in recent years has been the depiction of crowds. She makes small monochrome drawings, and more recently large paintings, of dense crowd scenes taken from newspaper and online images of mass urban protest. Viewed from above, from tall buildings or from news helicopters, Gerrard’s images present a topographical view of people contained within or spilling out of huge civic spaces in a kind of calligraphic active groundswell. Hundreds of intense, tiny brush marks draw the viewer into particular incident within the works, but equally, they are immediately recognisable – being derived from powerful images that have proliferated via the mass media of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, mass actions across European cities, US inner city demonstrations and many others. These are all part of our recent history.

The second element of her work engages public space and built environments. She has produced ten major public installations 2004. These include the London School of Economics (Elenchus/ Aporia, 2009) and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital (Assemble/Move/Map, 2012).
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Image: Protest Crowd Beirut, ink on paper, 40 x 58cm, 2009

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Talk with artist David Beattie
Tuesday 14th March, 11am

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

David Beattie is an artist who lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. He has received a number of Arts Council bursaries, most recently 2015 and was awarded the Harpo Foundation Award in 2010. His work is in a number of public and private collections and most recently was a recipient of the Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA collection, 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include CCA Derry-Londonderry (2017), Temple Bar Gallery and Studios (2011); The Mattress Factory Art Museum, Pittsburgh and Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Visual Art, Toronto, Canada (both 2010). Beattie has been included in numerous group exhibitions including In the Line of Beauty, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2013), O Brave New World, Rubicon Projects, Brussels (2013) All Humans Do, The Model Sligo and Whitebox, New York (2012); Feedback, Galway Arts Centre (2011); Holding Together at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2010); La Part des Choses, Mains d’Oeuvres, Paris, and in Quiet Revolution, Hayward Touring, UK (2009).

Playfully welcoming new connections between foreign ‘things’, Beattie encourages a sense of curiosity and exploration in the act of displacing quotidian objects. Assembled from a variety of everyday materials the work attempts to provide a framework for assessing our daily surroundings. The interactions between object, space and viewer create a dialogue or wider system in which all elements have a role to play. This process of engagement can be seen as a search for a tangible present through the intermediary moments where physics, philosophy, technology and nature collide.
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Image: Approaching Reality, mixed media, variable dimension, 2013

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Talk with artist Damien Flood
Tuesday 21st February, 11am

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Damien Flood is an Irish artist based in Dublin.

His work is grounded in early writings on philosophy, theology, alchemy and the natural sciences and explores the mutability of ‘reality’ and language.

Recent group shows include The Studio Chronicles at RH Contemporary, New York (2015), Product Recall, Galway Arts Centre, Galway (2015), NGORONGORO, Lehder Strasse 34, Berlin (2015), Cú Chulainn Comforted, Basic Space, Dublin (2015), Promise of Palm Trees, Breese Little, London, (2015), Pull Bite Rally, NCAD Gallery, Dublin (2014). Renew, Green On Red Gallery, Dublin (2014,) Was Uns Trend, Glue, Berlin (2014). In 2013, he exhibited in the group exhibition Island: New Art From Ireland in Galleria Civica diModena, Italy; in the three-person show Flood/NiBhriain/Vari at DOMOBAAL, London; and the group show Cafe Paridiso (Least common denominator, or Rustenschacher) at M1, Hohenlockstedt, Germany. In 2012, he was part of the group show Making Familiar at Temple Bar Gallery, Crystalline at Millennium Court Arts Centre and Last at Douglas Hyde Gallery. He has been selected for the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize in 2008 and 2010. In 2014 he was the recipient of the Elizabeth Fitzpatrick Travel Bursary administered by the Royal Hibernian Academy.

Solo shows include: Infinite Plane, Grey Noise, Dubai, 2015, Interior Sun, Green On Red Gallery, 2014, Theatre of the World, Ormston House, Limerick, 2012, Upland, Mermaid Arts Centre, 2011, History of the Visitation, Green On Red Gallery, 2011, Counter Earth, Green On Red Gallery, 2010.

Publications include: Afterworlds, 2013, Spectral Gallery, 2011, Selected Works, 2010.

He has been a tutor at Limerick College of Art, Wexford College of Art, Sligo College of Art, Burren College of Art and has been a Visiting Lecturer at the National College of Art, Dublin and Belfast College of Art. Damien Flood is represented by Green On Red Gallery, Dublin.
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Image: Taste, oil on canvas, 60 x 50cm, 2016

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Talk with Writer/Director Dick Walsh
Tuesday 31st January, 11am

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Dick Walsh is an experimental theatre writer and director. He is an Associate Artist with Pan Pan Theatre and is supported by the Irish Theatre Institute. His play ‘Newcastlewest’ was produced by Pan Pan and featured in the Dublin Theatre Festival and the Korjaamo Festival in Helsinki. This year he has been nominated for The Stewart Parker Award and his most recent play ‘George Bush and Children’ was nominated for the Judges Choice Award at the Dublin Fringe Festival.

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Talk with Professor Valentina Vitali
Thursday 10th November, 11am

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Valentina Vitali is a film historian. Her research explores, from a comparative perspective, the relation between history, economics and film aesthetics. She has written extensively on Hindi cinema, on concepts of the national in cinema, and on film historiography. She has been teaching film history and theory for twenty years.

The talk will include a brief introduction to Indian cinema as the first form of national popular culture. It will also focus on women in silent action films and the recuperation of this genre and type of heroine by contemporary Indian installation / performance artist Pushpamala N.

Valentina is a member of the editorial board of Sine/Cine: the Journal of Cinema Research and of the editorial advisory committee of The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. She is a fellow of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore and, at UEL, has acted as subject area representative on her school’s Research & Knowledge Exchange Committee and on the Research Degrees Sub-Committee for eight years.

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Artist Talk
Tuesday 10th October, 11am

Featuring artist Wim Cuyvers

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

More than often controversy encircles his work, which he nevertheless does not seek, yet when asking fundamental questions, these easily show themselves as problematic questions. He does not make a distinction between his architecture, texts or art. “When limiting its means, architecture clips its own wings. Architecture is not merely about constructing buildings, but about thinking. Architecture has to construct existential spaces, instead of functional spaces.” As an architect Wim Cuyvers is looking for existential spaces – space that questions, that nurtures a degree of confrontation or concentration, that can only be negatively defined: not privatised, not economical, not claimed and not controlled…

Graduated as an architect at the Hoger Architectuurinstituut Gent (B) in 1982. His work, often remarkable because of the wayward interpretation and projective transposition of its prior conditions, has been frequently published (a.o. in A+, Archis, De Architect, S/AM, Flanders Architectural Yearbook, A+U, Oase) and exhibited (monographic exhibition deSingel Antwerp, 1995; numerous Group Exhibitions a.o: “Nouvelle architecture en Flandres”, Bordeaux, 1996; “De rijkdom van de eenvoud”, Brussels, 1996; “Homeward, Contemporary Architecture in Flanders” Antwerp, Bordeaux, Rome, Venice, Plymouth, 2000, Archilab, Orleans, 2004, Kunst&Zwalm 2007.

He has been active as an author of critical essays on architecture and on broader cultural questions. Together with photographer Mark De Blieck he is the author of an untitled book treating about the rear of public space (Yves Gevaert publisher, Brussels, 2002) and published in 2005 ‘Text on Text’. In 2010 he published ‘Poor being poor’, a theater text. Cuyvers has taught in Sint Lucas Gent (B), Design Academy Eindhoven (NL), Academie voor Bouwkunst Tilburg (NL), Technische Universiteit Delft, Ecole d’Architecture Paris Malaquais (F) and was advising researcher in the design department at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (NL). Recent works were mainly about ‘reading’ public spaces in urban areas (Sarajevo, Belgrade, Tirana, Bucuresti, Brussels, Kinsjasa, Brazzaville, Manhattan…) He obtained honourable mentions in different design competitions and won the Culture Prize – Architecture of the Flemish Community in Belgium in 2005.

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Public Discussion
Friday 13th May 2016, 2pm

Following last year’s artists’ residency and public discussion at the beautiful Cow House studios in Wexford, in 2016, the Bealtaine Festival have invited sculptor Tina O Connell, painter Brian Bourke and Sarah Tynan spending time exploring their practices. The idea behind the residency is to create a quiet space over the course of two weeks for artists of mixed generations to consider their practices, and the changing contexts of those practices as time has moved on in their career, over a two week period. At the end of the residency there will be a public discussion with the three artists.

Tina O’Connell is an Irish artist living and working in London. She completed her MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, London, before taking another postgraduate degree in Marseilles, France. Following this she undertook a prestigious Henry Moore Fellowship in Sculpture at Winchester School of Art. She since completed residencies at; La Friche Belle de Mai (Marseilles), 18th St. Arts Complex (Los Angeles) and IMMA, Ireland. O’Connell’s solo exhibitions include; Templebar Gallery (Dublin), Belltable Gallery (Limerick), Project Arts Centre (Dublin), Kunstbunka (Germany), Spacex Gallery (Exeter, UK), College des Irelandais (Paris), Limerick City Gallery (Limerick) and The Jerwood Gallery (London). She has worked on a number of high profile commissions, and has received many awards, from the Lorne (Slade School of Art) to British and Irish Arts Council. She has completed three recent International commissions; a new collaborative work for a Sculpture Biennale, Germany (2012); a public art commission for Washington DC Arts and Humanities Commission Centenary Cherry Blossom Festival (2012) for Golden Mountain, as part of the TULCA Contemporary Arts Festival in Galway, Ireland (2013) a commission for Objectif Exhibitions (2015) and a new commission for the Royal College of Art Dyson space (2016).

Connemara-based Brian Bourke is one of Ireland’s most significant artists and was born in Dublin in 1936. Bourke was educated at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and St Martin’s School of Art in London. In 1965, Bourke was chosen to represent Ireland at the Paris Biennale and the Lugano Exhibition of Graphics. He is a member of the RHA and was awarded the O’Malley Award from the Irish-American Cultural Institute in 1993, won the Arts Council portrait competition, the Munster and Leinster bank competition in 1966, and first prize in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art competition in 1967. Bourke is mainly known for his painting and drawings and his work hangs in many important collections and galleries throughout Europe.

Sarah Tynan is an Irish artist living and working in London & Dublin. She completed a BA in Painting at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (2009) and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (2012) Recent exhibitions include Dazed X Confused Emerging Artist Award, Royal Academy, London (2015); Lobby Part I & II,Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin (2015); Pavilion, Store, London; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Spike Island, Bristol and ICA, London (2014); Notes on an Autobiography, ASC Gallery, London (2014)

​Image credit: Sarah Tynan and Tamsin Snow, Pavilion, 2014 (courtesy of the artist)

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Artist Talk
Wednesday 20th April 2016, 2.15pm

Featuring artist Alice Maher

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)
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Alice Maher’s work touches on a wide range of subjects often reprising, challenging and expanding mythic and vernacular narratives. Her artistic practice spans painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, animation and video. The various art works and materials lend themselves to lateral, associative or enigmatic display, aided by her very particular attention to setting and context. Animated films expand on a lifelong devotion to the practice of drawing. Her first major solo show was at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1994. That same year she represented Ireland at the Sao Paolo biennale. In 2012 the Irish Museum of Modern Art presented a retrospective of the artists 30 year practice. ‘Becoming’ included many iconic works as well as a newly commissioned two screen film installation, ‘Cassandra’s Necklace’. Her work can be seen in many international collections including The Neuberger Museum, The Hammond Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MOMA, the British Museum and the Georges Pompidou Centre Paris.

For further information on the artist please log onto: http://alicemaher.com/
Image: Cassandra’s Necklace, Film Still, 2012

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Artist Talk
Wednesday 2nd March 2016, 2.15pm

Featuring artist Lee Welch

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design
(Carlow IT)

Lee Welch (IRL/USA) completed an MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and gained his BFA from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. He has received awards from the Arts Council, Culture Ireland, Dublin City Council and Fire Station Artists’ Studios.

He was recently awarded a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Welch’s work has been featured in numerous institutions including Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; John Jones Project Space, London; CCA, Derry; Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany; Museo de Arte Contemporneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) curated by Latitudes, Leon, Spain, Objectif Exhibitions curated by Raimundas Malasauskas, Antwerp and Project Arts Centre, Dublin. He currently is exhibiting in Catalyst Arts, Belfast and is co-director at Basic Space.

For further information on the artist please log onto: http://www.leewelch.com/

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Artist Talk
Wednesday 10th February 2016,1.15pm

Featuring artist Brian Maguire

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design
Carlow IT)

​Brian Maguire studied drawing and painting at the Dun Laoghaire School of Art, and fine art at the National College of Art and Design(NCAD) in Dublin. A gifted student and artist, Maguire was appointed Professor of the Fine Art faculty at NCAD, in 2000.

Brian Maguire’s expressionistic drawings and paintings (as well as his video, photography, and poster artworks) deal with themes of physical and political alienation. His focus on marginalized or disenfranchised groups has led him to work at a number of prisons, hospitals and other institutions in Ireland, Poland, and the USA, including: Mountjoy Jail, Dublin, Portaloise Jail, Spike Island, Co. Cork, Fort Mitchell Prison and Bayview Correction Center, New York. His recent paintings have also been inspired by American and world political events.

A former member of the Independent Artists Group, Maguire has exhibited extensively throughout Europe, America and Japan. He represented Ireland at the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal, and created the “Casa de Cultura” series based on people from that city’s slums. Maguire has also enjoyed a number of successful solo exhibitions, including Lincoln Gallery, Dublin (1981); Triskel Gallery, Cork (1982); Irish Pavilion, Leeuwarden, Netherlands (1990); Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2001); Fenton Gallery, Cork (2003). In 2000, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin hosted a major retrospective for Maguire, which travelled to the Crawford Arts Gallery in Cork and the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, Texas. Maguire also won the Irish-American Cultural Institute’s O’Malley Art Award in 1990.

Maguire’s paintings and other artworks are represented in collections including: the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hugh Lane Municipal Art Gallery in Dublin, University College Dublin, Office of Public Works (OPW), Crawford Municipal Gallery Cork, the Alvar Aalto Museum in Finland, and the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, Netherlands.

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Artist Talk
Tuesday 14th April 2015, 11am

Featuring artist Diana Copperwhite

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Diana Copperwhite is a painter based in Dublin and Berlin whose work is about painting first and foremost. Diana Copperwhite’s work deals primarily with memory; both the subjective and the collective. Her concern, though, is not the recreation of a specific image or moment, but the creation of something informed by the act of remembering; an act which, subject as it is to it’s own shifting vagaries, renders past instances as ephemeral, untrustworthy, constantly in flux, resulting in works which themselves perpetually shift; their images lyrical, ghostlike, ethereal, though often checked by a single element of solidity, a sharpness, the overall aim of which is to suggest an instance where “reality, memory and fantasy collide”.

Copperwhite completed a BA(hons.) degree in painting in NCAD and an MFA in European Fine Art in Winchester School of Art and Design, Barcelona. Her works are in collections of Irish Museum of Modern Art, Allied Irish Banks, Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Office of Public Works, Contemporary Irish Art Society, Bank of Ireland, Dublin Institute of Technology, Jefferson Smurfit, KPMG, Arthur Andersen Plc, International Red Cross Netherlands, Mariehamn Stadbiblioteque, Aland, Finland, The President of Ireland, Jean Cherqui, Paris and several private collections in Ireland, Belgium, Finland, France, America and UK.

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Artist Talk
Tuesday 3rd March 2015, 11am

Featuring artist Sarah Browne

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Sarah Browne’s practice includes exhibitions, public projects, publishing and critical writing and she also works collaboratively with Gareth Kennedy as Kennedy Browne. Her research-based practice implicitly addresses ‘the economy’ as the dominant metaphor for contemporary social and political relations. She is concerned with the creation or documentation of intentional economies and temporary communities, typically small-scale systems influenced by emotional affects. An interest in forms of non-market exchange such as gifting, subsistence, subsidies and poaching leads to the creation of particular bespoke objects for circulation and use to map existing but sometimes hidden social relations. This work is typically domestic in character, using technologies such as knitting, flower-pressing, letter-writing, carpet-knotting and film-making, and is often carried out with the participation of a ‘community’ where it is based, or creates a fictional or temporary ‘community’ for itself.

Recent exhibitions include The Peacock, Grazer Kunstverein, Austria; One Foot in the Real World, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Twentieth Century as Never Seen Before, Museo di Santa Giulia, Brescia (2013); How to Use Fool’s Gold, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2012); Second Burial at Le Blanc, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2011); Minimalism and Applied II, Daimler Contemporary, Berlin, and Unto This Last, Raven Row, London (both 2010). In 2009 she co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with Gareth Kennedy and Kennedy Browne. She currently lectures at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

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Artist Talk
Tuesday 4th November 2014, 11am

Featuring artists Mathilde Ganancia and Joey Bryniarska

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT) and Cow House Studios

Artists Mathilde Ganancia (France), Joey Bryniarska (UK) and Paul Gaffney (Ireland) are currently undertaking a residency at Cow House Studios. Situated within the rural tranquility of Rathnure, Co. Wexford, Cow House Studios offers a valuable support structure for emerging visual artists as well as introducing critically engaging contemporary work to the rural community. During their residency, these artists are given the time and space to develop a new body of work.

French artist Mathilde Ganancia lives and works in London. In 2013 she completed an MA at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France. Solo exhibitions include Sautes d’humR, DNSAP, Paris, 2013; and Soudain, DNAP, atelier Gauthier, Paris, 2011. She has participated in many group exhibitions including Chinese New YearArt curated by Cedric Christie, Q Park ArtLyst, London, UK; TEŠKO JE BITI… u vremenu (It is difficult to be…in the time), Prateći Umetnički, Belgrade, Serbia, 2013; Piquade d’humR, ENSBA , Paris, France, 2012. In 2013, she undertook a residency iat Rhizome Art Center with Winter Story, Lijiang, China.

Joey Bryniarska lives and works in London. She received a post-graduate diploma from the Royal Academy Schools in 2009. She was the recipient of a Spike Island Graduate Fellowship in 2005 and was awarded the Sainsbury Scholarship in Painting and Sculpture at the British School at Rome from 2009 – 2011. Recent exhibitions include Postbox Gallery (London, UK), Fold Gallery (London UK) and Hidde van Seggelen Gallery (London, UK). Joey has recently been awarded a NEARCH Fellowship at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastrict which will run from 2015 – 2017. She is currently an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London.

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Artist Talk
Tuesday 11th November 2014, 2pm

Featuring artist Paul Gaffney

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT) and Cow House Studios

Artist Paul Gaffney is currently undertaking a residency at Cow House Studios. Situated within the rural tranquility of Rathnure, Co. Wexford, Cow House Studios offers a valuable support structure for emerging visual artists as well as introducing critically engaging contemporary work to the rural community. During their residency, these artists are given the time and space to develop a new body of work.

Paul Gaffney is an Irish artist who is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in photography at the University of Ulster in Belfast.

His self-published book, We Make the Path by Walking, was nominated for the Photobook Award 2013 at the 6th International Photobook Festival in Kassel, Germany and shortlisted for the European Publishers Award for Photography 2013. The book was selected for several ‘Best Photobooks of 2013’ lists, including Photo-Eye and The British Journal of Photography.

We Make the Path by Walking has been presented as solo exhibitions at Oliver Sears Gallery (Dublin), Flowers Gallery (London), Ffotogallery (Cardiff) and PhotoIreland Festival 2013 (Dublin), and in several group shows in the United States, UK, South Africa, Ireland and Italy.

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Artist Talk
Saturday 29th November 2014, 2pm

Featuring artists Anne Hendrick, Aileen Murphy and Emma Roche in conversation with curator Paul Doran.

Patient Staring is one of our current exhibitons featuring artists, Anne Hendrick, Aileen Murphy and Emma Roche and curated by artist-as-curator, Paul Doran. The exhibition attempts to embrace each artist’s individual painting process and the visual risks applied throughout the production and eventual realisation.

Too often, the practice of painting will involve lengthy spells of planning and frequent hesitation infiltrated with self-reflexive interrogation. Here, the artist will then withdraw and begin a lengthy process of questioning before a period of intense production. Innumerable options are put forward through this creative process, and the challenge of distilling these thoughts prove to be the most daunting aspect of creating the work. At the outset for this exhibition, the artists came together to discuss their own individual thoughts around painting in an effort to clarify these processes, often viewed by many as a seemingly unattainable task.

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Saturday 28th June 2014, 2.00pm
Featuring artist Frank Abruzzese

Photographer Frank Abruzzese will discuss his exhibition Live Load, currently in-situ at Wexford Arts Centre.

Abruzzese’s work is process driven, and seeks to demonstrate photography’s power to reveal as much as it hides. His work is informed by interests in engineering and problem solving, new technologies, symmetry, science fiction, landmarks, repetition, traces and monuments. His working methods are often experimental, employing unorthodox film selection, exposure time and digital photographic techniques to transform often mundane subjects into something extraordinary, ambiguous or uncanny, and question photography’s role as a factual document.

Originally from Philadelphia, Frank obtained his Bachelors Degree in Moving Image Arts from the College of Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2000, and Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. He is the recipient of the Emerging Photographer of the Year award from San Francisco Magazine, and as a photographer exhibits internationally in galleries and universities. In 2007, he co-founded Cow House Studios, a progressive artist studio set in rural Wexford with his wife, artist Rosie O’Gorman.

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Thursday 3rd April 2014, 12.30pm
Featuring artist Niamh McCann

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

Niamh McCann’s diverse and playful practice, which includes sculpture, installation, painting and video, explores philosophical riddles/conundrums through seemingly random visual juxtapositions and spatial relationships, looking toward themes of travel, globalization and urbanization within very particular social and political contexts.

McCann is the recipient of various Arts Council awards, and residencies at Cemeti Arthouse, Indonesia; HIAP, International Artists’ Residency, Cable Factory, Helsinki, Finland, URRA Artist Residency, Finland, Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Ireland; and of Perspective and EV+A exhibition awards. Solo projects include: Insertions, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2012),Niamh McCann, The Void, Derry (2011), TiltShift, The City Gallery, The Hugh Lane (2010), HIAP Project Space, Finland, 2009, Purlieu, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin (2009), EME, Pallas Heights, Dublin (2005) and Total Eclipse of …, Planet 22, Geneva, Switzerland (2001). McCann is represented in the Irish Museum of Modern Art Collection; Limerick City Gallery Collection,Swansea City Council Collection; The London Institute Collection; Hiscox Collection, London.

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Thursday 8th April 2014, 12.45pm
Featuring artist James Merrigan

In association with Wexford Campus School of Art & Design (Carlow IT)

James Merrigan is an artist and art critic. As an art critic his main focus lies in writing and distributing art criticism outside of standard frameworks. From early on, psychoanalytic theory has informed the basis of his approach to art-making and conceptualising art practice. He is co-founding editor of of the printed publication Fugitive Papers [fugitivepapers.org] and founder of the exclusively online art criticism journal +billion_ [billionjournal.com]. In 2011 he was awarded the Dublin City Council Arts Office / VAI Visual Arts Writing Award (2011). He has been invited as a visiting lecturer to The National College of Art and Design, Dublin, The University of Ulster, and Trinity College, Dublin, where he taught a module on Psychoanalysis and Art for the MPhil in Psychoanalytic Studies. A book of his art criticism was published in October 2013 entitled Agents of Subjectivism. He is a member of AICA (The International Association of Art Critics).

Open to the public with no booking fee.

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