Quinn Sweeney

Bio

Quinn is an emerging artist working between Cork and Waterford. Her practice is multi-disciplinary and process-led. She completed her BA (Hon) Fine Art degree studies with a First Class Honours from MTU Crawford of Art and Design. Her series of work titled ‘Body Echoes’ was part of the Crawford College of Art and Design degree show ‘Second-hand Smoke’ in 2026 and was longlisted for the 2026 RDS Visual Artist Award. Alongside this, she was one of four students awarded Cork Arts Society’s Student of the Year 2026, received the Backwater Artists Network Membership and the MTU Arts Office STEAM Exhibition Award. She was also awarded the CCAD drawing residency for 2026-2027.

Artist Statement

My visual art practice is multi-disciplinary and process-led and challenges traditional ideas of sound and how it is visually represented. Works surface through embodied mixed media drawing, photography (both digital and analogue) and sound. While recently working on Fabriano paper, explorations have also consisted of up-cycling and reconstructing, collage and establishing a developing practice with the paper making process.

The audible world connects and informs but also invades and interferes, constantly revealing and concealing complex layers of relations in time and space. In a culture driven by data and machine intelligence, my practice explores the potential for knowledge and meaning in the unobserved sensory information through embodied drawing. To represent this, I use the paper surface as a state of potential transformation as like the body, it responds and remembers. Through adopting the characteristics of everyday sounds as they are experienced, work emerges from the unknown echoing the invisibility of the audible. Allowing fluid orientation, marks are deposited, responded to and changed, this expressing the bodily experience of interference, temporality and asymmetry. In a manner similar to sound which unfolds in time and space, visual conversations between layers narrate how this sensory information is not only lost but also revealed. Photography is employed throughout the process, stilling and flattening traces through time and exposure. This materially contrasts to the loud expression in drawing and working in the round.

Profile photo by by Joleen Cronin