The Sum and Its Parts

On Paperwork by Tom Doig

The work of Tom Doig is focused on collage, a medium arguably both arcane and contemporary. In Doig’s hands it is a definitively analogue medium; images selected from old reference books, instructional pamphlets and magazines found in second-hand shops and library sales; cut by hand from those pages and assembled into composite images with glue, or isolated like individual icons, to become suspended in blocks of hand-poured resin.

Conversely the idea of collage; disjointed, dislocated – often unrelated – images, speaks more to our technological moment than perhaps any other medium. Images are generated and consumed at an unprecedented rate often, in the case of an infinite scroll or a discover page, with jarringly incongruous subjects butted up against each other. The flipside of this incongruity is an algorithmic smoothing out, when the machine learns the taste of the user that one gets served up the same type of images over and over again. A slow, intuitive and handmade process acts as a resistance to this imposition of non-logic based on isolated data and instead celebrates a more personal constellation of interests and connections.

Categorisation of images suggests the work of a museum, but Doig’s selection of things doesn’t match with the motivation of those institutions to impose order and a worldview onto things. Instead, his works question and perhaps undermines the impulse of the museum. Much of his source material is drawn from the very things that his work questions; catalogues, encyclopaedias, resource books that act as a function of the “civilising” of the world into neat categories. Doig’s process of combing through resources found by effort or chance stands in contrast to this, although Doig practices a distinct form of taxonomy for his gleaning. In his studio stands a painted filing cabinet, in which source material is filed under headings:

Snakes.

Microscopic.

Cats.

Crowds.

Mushrooms.

Luxury.

Ruins.

Planets.

Isometric.

Retro tech.

Through this interrogation and reordering of images, Doig thinks about historical and contemporary allocation of value and consequently, power. The seemingly proliferation of images mirrors market-driven belief in infinite growth, that no matter how long we go on, there will be more and more to find and extract.  Doig’s process again stands in opposition to this, using methods and aesthetics associated with both Dada and DIY zine-making, not in order to make something raw and directly confrontational but rather something delicate, layered, whose critique is no less effective for being beautiful.

In elevating and repurposing formerly obsolete materials, Doig is giving them care and attention that result in new value through transformation. The critique of historical or contemporary hegemony remains but something else appears. The diamonds or gems on the wall represent luxury, scarcity, arbitrary value removed from context, cold and inert. But look closer and a whole world of teeming images is revealed, multifarious, complicated and overlapping.

Benjamin Stafford April 2026

Curiosity Killed The Cat, But Satisfaction Brought It Back: Animal as Totem within the Work of Michaela McCann

By Lara Quinn

Most people are familiar with the proverb, ‘curiosity killed the cat.’ A reprimand prescribed to individuals who pry or ask too many questions, it is a playful reproach that warns of the human propensity for speculation and curiosity. Ironically, what is most curious about this saying is that one seldom hears the proverb’s succeeding, second line, ‘but satisfaction brought it back’. This line grants the cat back one of its nine, precious lives, revealing and rationalising the innately human desire for knowledge.

From biblical myths of the primeval temptation to the personification of a cat, these myths and proverbs make clear to us that it is the satisfaction of tasting the fruit of knowledge that at once satiates us and compels us to take another bite. However, it is also made clear in these allegories that this process induces an irreversible transformation of the self, that ultimately compounds our appetite for curiosity with the development of the human psyche.

It is this proverb that emerging visual artist, Michaela McCann employs as the title of the central diptych within her recent solo exhibition, ‘Diverge’, at Backwater Artist Group’s Studio 12 Gallery. Upon entering the gallery space, the viewer is directly confronted by the two oil paintings, respectively titled, Curiosity Killed The Cat, and, Satisfaction Brought It Back. Epitomising the central themes McCann is investigating through this ambitious new body of work, these paintings associate the activation and fulfilment of one’s curiosity as an essential, archetypal process of growth, akin to the cycle of death and rebirth.

Referencing the proverb directly, the diptych portrays two cats, mirrored in pose yet inherently juxtaposed. Curiosity Killed The Cat, features the skeletal frame of a feline form. Its milky bones protruding from the guttural, red background against which it sits. It is undeniably a totem of death, indicative of both the historical past and a past version of oneself. Satisfaction Brought It Back, portrays what is seemingly the same cat in its more resolved state, coated in a replenished yet wrinkled layer of slackened skin that identifies the breed as a sphinx. Like the rings of an aged tree, the folds in the cat’s skin mark years of lived experience, manifesting physically the mental growth an individual endures throughout their life. The dichotomy that the proverb anchors upon is keenly exemplified through the mode of the diptych, which McCann further amplifies by mirroring both compositions in contrasting colours of red and blue.

Not only do these paintings explore themes of transformation and growth, but they also sustain McCann’s enduring interest in personal identity. However, diverging from the artist’s previous explorations of such subject matter, these paintings reveal a new and expanded focus of the Self that boldly rejects the representation of the figurative.

Instead, McCann harness iconographic devices of visual metaphor, specifically the personification of animals, along with more intuitive processes of painting, such as alla prima techniques that favour spontaneity, to portray what are ultimately self-portraits of the inner-self as opposed to capturing a physical likeness.

One can’t help but be reminded of the work of surrealist artist, Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011), when considering the use of animals as totems of identity. American, art historian, Whitney Chadwick (b. 1943), describes Carrington’s practice as ‘an art of sensibility rather than hallucination, one in which animal guides lead the way’,¹ in purposeful opposition against the sterile expectations of intellect and rationale that commanded many of the male-dominated art movements of the mid 20th century. She furthers this, stating,

‘Carrington’s animals identify the instinctual life with the forces of nature […] as symbolic intermediaries between the unconscious and the natural world’.²

Similarly to Carrington, McCann harnesses animals as a medium to explicate the unseen, unspoken processes of human nature, particularly those concerned with psychological transformation and growth. By representing these concepts through symbolic totems, such as a cat, the viewer is guided to look beyond the capacity of a physical reflection to access vicariously a symbolic representation of the self that conveys its ever-evolving cycles of identity.

In her essay, ’Beauty and/Is the Beast: Animal Symbology in the Work of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Leonor Fini’, American author, Georgiana M. M. Colvile reinforces the historical endurance of animals as symbolic tools for artists, writing that, ‘iconographic representations of both familiar animals and fabulous beasts are as old as human history’.³ From the thundering horses of Lascaux cave to the grinning hyena within Carrington’s ‘Self-Portrait’ (1938), McCann’s work is expanding upon a long established dialogue that ultimately evokes life’s most pertinent curiosity; who are we?

Chadwick negotiates representations of the self in relation to Surrealism, stating,

 ‘all Surrealist paintings are self-  portraits, their sources internal rather than external, their imagery indistinguishable from the structure and functioning of their creator’s minds, their goal self-knowledge’.⁴

This is notable when considered through a viewing of McCann’s work, who describes the premise of her practice as an exploration of the human condition. This exhibition in particular serves as a testimony of this pursuit. When producing this work, McCann rejected a reliance on external research and references, in favour of a more automatic mode of making that engages more directly with the unconscious, archetypal content unique to her experience and memory. Just as the image of a hyena naturally evolved from an imaginary memory of Carrington, referenced in her short-story ‘The Debutante’,

the animals that appear within McCann’s work, such as the curious cat, can therefore be considered resonant manifestations of her identity also.

Themes of identity have long transfixed the minds of artists for centuries if not millennia. Particularly evident in the last 200 years, amidst advancements in modern technology and our understanding of human psychology, the internal environment has become just as tangible as the external. From the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo, who found solace from her physical disabilities in the use of her body as a vessel to represent the much more significant experiences of her internal world, to the sensational surrealist works of Leonora Carrington, whose figurative dreamscapes capture the sensation of living, in all its absurdity and all its curiosities, more honestly than the traditional renderings of realism and classicism ever could. Artists have made it their business to make the unseen seen, exposing the hidden and often very personal psychology of the human condition that ultimately binds us all.

McCann’s work responds directly to these conversations, expanding dialogues of identity and the Self through a modern 21st century lens that reveals our individuality as well as our commonality. Using her own devices of symbolism and visual metaphor, McCann manifests, onto canvas, the inner workings of the human psyche, painting otherworldly scenes that are at once familiar and foreign. The artist’s evident technical skill in painting realism is challenged by the surreal representation of sensationalised, dream-like content which ultimately triggers the curiosity and wonder that bewitches us all.

Triptych of Forgotten Light

A speculative response to Sean Hanrahan’s In the Presence of Beings

By Sarah McAuliffe (National Gallery of Ireland)

The warning signs were always there; plastic bottles, cans, wrappers, wipes and tyres piled up in large towers on the shore of our small town, where I once built sandcastles. The foam of the sea touching my ankles, a distant memory. Soaring temperatures, scorched earth all round. Green gardens turned brown, flowers to dust. The idea that the world I inhabited would one day become inhospitable was not difficult to imagine, yet I could not fathom such a possibility either. Fear or shame, I suppose. A certain relief came in knowing I wouldn’t live to see the end, the Earth’s final reckoning. For now, life continues underground in Neoterris. Subterranean environments like this began as survival shelters, temporary measures in the face of resource wars and extreme weather systems. A necessary respite for the ozone, wounded from centuries of carbon emissions.

That was four decades ago.

Today, these provisional burrows have evolved into fully functioning civilizations. I was eighteen when the surface closed in 2078; old enough to remember the smell of rain on pavement, too young to understand extinction. Now, I am in my late fifties and the sun is a rumour.

Here, light is engineered; soft bioluminescent panels mimic dawn and dusk cycles. Clouds and stars are projected, sunsets simulated. A chorus of turbines and air circulators forms the soundtrack of the city. Divided into five concentric strata, the city revolves around a central axis referred to as the “spire”, a vast vertical artery that houses transit links, air filters, communication cables and cooling systems. The band closest to the surface of Neoterris, known as the Ascendant Ring is made up of exclusive residences, research labs and government facilities. The temperature is programmed to imitate a time when Earth had regular seasons, the light soft enough to trick you into hope. Most of the population live in the layer just below, the Civic Belt. Its districts spiral outward in hexagonal clusters, each self-sufficient. Here, you can access hydroponic farms, schools, community centres and residential towers. Level three, the Archive Circle is where you’ll find me most days. Dedicated to arts and culture, the city’s museum, library and data vaults are located there. Artificial humidity is carefully controlled to preserve relics of a world that now exists only in memory and code. Below this lies the Machinery Loop, the industrial underbelly of Neoterris, where generators, aquifers and geothermal loops are constantly working to maintain its infrastructure.

The deeper you go, the city becomes more animated. The walls exhale warmth; the vibration of generators pulses like a heartbeat. Sometimes, when the ventilation currents shift you smell the faintest trace of pine resin or salt air. We are told its just chemical maintenance, but the older citizens, those whose memories of the surface are most palpable, call it “Earth’s breath”. The lowest level, the Abyss is rarely referred to. In fact, depending on who you ask it doesn’t exist at all. It is made up of a network of uncharted tunnels where early climate refugees settled before the city’s expansion plans caught up. Today, its inhabitants have been ostracised, denigrated as outcasts. They talk of the land above as if we can return someday. Having rejected neural integration, they are condemned to the void. Their lights are dim, their air thin. But their freedom is absolute.

I remember when I was a young girl seeking shade in the Memorial Art Museum, browsing its galleries and corridors for hours. With objects dating as far back as the 1500s, it felt like I made a new discovery every time I visited; one week it was a shield decorated with the head of Medusa from the 17^th century, the next it was an Expressionist painting capturing the artist’s sense of dislocation and isolation in the digital age. My most vivid memories of life above ground are of my visits to the museum. Although a lot was lost in the transfer to the deep, my love of art stayed with me; something physically intangible, yet so substantial.

The Memorial Art Museum felt like a scared space, preserving the past, while embracing progression. Light poured through a glass roof, footsteps and whispers echoed in the galleries. The air smelled of varnish and the perfume of passing visitors. I was always resisting the urge to touch the thick drips of paint on canvas, the polished stone sculptures; to feel something of the artist’s process. If I could just enter the picture space for a moment, I thought. The longing to escape the world outside was overwhelming. I guess I got my wish; whisked away from reality to a place that people over half a century earlier would have never imagined.

Now I visit the Aurix, our version of a museum in the underground world. Here, there are no grand halls, everything is compact, hushed, efficient. There is no sunlight to illuminate the galleries – modular pods that can hold a few visitors at a time – only artificial fluorescence. Visitors move in slow procession, guided by AI docents, eyeing objects from the past and those made by artists, thinkers and designers of Neoterris over the last forty years. As the purported intention was to one day return to the surface, only so much was transported here and filling the gaps of what is missing will decline as human memory fades. Of course, there are books and data records, but to be in the physical presence of an artwork, to feel its aura is something that cannot be read, researched or imitated.

Last month, I visited Gallery 12, and I’ve been keeping a secret ever since.

A new projection had been programmed, a triptych of a kind I had never witnessed before in the Aurix. It triggered a flashback to one of my many trips to the Memorial Art Museum. I must have been about eight years old at the time. I was standing in one of the rooms of 18^th Century Europe, gazing at a cloud of oval canvases in gilt frames, some depicting the likenesses of dignitaries, royals and intellectuals, and others of dreamy landscapes and figures in lavish costumes.

Before me were three rectangular panels suspended in the blacked-out room. They glowed with a subdued radiance, their gilded surfaces recalling the warmth of the sun. The central motif – an elongated oval – appeared in each frame as an endless void. Within these apertures drift luminescent ellipses, soft-edged and weightless, like organisms suspended in fluid or orbiting satellites. In the panel on the left, pale blue particles splinter the gold frame, hovering between emergence and retreat. A tarnished solar orb in its corner suggests the last vestige of daylight over Earth’s horizon. At its elliptical centre two forms, resembling a moon dipping below a pond of reflected twilight, float against dense veils of reds, browns and greens, reminiscent of a distant woodland. The central panel is more complex – a constellation of nested discs glide into the depths of a shadowy chasm; like a coded record of human departure from Earth’s surface, or an inward gaze, consciousness folding into itself. A pool evoking an algae lake occupies the base of the oval. It resists the magnetic force inhaling the atoms above. In the right panel, passages of blues, purples and greens levitate above a deep burgundy ground; every few seconds light ripples through them. The orb in the frame of the first panel is dwindling, the last of its light fading into a sphere beyond human vision. It has moved from the top of the left panel to the bottom right as if it turning on an axis. The letters X and H can just about be made out in the upper right corner, like the imprint of an artist. Yet, the maker’s identity feels as unknown as the many people who remained on the surface, now largely forgotten, consigned to the past.

Floating in the background was a panel of a different kind, less solid and constantly in flux; intersecting strokes of colour – blue, green pink – flashed across the room. It threw out shapes of varying scales, long enough to catch a glimpse of them before blinking, too quick to commit to visual memory. Gold particles exploded into space, falling around me like a meteor shower. Its crescendo came with the weaving of its forms into something three-dimensional, a sculpture that landed on the gallery floor, before it faded away a few moments later, folding back into its luminous source. It resembled the torso twist of a figure in contrapposto, rendered in hard edges rather than soft curves and it spiralled like a strand of DNA.

Together, these works assert themselves into the orbit of the viewer. The objects in the Aurix are usually described as passive, programmed to be looked at, not engaged with. But these pieces abound with a distinct dynamism that invites interaction.

As I turned to leave the room, I saw the central panel flicker. Something in me stirred, a vibration along the base of my skull. Could it sense me? I was observing it, and it was observing me, it seemed. My childhood impulse to reach out and touch the artwork came over me. The museum’s AI must have detected this and cautioned me to stand back, explaining that its interactive code had not yet been fully neutralised. I nodded and continued anyway. The surface was warm; it felt alive. For a moment, I thought I heard something, wind maybe. My fingers sank in, the room dissolved. All of a sudden, I was standing on grass, real grass, not some kind of reproduced texture. Soft, uneven, tickling the soles of my feet, it rolled out into a vast expanse before me. The temperature felt different to what I had ever experienced before; it was mild, pleasant even. Clouds floated like ships above me, their edges burning gold from the sunlight beyond them. The sound of waves crashing in the distance was interspersed with birdsong. It pierced something in me that I didn’t know was still there. I felt, small and infinite all at once. I was part of this landscape and it was part of me.

I was unmonitored, free.

For the first time in years, I felt something that couldn’t be calculated, transmitted or uploaded; longing and awe tinged with bewilderment and responsibility. I wondered if this is how the figure in Casper David Friedrich’s Woman before the Rising or Setting Sun (ca. 1818–24) felt standing before a radiant landscape; a transcendent moment that somehow felt personal, like life’s journey was being laid out before her. I’d never known of the sublime beyond the definitions I encountered in the Memorial Art Museum. Now, I felt I had tasted it. I bathed in a light that had long been forgotten, I breathed in air that was so fresh, it was dream-like.

Then, the ground shifted and the scene before me fragmented. I fell back through sound and light into the gallery. How long had I been gone? Couldn’t have been more than mere seconds, I thought. The surface of the panel was now cool, no longer porous. A voice murmured through my neural link: “Visitor 24 –S92. Interface protocol breached. Sensory contact prohibited.”

I stared at the triptych, still glowing softly. I realised then that each oval was a portal, not into space, but into time, into impressions of Earth before civilisation started to collapse. Figments of memory stored in light and pigment, waiting for someone to complete the circuit. Perhaps, this was the artist’s plea for action before it was too late, a call that was not heeded. But what of Earth now, after its prolonged intermission? Is there a chance it could feel this way again?

I have been visiting this exhibit ever since. Just yesterday, a glitch in the rightmost panel caught my eye. As I stepped before it I could see a faint reflection that wasn’t mine; someone standing in what looked like a studio, the kind I’ve seen in archived digital files in the library. Who could it be? The artwork’s maker, possibly. The label reveals nothing more than the triptych’s inscription – X.H. – and the year 2051.

I often wonder if other visitors have experienced this. I can hardly be the only one who’s been seized by the aura of this artwork. If so, why me?

I think my next visit will be to a friend in the Abyss. Older than me, with memories more vivid and earlier than mine, he has long balked at any talk of the possibility of regeneration on the surface for fear of the depths that lie beyond the already dark tier he occupies. But now, I have felt the air, I have touched the damp earth. His secrets are mine. Part of me is still in that verdant meadow. Perhaps that is the purpose of the exhibit; not to remind us of what we’ve lost, but to give us a chance to return.

I can’t go back to a life of imitation and surveillance so, for now, I’ll go down. 

Encounters. This is how it all begins.

Dr. Loïc Bourdeau

Art & Humanities Associate Dean for Research and Engagement

Maynooth University

I met Pauline Keena thanks to a colleague at Maynooth University, through her interest in making her work available in academic settings, searching for a collaboration that might help extend the scope of her work and bring a different understanding to it. Yet if collaboration often implies explanation, here it has been the reverse. It is not me clarifying her practice as an academic; it is me, an academic, learning from her. My work requires that I arrive with five-year plans and strategic visions; Pauline arrives with, in her own words, “a vague sensation of things.” I have tried to channel that phrase, but the truth is, I do not need to try. When I encounter her art, the sensations overtake me. This is the rhythm of our work together within the Medical Humanities cluster I co-lead in Maynooth’s Arts and Humanities Institute. I come from the side of narrative medicine, of motherhood studies, of literary studies. Pauline comes from the side of material practice, of threads, clamps, surfaces, drawings, fragments. Together, we create a space where matter and narrative, remains and words, speak back and forth.

Pauline’s tapestry is the work I cannot meet without my body responding first: an intake of breath, a tightening in the chest, a sudden stillness. For every clamp, a child. I saw it unfinished in her studio, and the visceral shock was immediate. It is a work about what remains. From the remains, she makes this thing. That making allows us to approach the unspeakable; not to solve it, not to close it off, but to let it be spoken.

This insistence on remains echoes another of my own encounters: with French writer Camille Laurens and her 1995 book, Philippe, which recounts the loss of her newborn son. Working with Camille and translating her book has been, to an extent, another linguistic exercise as we navigate different languages, different meanings, different experiences. It is also a commitment, born of a visceral reaction. In Laurens’s prose, maternal loss is not described; it is lived on the page. The book refuses consolation and insists instead on recognition. “Every mirror shows me my dead son; every mirror shows me my son and my own death,” Laurens writes. Each page of the book shows us her dead son, her face, and the system that allowed for death to happen. But it also shows us how literature gives life and holds space. Camille finishes her book with the following:

Every writer has an impossible sentence. For a long time, my impossible sentence began with I. … Until now, I always found it unthinkable—or rather, impracticable—to write I in a text destined for publication, to be made public. I is for me the pronoun of intimacy, it belongs only in love letters.

I write to say I love you. I scream because you did not scream, I write so that your unsounded cry might be heard—why did you not cry, Philippe, you who lived so strongly in my darkness? I write to loosen this pain of love, I love you, Philippe, I love you, I scream so that you may scream, I write so that you may live. Here lies Philippe Mézières. What no reality can ever do, words can. Philippe is dead, long live Philippe. Weep, you who read, weep: let your tears draw him out of nothingness.

Camille’s work operates at a threshold between presence and absence. It creates meaning from that which overwhelms language. Pauline’s work does that too; it creates form from the ineffable. In both cases—Laurens’s words, Keena’s materials—the encounter is what transforms. Neither text nor textile asks to be understood in the usual sense; they demand presence. They place us before grief, before remains, before that which is unbearable but also undeniable.

Art calls for hospitality. During my residency with Camille last May at the Children’s Hospital in Bordeaux, we led a workshop with a group of young paediatricians; our goal is to foster empathy and showcase the importance of perspective in care and the importance to listen to stories. To begin the session, I thanked them for welcoming us into their hospital and allowed myself a brief etymological detour. The word hospital comes from the Latin hospes, which also gives us hospitality. It carries a double meaning: hospes refers both to the one who receives—the host—and the one who is received—the guest.         

A hospital, then, is not only a place of care but also, potentially, a place of hospitality. Yet the word already contains a tension. As Jacques Derrida reminds us, echoing Albert Camus, “the host is hostage to the guest he holds hostage.” The roles of guest and host are constantly shifting. For Derrida, true hospitality means inventing a space of encounter as a unique event—something beyond pre-existing norms, beyond institutional frameworks—something almost poetic. To welcome, in that sense, is not to follow a protocol; it is to open oneself to the unknown, to accept being transformed by the other.

If philosophy helps us understand the conditions of hospitality, literature—and the lived experience of care—allow us to feel its texture. Philosopher Sara Cohen Shabot, drawing on Simone de Beauvoir, proposes that we rethink childbirth, and more broadly the embodied experience of care, through vulnerability, dependence, and co-presence. She reminds us that childbirth is not an isolated act, but a relational, inter-corporeal process. To give birth, she writes, is to be with others—to be vulnerable before others, to depend on others. This is not weakness, but an ontological condition: a fundamental fact of human existence that speaks to how we inhabit the world, always in relation to others. From there, the ethics of care cannot be separated from a politics of care—one that recognises our interdependence.

Where Shabot helps us think about the structure of care, literature allows us to experience its ruptures. In the French novel by Eliette Abecassis, Un heureux événement, the birthing narrator is reduced to her medicalised, painful body. When she reaches out to the midwife for support, the midwife says: “I’d prefer that you not touch me.” The story becomes a scene of counter-hospitality: the hospital no longer welcomes—it rejects. That rejection, that inability to feel received in a place meant for care, echoes another idea in Shabot’s philosophy: the erasure of trauma. The narrator asks: why did no one explain what was happening? Why does such a foundational experience disappear so quickly? Perhaps this is why women rarely speak about it, or feel shame when they do.    

Other literary voices, like Annie Ernaux’s in L’Événement, remind us that the spaces of care—waiting rooms, clinics—are also spaces of encounter, fragile and revealing. Ernaux writes:

The waiting room is divided into two adjoining boxes. I chose the one closest to the doctor’s door, the one with the most people. I started correcting the papers I had brought. Just after me, a very young girl, blond, with long hair, handed in her number… Waiting already, seated far apart, were a man in his thirties, fashionably dressed, slightly balding; a young Black man with a Walkman; a man in his fifties… collapsed in his seat… Then a couple: she’s wearing shorts, visibly pregnant; he’s wearing a suit and tie.

If you know her novel about abortion before it was legal in France, you can see that this is not a dramatic or violent scene, but a moment of quiet observation—an ordinary wait that becomes, in Ernaux’s hands, a moment of existential intensity. Each body carries its own story, its own fear, its own inequality. The waiting room becomes more than a functional space; it becomes a human tableau, charged with emotion, proximity, and silence. Ernaux shows us that hospitality is not only about opening doors—it’s also about how we wait together. About whether there is space for recognition, for witnessing, for co-presence.

And this brings me, quite naturally, to the art gallery—the space we inhabited earlier. Like the hospital or the waiting room, the gallery is also an institution, framed by rules, protocols, and expectations. But it is also a space of genuine hospitality: a place that welcomes vulnerability, that receives not only artworks but also the emotions, memories, and traces of care that visitors bring with them.

In Pauline Keena’s work, I find precisely that kind of hospitality. Her art invites us in without judgment or instruction. It doesn’t tell us what to think or feel; it gives us space to feel. Each piece opens a quiet, generous encounter—with fragility, with tenderness, with what remains unsaid. Like Ernaux’s waiting room, Pauline’s installations are spaces of presence—where bodies, memories, and emotions coexist without hierarchy.

In that sense, Pauline’s work and the narrative medicine workshops I facilitate with healthcare professionals share something essential: both create spaces where listening, witnessing, and presence become acts of care. Both remind us that to welcome is not simply to open a door, but to allow ourselves to be transformed by what enters.

Perhaps that is the ethical and poetic task of all spaces of encounter—hospitals, clinics, waiting rooms, galleries: to host without preconception, to welcome what unsettles, what exceeds, what doesn’t fit. To accept not understanding everything, not controlling everything. To welcome ambiguity.

*

Pauline’s art is not about something. It is the thing itself.
This is not representation. It is inscription.

Pauline’s practice builds through repetition: stitching, mending, packing, giving the work the years it needs. It is slow work, necessary work. “Proactive, embodied knowledge,” she calls it. Not knowledge as in a statement, but knowledge as in a practice of staying with what is otherwise unstayable. It recalls the laundries, the hidden stitching rooms of Irish history, it etches the past into our collective consciousness, but it also resonates with daily experiences of maternal loss.

*

Her art refuses neat closure.

This is where the arts, I believe, do what no other domain can. Medicine diagnoses, law adjudicates, policy regulates. All of these are necessary. But only art creates conditions for us to remain with contradiction and ambiguity, to dwell in questions without rushing to answers, to hold loss without erasing it.

In narrative medicine workshops, we often say that stories do not stand next to care—they sit inside it. In clinics, as in classrooms, I have seen how a single page or a single object can shift everything: the gaze, the question, the sense of what matters. Pauline’s art extends this truth. It is not a supplement to care; it is care. It reminds us that attention itself is an ethical practice.

*

Attention is our first instrument.
Art is a practice of care.
The clamps, the fabrics, the fragments of history that appear in Pauline’s work are not merely materials—they are carriers of memory. They recall the unseen, the unspoken, the gestures of care and endurance that persist across time. Pauline’s art listens to these traces, not to expose or accuse, but to transform them into spaces of remembrance, tenderness, and repair.

*

Her art does the remembering.
It remembers with us, and sometimes for us.

This, too, links her work to Laurens’s, which insists on writing her son’s life which official documents abbreviated into DCD—deceased. A shorthand that erases. A shorthand that kills again. Laurens resists by expanding the abbreviation into story, into testimony, into insistence. Pauline resists by turning clamps into tapestry, fragments into fabric. Both works convert what remains into what can remain, into something we can return to, hold, and hold with. In the Medical Humanities, we often ask: how can the humanities contribute to health and care without being reduced to “communication tools” or “soft skills”? Pauline’s practice offers a clear answer. The arts are not accessories to justice; they are rehearsal rooms for it. They give us forms in which to test attention, practice recognition and sustain presence.

Art does not cure grief; it dignifies it.
Art does not erase the past; it gives the past a future.

*

This is why I am grateful to be in dialogue with Pauline. As an academic, I measure time in grant cycles, in teaching loads, in research outputs. But Pauline’s “vague sensation of things” unsettles that rhythm. It reminds me that sensation precedes strategy, that the body registers what the mind cannot yet articulate, that grief demands not vision but presence.

And perhaps this is the most important lesson her work teaches us: that what remains—fragments, instruments, threads, sensations—can be the ground for making again. The work is not about closure, but about continuing. Not about explaining, but about holding. Not about the past, but about relation.

What is gone is not nothing.
What remains can be remade.
And what is remade can remake us.

https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/faculty-arts-humanities/our-people/lo-c-bourdeau

‘Exploring the Power of Story-Telling in the Work of Ailbhe Reilly-Tuite’
Written by Lara Quinn

American author and professor in comparative mythology, Joseph Campbell (1904 – 1987, New York), once said,

‘What I think, is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfilment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss’.^[1]

Campbell became widely renowned for his theory of the hero’s journey or monomyth which he first explored in his major publication titled, ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ (1949). The monomyth, he describes, is a template devised to map the narrative arc that a heroic protagonist embarks upon in classical myth and legend.^[2] Campbell breaks it down into 17 stages, within which, the hero discovers his own shortcomings in the face of a ‘great ordeal’, undergoes a major transformation to overcome the peril, known as apotheosis, before eventually returning to his old life forever changed by the journey he just made.

Within their visual art practice, emerging artist, Ailbhe Reilly-Tuite demonstrates their own iteration of a monomyth, using drawing, animation, sound and installation to establish the chapters of what they define as life’s great adventure. In contrast to the calculated, theoretical writings of Campbell, Reilly-Tuite’s work is richly intuitive and instinctual, exemplifying a monomyth and its stages in the very development of their practice and exhibitions. From immersive sound compositions, innovative curatorial devices to the invitation for viewers to become active participants in the making of the work, Reilly-Tuite’s practice harnesses the gallery space as a tool to involve the viewer in playful engagement with the art, not exclude them through the didactic traditions of passive viewing.

These components of Reilly-Tuite’s practice are highlighted in their majorly successful, interactive artwork titled, Dreamscape, made as a part of their BA Degree Show at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design (2024) and later exhibited in the Laneway Gallery as a part of the Cork Fringe Festival (2025). Upon a large frame of stretched canvas, viewers were invited to trace the image of one of Reilly-Tuite’s elaborate drawings, guided by a projection of the artist’s hand-drawn, stop-motion animation which features one of their many invented characters. In this case, it is a black, amorphous droplet, like an accidental splash of paint suddenly come to life, that traverses through the terrain of Reilly-Tuite’s Dreamscape. The projection seamlessly interacts with the drawing’s composition, directing the viewer’s hand as they trace the lines of the artist’s marks. In their participation, the viewer subsequently evolves from the role of passive onlooker to active participant in the artist’s process.

For Reilly-Tuite, this artwork represents the cyclical journey of death and rebirth, a narrative demonstrated within the artwork through acts of intentional repetition. With every participant that traces over the artist’s drawing, the journey begins and ends anew, again and again. Throughout the duration of its display, the artwork remains in a liminal state of extended transformation, evoking both the Sisyphean nature of the human condition as well as the fleeting, transience of our time. However, the playfulness of the artwork’s interactive devices along with its vibrant aesthetic juxtaposes these more sombre sentiments, preserving vitality within the work while seemingly mirroring the general ignorance of one’s own perceived mortality amidst daily mundanities. Repeatedly tracing the path of this journey in the literal re-tracing of this multi-layered drawing, we are reminded of a sense of companionship in our shared experience of the human condition that perhaps even trumps our fear of it.

When researching for this project, Reilly-Tuite drew from both their personal memories as well as their keen interest in Irish folklore. Rooted in the ruins of Ireland’s ancient, heritage site, Loughcrew in co. Meath, Reilly-Tuite found the inspiration they needed. Not only is the site’s neolithic burial chamber a landmark of major significance within Irish history, containing some of the country’s most remarkable examples of neolithic art to date,^[3] but it is also more personally a site of sentimental value for the artist.

Originally from co. Meath, Reilly-Tuite visited Loughcrew often throughout their childhood, hiking the site’s steep hills with their family. Within their work, the cacophony of ancient carvings preserved at Loughcrew have been rearranged to compose a visual language with which Reilly-Tuite can communicate the narratives most fervent to them in their art. Diamonds come to represent entities, zigzags denote a method of counting while curved lines can mark the boundaries of ecosystems. The ancient symbols, whose meanings we can no longer fully ascertain, are reprised within Reilly-Tuite’s work, in yet another demonstration of the death and rebirth cycle. It is through this process that the ancient landscape of Ireland becomes a reimagined Dreamscape of the artist.

When it came time to develop this research into physical making, Reilly-Tuite found resolution in the mediums of animation, film and sound. As the recipient of the Backwater Artists Moving-Image Bursary (2024), they have continued to work with these mediums throughout their practice since. For them, moving-image is the visual art form that most closely emulates music. This is largely due to the fact it is a durational process, which Reilly-Tuite feels echoes the capacity that music possesses to transport an individual on a journey as opposed to a destination, as is the case with a finished piece. Music as inspiration to produce visual art isn’t something new for Reilly-Tuite. From learning the piano as a young child, the influence of their father’s musicality, their early years at Crawford College attempting to draw music in their own practice along with their involvement with the ensemble, The Orchestra of Disquiet, Reilly-Tuite has long blurred the lines between art that is seen and art that is heard. By combining drawing with moving-image in the production of their stop-motion animations, the artist discovered an art-form which simultaneously captures the evocative gestures of mark-making through a medium that still maintains the process of making as paramount.

Using Dreamscape as an overarching story map, Reilly-Tuite’s subsequent exhibitions have examined specific stages of the journey it narrates. This is evident in the artist’s two most recent solo shows: ‘In the Well’, exhibited at the Lavit Gallery from July 3rd to July 26th, 2025, and ‘You can call it an Adventure (if something goes wrong)’, exhibited at Backwater Artist Group’s Studio 12 Gallery from September 5th to October 3rd, 2025. Where ‘In the Well’ focused on a period of dormancy and preservation within the greater journey of Dreamscape, the exhibition ‘You can call it an Adventure (if something goes wrong)’, represents the hopefulness of a new beginning that follows.

Examining familiar paths the artist frequented over the past year, specifically from their time spent living in rural Donegal, ‘You can call it an Adventure (if something goes wrong)’ aims to consolidate the conflicting feelings which arise when beginning something anew. Similarly to Reilly-Tuite’s layering of drawings in Dreamscape, the artist layers their many memories of walking these rural paths to create a unique reimagining of the experience that is focused more on capturing the sensation of undertaking this journey as opposed to a true rendering of its route. The gestural markings of their drawings, which delineate the path from the sea and the flowers from the grass, prioritise the representation of the blowing breeze and the strides between steps. Every frame comes to represent each of these steps taken, as the viewer is guided along this symbolic path, the memories of which harbour incitement for future adventure.

Again, Reilly-Tuite uses stop-motion animation to convey the theme of journeying, evident in the production of their animated film titled, Grassy Path. However, unlike the vibrancy of Dreamscape, this work is made without the use of colour. In fact, the entire exhibition is monochromatic except for a single wall painted a dark, forest green, serving to juxtapose the brightness of the gallery space. This is an intentional mechanism employed by the artist to preserve the viewer’s focus solely for the light of the space and the movement of the Grassy Path animation. For Reilly-Tuite, these are essential themes within this body of work, representative of the inherent urge to move towards the light after a period of dormancy.

A sound composition further amplified the sensation of movement in the gallery, played back and forth between two speakers on either side of the projected animation. It included recordings captured during the artist’s walks in Donegal amongst journeys to other cities, such as the sound of a bus on the way to Leap, the hectic noises of Connolly station along with the intimate chatter of a friend’s car radio. Some of the sounds are symbolic, including the creaking gate which, for Reilly-Tuite, signals the introduction of a new sound to the composition, as if passing through the gated threshold that separates one place from another.

The arrangement of the speakers orchestrates the sound so as to mimic the movement of the viewer as they navigate through the space. 17 strips of drawings, each titled a second in the grass accordingly, hang from the gallery ceiling, carving an anti-clockwise, spiral path through which people are encouraged to walk. Each strip contains 12 individual drawings which together amount to the 204 frames that were made to create the stop-motion animation, Grassy Path. The significance of the number 17 in Reilly-Tuite’s work is notable when compared to the aforementioned writings of Joseph Campbell, whose theory of the monomyth similarly composed of 17 individual stages. For Reilly-Tuite however, the number 17 is specifically used for its reverence in Irish folklore, representing a sacred number due to its repeated references throughout Irish myths and legends.

According to Campbell, one of the purposes of the myth is ‘to carry the individual through the stages of one’s life’.^[4] They are not historical stories, but archetypal narratives which have the capacity to incite deep resonance and subsequent action in the viewer or listener. Visual art that draws from myth and legend has the capacity to convey this archetypal content in an altogether more visceral experience due to the viewer’s sense of autonomy in understanding the art for and by themselves.

This proposition is supported by author, Leonard Shlain (1937 – 2009, Michigan) in his book, ‘Art and Physics’, where he proposes that the conception of thought is often, but not exclusively, preceded by the act of looking.^[5] In other words, visual art can be considered one of the principal instigators for inspiring new waves of thought in an individual or generation of people.^[6] Reilly-Tuite demonstrates this in their work, conveying deeply profound themes through art that is accessible, playful and imperfectly human, all the while subverting the traditional experience of viewing art by inviting the viewer to participate in the journey for themselves.

Lara Quinn is a Cork-based artist and writer. She holds a BA in Fine Art from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design (2024) with prior education studying the History of Art at University College Cork. Her work has been reviewed in the Irish Arts Review, Visual Artists News-Sheet and the Irish Examiner. Quinn’s awards include the Agility Award (2025), Student of the Year Award (2024) and Best Thesis Prize (2024) to name a few.

Ailbhe Reilly-Tuite is an interdisciplinary artist based in Cork. They graduated from BA Fine Art in Crawford in 2024. Their work explores imaginary realms through drawing, bookmaking, moving image, and sound. They hope to create artworks which welcome others into playful and contemplative spaces, focusing on drawing as an intrinsic tool for communication. 

Backwater Artists Group Moving Image Bursary is awarded to a graduating artist from MTU Crawford College of Art & Design, who demonstrates talent and ambition in their work practice. The award includes a free studio space for 6 months, a solo exhibition with associated supports, including an artist’s fee and mentorship by a relevant art professional. In 2024/2025 Ailbhe has been mentored by Anthony Murphy. Backwater Artists Group Moving Image Bursary is in partnership with Cork Film Centre and MTU Crawford College of Art & Design. 

[1] Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, (California: New World Library, 2004), 133.

[2] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, (New Jersey: Princeton Press, 2004), 23.

[3] Frank Prendergast, ‘The Loughcrew Hills and Passage Tomb Complex’, B. Stefanini and G.M. Glynn (Eds), Field Guide No.29 – North Meath, (Dublin: Arrow Technological University, 2011), 49.

[4] Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, (California: New World Library, 2004), 112.

[5] Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light, (New York: William Morrow
and Company Inc., 1991), 19.

[6] Ibid.

elsewhere
CIT Wandesford Quay and Elizabeth Fort, Cork

elsewhere was an expansive and ambitious group show, thoughtfully curated by Helen Farrell, that included work by selected members of the Backwater Artists Studios, in Cork. [1] In choosing ‘elsewhere’ as a title, Farrell devised a theme that was both elastic and evasive, allowing ideas of location or place to be summoned, but also endlessly deferred or displaced. Farrell invited participating artists to respond to one of a range of specific sites in the CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery and the nearby Elizabeth Fort. This choice of spaces offered the artists some compelling opportunities to either intervene within the physical space of the gallery or to respond to the warren of buildings, walls, and shelters within the fort. elsewhere also extended this invitation to viewers, prompting them move through the various locations of the show as its spilled out of the gallery.

First constructed in 1601, Elizabeth Fort has been in continuous use by various occupants until its closure in 2013. As a result, its massive walls contain an intriguing mix of environments – from domestic accommodation to a former Garda Station and training centre, as well as the elevated outlook of the northwest parapet and an air raid shelter. As diverse exhibition site, it set the viewer on a scavenger hunt, compelling viewers to roam up and down stairs, in an out of bedrooms and bathrooms, to push open doors, and peer into cupboards. These spaces were occupied with an impressively light touch: the homely decay of the bedrooms and kitchens were largely untouched, with artworks sitting comfortably amid the peeling wallpaper and chipped tiles. Some of the artists chose to respond directly to these locations and their distinct atmospheres. Tracy White Fitzgerald’s tiny paintings, dotted across the lumpy woodchip of a small bedroom, reproduced fragments of old wallpaper or found photographs. Downstairs in a gently mouldering sitting room, Jo Kelley’s surreally dÈtourned tchotchkes offered moments of mischievous surprise: ceramic birds with bizarrely elongated beaks; tiny handmade cups, wonky and childlike, pepper the window sills and shelves. In the purple painted kitchen, Peter Martin’s pop-inflected light boxes reproduced family photos in etched and painted glass.

Upstairs in an old training room, Darn Thorn presented elegantly sculptural slide projection and audiotape installation that evoked an elusive narrative set in an unknown location, and in doing so he treated the theme of ‘elsewhere’ in a more abstract manner. The magnetic tape was staked out across the carpet forming a long triangle as it passed through the reel-to-reel player, while the intermittently changing slides showed scrubby, deserted shorelines. Johnny Bugler’s deeply affective intervention in the complex of rooms that make up the air raid shelter played a 1942 BBC recording of nightingales in a Surrey wood, which unexpectedly captured the sound of departing Lancaster bombers. Beyond, in a profoundly dark concrete room, a hallucinatory arrangement of misshapen bubbles hung still and blue – empty sea urchin shells, lit from above. The installation was lyrical and poignant but steered clear of sentimentality.

Meanwhile in Wandesford Quay, Luke Sisk reacted to the idea of location in a more literal way. His gracefully minimal ceramics were made from clay rehydrated with water collected from various points along the River Lee, in Cork; the surface of each small vessel was imprinted with textures from each site. Farrell ably choreographed the largest space of the gallery – Sisk’s delicate work was well positioned next to the Wandesford’s expanse of windows, allowing the visitor to pick up on the intricacies of surface texture. The array of small objects was balanced by Éilish Ni Fhaoláin’s suspended scroll, which was illustrated with a comically stretched sweeping brush and draped across the full length of a thin extended table. The whole arrangement had the appearance of a domestic chore gone awry.

The gallery offered more challenging and atmospheric locations than many white cube spaces; its twin-barrel vaults were usefully dark for video projection, but for elsewhere had been cleverly co-opted as sites for a collaborative drawing and sculptural installation by Cassandra and Megan Eustace. The dim light of the inner vault allowed the artists to create a compelling optical illusion, where faint bands of light seem to hover and pulsate. In the outer vault, a sheaf of paper layered with expressively drawn outstretched arms draped over a bar, seemed to capture or register motion, recalling Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912).

Within the shifting cultural landscape of Cork, the most recent upheaval being the dispersal and rehoming of Sample Studios, the Backwater Artists Group has established itself as a steady fixture. Founded in 1990 by graduates of the CIT Crawford College of Art and Design (CCAD), the studio complex supports a vibrant range of practitioners, and this breadth of practices was well represented here – sculpture, drawing, photography, installation, ceramics, stained and flashed glass, film, and painting. A key aspect of Farrell’s curatorial strategy was to develop an interactive project with current students from CIT CCAD. Each participating student was paired with an exhibiting artist, and had a chance to follow the development of each project from conception through to exhibition, thereby gaining invaluable insight into the complexities of dealing with tricky sites, and with the intricacies of large group exhibitions. The generosity displayed by all parties – CIT CCAD’s support of the project, local businesses’ sponsorship of the endeavour, as well as the artists giving their time to share their studio practice – is characteristic of the arts community in Cork, increasingly under pressure from dwindling studio and gallery space. elsewhere was as much a heartening example of continued resilience and resourcefulness within collaboration as it was a compelling aesthetic proposition.

Sarah Kelleher 

The show ran from 28 April to 20 May 2017.

Notes
1. Participating artists: CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery – Megan and Cassandra Eustace, Helen Horgan, Róisín Lewis, John Kent, Ben Reilly, Éilish Ni Fhaoláin, Luke Sisk. Elizabeth Fort – Johnny Bugler, Angie Shanahan, Tracy White Fitzgerald, Elaine Coakley, Gerard O’Callaghan, Jo Kelley, Peter Martin, Helen O’Keeffe, Angela Gilmour, Darn Thorn, Sean Hanrahan.

Róisín O’Sullivan
A Deeper Well

The skittish blackbird greeting my arrival at the first floor gallery space of Studio 12 looks perfectly at home there. Hopping from the stone window ledge to the wooden floor and back again, the bird, with all of its mysteries and hidden forces, might have sprung directly from one of Róisín O’Sullivan’s carefully placed works. Though this is fanciful – the bird was more intent on escaping the small room than fulfilling a symbolic role – his animated spirit chimed with the latent energies contained within O’Sullivan’s intricately carved and painted panels.

The artist’s paintings are medium sized or small. Some are tiny. They are sometimes on paper or canvas, but most often, as all the works here, they are on wood. Wood is an ancient support, dating back to at least medieval times, when miraculous icons found a prosaic backing there. Unlike stretched canvas, there is no painterly pushback on wood, no discursive bounce. The resistance of wood is more stoic; ‘paint all you like’, it seems to say, ‘cut me and carve me but don’t expect me to give a damn!’. Perhaps unnerved by this, or taunted, O’Sullivan gouges, carves and burns the implacable material, tagging it with a minor key violence.

A preponderance of eyes solicits the history of portraiture, but O’Sullivan’s windows to the soul are opaque, more like material totems than vessels of inward scrutiny. She owes a debt to surrealism, to the logic of dreams, and to the eye as fleshy object as well as an emblem of sight. One of her larger paintings, Moonwatchers (all works are 2025 unless otherwise stated) is crowded with almond-shaped eyes carved into the plywood surface. These might be the burls of a tree-trunk come alive, though their shapes seem closer to human. Hovering over a reflecting pool, the disc of a spinning moon strews light like confetti.

A small work called Orrin also depicts an eye, or maybe it’s the centre of a whirlpool, its concentric circles of black oil paint cut short by the edges of the support. A spill of cobalt blue appears along the sides of the panel, as though squeezed out by the olive-green ground and the dark lines radiating outwards. On the same wall, to the left as we face it, a larger painting called Sunfall rests near the ground on flat discs of cut wood. These slices of time feel collegiate with their smaller neighbour, with their growth rings, their expanding circles, plainly visible. The painting itself (if distinguishable from its wooden feet), is a complex affair, and colourful too, with yellow ochres and red earths forming a cubist landscape or a world on fire. Eyeballs erupt within feathery flames, while, tilted to one side, Picasso’s lightbulb (Guernica’s evil aperture) hovers like a flying saucer, a visitor to exotic lands, or Armageddon.  

Painterly influence draws from the deep well (to borrow from the artist’s own metaphor) of the medium’s history and tradition. O’Sullivan’s time spent in Tony O’Malley’s old studio in Callan has evidently rubbed off, and so too have more esoteric painters like Forrest Bess and Hilma af Klint. O’Malley’s allegiance to the natural world included a sensitivity to boundaries, of fields and other physical demarcations, but also to the unseen forces his titles like Summer Inscape (1981) and Spectral Garden (1987) allude to. O’Sullivan’s choice of cast-off supports and homemade frames show the influence of Forrest Bess, as does her faith in the potency of symbols to carry both personal and collective meaning. On a deeper level, Bess was dedicated to the dissolution of boundaries, and this dichotomy, between the naturally bounded nature of painting and its investment in the world around it, enlivens O’Sullivan’s work too. With an illuminated eye at the centre of a tree-tunnel vision, the looping lines and radiating dashes of Starfell feel stylistically indebted to Hilma af Klint. The Swedish artist’s harnessing of the natural and spirit worlds, of nature, symbolism and abstraction, are echoed in O’Sullivan’s complex composition, a large panel invested with a micro physicality (a rainfall of tiny carvings) and spell-like enchantment.

One wall of the single-roomed gallery is a golden yellow. The colour stands in for the natural element shining through the opposite windows, sunlight as painted material. Ashgaze is the size of a large paperback, its palette of browns, whites, blues and blacks luminous against the coloured wall. A carved-out rectangle appears as a window within the window of the painting itself. Through this opening, a bright sphere is surrounded by nocturnal plants and silhouetted birds. Conflating what’s inside and out, the painting, through a frame of day, is looking into night.

Ashgaze, Sunfall, Starfell – one of the pleasures of writing about O’Sullivan’s work is the sounding of these compound words. Her single word titles are beautiful too: Velora, Orrin, Lunith. The only work dated earlier than 2025, Lunith (2024) is also one of the most naked. Another small panel, another eye (perhaps more than one), the sanded surface is free of paint in favour of drawing, with fine lines burned (as though cauterised) directly into the plywood skin. The curving shapes and cryptic circles are like hieroglyphs or an ancient map, or the figure of a storybook friend.  

To make a painting is to make something visible, the paint itself, but also ideas, their combination discernible. If ideas become visible in this way, then the opposite must also be true, that material recedes as concepts come forward, and this ontological push and pull is at the heart of painting. Like the bird-guide briefly trapped inside the sunlit gallery, O’Sullivan’s paintings, which are modest but insistent, ambiguous, but ambitious in their search for meaning, appear lively in this exchange.

John Graham

July 2025

Reach out, pull Me closer
Exhibition text by Sarah Long

Murrough O’Donovan presents a series of interventions on a fallen beech tree in his exhibition ‘Reach out, pull Me closer’. Branches, bark and tree trunk are partially sculpted and scored to create a deconstructed–or constructed–landscape. A cascade of branches, arranged and fractionally worked upon, occupies the centre of the floor. It is this tension between O’Donovan’s physical inquiry into his chosen material and his observance of its natural qualities that highlights the show’s key concern: the delicate stasis between humans and their environment.

A branch with several kinks and knots is placed in the corner of the gallery space, as if cordoning off the area. The wood appears without modification, honouring the strange and multi various ways in which trees and organisms grow and develop with gnarly dips and divots. Held in place by the adjoining walls, the placement of this work calls to mind notions of trespass, private land and ownership. The balancing act of the branch suggests that human artifice cannot exert these fixed claims to its innate, wild integrity.

In Waiting, O’Donovan arranges a tree trunk underneath a headdress fashioned from wood and, most strikingly, a belt. The base of the sculpture contains grooves carved in the shape of feet, inviting the viewer to stand in place and wear this strange crown. The wood is attached to the belt perpendicularly, creating a religious visual akin to the ring of thorns placed on Christ’s head. This timeline collapses, however, in the network of fine lines that are grooved and carved into the branches. The geometric patterns, embellished with copper leaf, are reminiscent of Prehistoric art practices and designs. Our stories, religions and belief systems have always been intertwined in our surroundings. We impress upon our environment and our environment impresses upon us–there is a harmony to this.

The work can also be read alternatively, the belt at the centre of the sculpture can be understood as a symbol of dominance and control. The prioritising of the rational mind during the Enlightenment cemented the idea that nature was something that we could–and should master–and this outlook still informs much of Western society and ideology. The presentation of the work, echoes the apparatus of a Visual Reality headset, positioning the viewer inside the work whilst also underlining our disconnect from nature.

The interactive element of Waiting further complexifies the work, as the human impulse for ritual is explored. Quite simply, it is a pleasing thing to stand where someone stood before, the work puts the viewer in communion with their fellow audience and indeed ancestors: ‘Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.’^[1] O’Donovan is interested in the ways we have historically interacted with nature, what traditions are intrinsic and primitive and bond us to our environment, and what instincts are destructive and remove us from these natural relationships.

A wall-based piece comprises a section of tree trunk that displays a handprint in its centre. The artist’s refrain, included in the exhibition’s mediation, resonates here: “Stand on their body, / Put your head in their arms, / Put your feet in their blood, / Stretch with them, / Reach out to Me, / Pull Me down, / Pull Me closer.” The wood is split into two sections, O’Donovan’s desire for connection is conveyed by the handprint that is carved across these parts in a symbolic gesture of the act of unification. This question of disconnect is interesting in an Irish context, in particular. Coillte, the Irish state forestry body, is often the subject of controversy and criticism due to its extractive approach to our woodlands, creating a monoculture rather than striving to grow and manage native woodlands that would see enormous ecological benefits. O’Donovan’s work illuminates the realities of how severed our society is from our basic life sources.

A copper plate, hanging on the centre wall of the gallery, acts like the sun overseeing the interplay of the sculptures. Its circular shape and solar proprieties point towards a continuum and the cyclical nature of all things. Life and death, creation and destruction–there is a balance to be struck between different forces. A balance, given our current ecological and Climate Crisis, we seem doomed to tip the scales on, until we are dragged down and embark on another terrible fall from paradise. O’Donovan seems concerned with discovering potential methods for us to commune with nature inside these cycles. As Virgina Woolf noted, indeed ‘rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame’ however as she preceded these lines in her novel, ‘s a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London and silence falls on the mind’.^[2] We have our customs but they are shaped by our response to our environs.
Sarah Long

^[1] Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

^[2] ibid.pp

Arranged Mirage is a two-artist exhibition showcasing bold new work by Backwater Artists Group studio members Amna Walayat and Tina Whelan. Walayat, a Cork-based artist of Pakistani origin, draws from Indo-Persian symbolism to explore identity, displacement, and the myth of return, blending personal narrative with collective memory. Whelan, an Irish artist and researcher, works across painting, sculpture, video and textiles to investigate generational trauma and the embodied experience of womanhood—often through the lens of Catholic ethics and maternal legacy. The artists share a language of memory, myth, and transformation—where tradition is not upheld, but unstitched and remade.

ARRANGED MIRAGE : a shared grammar of myth, memory, and transformation.

To walk through Arranged Mirage is to enter a private cosmos that pulses outward.

By confronting interiority—by offering shrine and miniature as active agents—the artists remind us: belief doesn’t live only in collective ideology, it lives in each quiet altar built inside. In the overlap of Tina and Amna’s languages we find a new, arranged, mythic mirage.

In Arranged Mirage, Tina Whelan and Amna Walayat draw from the ornamental traditions of their cultural inheritances to build something that feels simultaneously intimate and insurgent. The exhibition unfolds like a series of veiled gestures: deeply personal but insistently political.

Upon entering the space, you are struck with by the hum of a deep blue wall—lapis lazuli blue. It’s colour deliberately echoes the rich pigments of traditional Indo-Persian miniature, where lapis was once ground by hand into ultramarine for sacred and courtly painting. This is no coincidence. Amna Walayat makes her own pigments using the classical Persian method, a meditative process that mirrors the themes of care and continuity that run through her work.

The story of The Conference of the Birds, a 12th-century Sufi poem, moves through Amna Walayat’s work. The tale, which sees thirty birds searching for a king only to find themselves, becomes a framework for self-reflection, migration, and identity formation. In Walayat’s hands, paradise becomes neither destination nor doctrine, but a layered, unstable space—one that holds both rupture and renewal. (“When you have broken free of yourself, a thousand doors will open.” – Farid ud-Din Attar, 12^th century Sufi mystic and poet)

In Amna’s miniature’s, ink blossoms into paradise‑gardens, Persian domes dissolve into iris and onion‑skin petals. Each brushstroke roots in traditional illustration, yet escapes expectation. Contemporary symbols also surface. Three balloons float through one of Amna’s compositions, disarming and interrupting the classical frame. It’s a quiet break with tradition, aimed not at honouring purity, but at reimagining what tradition can become through transformation.

At first glance, Tina Whelan shrine recalls the heilige hoekjes of Catholic Flanders—“holy corners” women once maintained in the home as places of daily prayer and remembrance. Tina’s shrine is a tender, guarded altar that both honours and unravels. It is layered with pieces of cloth, talismans, dried petals, found offerings from the sea, small relics—these are personal liturgies. Tina’s summons the private, the hidden rituals of womanhood—her body, her memory—stitched into an insurgency of myth.

Punctuating the shrine are smaller works that evoke early forms of femininity, complicating their legacy. These pieces—delicate in scale, ornate in presentation—unravel an ambiguous story. A lavish frame surrounds what appears to be a portrait, but the face is indistinct, veiled in mould, time, or abstraction. The image resists clarity and recalls the historical practice of arranged marriages, where women often encountered only a flattering likeness—painted or embellished—of the man they were promised to, long before meeting him in life. These portraits, curated to please, rarely represented the truth. Whelan’s use of erosion and decay becomes pointed. These gilded works do not immortalize their subjects—they obscure them. They speak to how femininity has been idealised and distorted, polished into something unrecognisable. They honour not what was shown, but what was hidden.

A large vessel chimes with music that fills the exhibition space, it draws the visitor in and asks them to peer inside and acts as a portal. It transports the viewer to video which underscores a central premise of Arranged Mirage. In Tina’s film, we see the artists’ hands—Tina’s and Amna’s—carefully packing a suitcase. Layer by layer, their clothing is folded, arranged, nested into shared space. Clothing here is a form of self-portraiture, intimate and tactile. To pack is to prepare for movement, to negotiate what is carried forward and what is left behind. It evokes the shared authorship, cultural overlap and transport of identity across space and history.

This small filmic moment—tucked into the base of a ceramic portal—speaks to one of Arranged Mirage’s central concerns: how personal mythologies are constructed not alone, but alongside others.

Arranged Mirage softly insists. The artists offer a series of interior landscapes that ask the viewer to consider how identity re-authored. Whelan and Walayat don’t reject the symbols they’ve inherited; they repurpose them. In doing so, they open space for something less fixed and more human. In Arranged Mirage, belief becomes a private altar—gently arranged, never doctrinal, always in flux.

Enid Conway

At first / I was land is the first of a new annual Emerging Curator Award exhibition created by the innovative Backwater Artists. Highlighting the ongoing need for creative producers to gain support and opportunity across the arts sector, this framework (both mentored and financial) is essential in nurturing and platforming the next generation.

Curated by Niamh Brown, At first / I was land features the work of five artists – Debbie Godsell, Paul Gaffney, Fiona Kelly, Sarah Long and Roísín O’Sullivan – whose work resonates with Eavan Boland’s poem “Mother Ireland” (first published in 1995) which Brown has taken as a starting point for the exhibition. Echoing Boland’s poetical narrative, Brown’s deft understanding of the work enables the curation of the visual and material facets of each of the artworks to speak and, importantly, to be recognised.

Debbie Godsell’s two striking colour photographic prints Elizabeth; Queen and Amos; Farmer are taken from a wider series The Protestors (2023) where each portrait re-imagines a person connected to the land, whether by work or ownership. The two heads, constructed with natural ephemera include wheat, turf, barley, shells which, combined with domestic haberdashery items of printed cottons and trimmings, create Mummer-like heads. The ‘protestors’ – each appearing muted – consider frugality and zero-waste but also address the gap of knowledge regarding Irish Protestant folklore archived in Irish State institutions. As Godsell has remarked, there is a gap in the representation of ‘the poor and the plain [Irish] protestants[1]’ and their customs which include Harvest Thanksgiving where ‘every October their churches would be festooned with produce to celebrate the hard work’[2].

To the right of Godsell’s work is a photographic image of a haycock, drawn from lifeless gorse and scrub placed on an elevated low stone wall to prevent fire creep once the gorse is set alight and its ashes replenish the soil. This work, along with two other images in this exhibition, are from Paul Gaffney’s series We Make the Path by Walking (2012) which focuses on the idea of long-distance walking as a form of meditation. Detailing human interaction with the landscape, scrubland flora, and long, lush, cultivated grasslands, the materiality of the images prompts the viewer to pause and consider the overlooked components of our surroundings.

Materiality is central to the three exquisite small-scale paintings by Róisín O’Sullivan [3]. Created on found wood, O’Sullivan’s painterly relationship to the materials of the natural world is immediate and sympathetic in which her work could be characterised as being gently guided by natures’ own process of mark-making. With each individually paint-stroke recorded, and considered, the marks become part of a larger reciprocating conversation between surface, line and gesture between paint and panel, creating intriguing, evocative landscapes and mesmeric mind fields.

Fiona Kelly’s practice is synonymous with land, and human interaction with and extraction from it. A Temporary Iteration, Formed by chance (2020-2023) features four birch ply scalenohedron structures – which emulate the crystal formation of the mineral calcite – punctuate the floor. Printed onto three of the meticulously constructed forms are images of fallow land and flora, as bleak as they are beautiful. The fourth structure has a small embedded ocular window in which one views Kelly’s video of a desolate concrete slag pile and the restorative flora of a pink cornflower, offering a metaphoric olive branch between human impact and nature’s resilience.

Sarah Long’s floor-based video Tread softly because you tread on my dreams looks at land, albeit on a micro scale whilst addressing big thematics. Using a digital pen to draw the outline of each frond and leaf contained in a static image, she retells her dreams through her auto-fictional character, Mary – a present-day embodiment of the Mother Ireland figure. Punctuated by stories centred around men’s foibles, including those of Samuel Beckett, Michael Collins (NASA astronaut), and William Martin Murphy, whom, when she confronts the ‘feckin gombeen’ [who is stalking her around Cork City] tells her ‘to be a good girl and go about your day’. To underline the power of Irish patriarchy, below the image of the leaves and fronds, are distorted black and white moving images of Ireland’s key political figures including General Michael Collins. Long’s mesmeric continuous drawing combined with her monologue is as funny as it is serious, and whilst her drawing is strangely mediative, her narrative offers a meandering yet powerful reflection on society’s relationship with women, as Mary says: ‘I fear we are on a one-way march.., I feel we are just stuck…its incessant and it doesn’t seem to matter…it won’t stop because the ghosts still have their say.’

For a comparatively small exhibition space, Brown adeptly creates enough breathing space and tension within the display to enable the works to both converse and listen with each other. For me, the artists’ concern with the subjects of their work, alongside Brown’s perceptive exhibition curation, gently echoes the words of Eavan Boland herself: ‘I began to feel a great tender heartedness towards these things that were denied their visionary life’[4].

[1] Debbie Godsell in conversation with Cristín Leach at Uillinn, Skibbereen 22 February 2025 (YouTube) accessed 16 March 2025

[2] Ditto

[3] Róisín O’Sullivan works (l-r) Gold Night (2022), Summer Birdsong (2021) and Vesper (2022)

[4] ‘Conversation: Poet Eavan Bolan’ PBS NewsHour 9 March 2012 (YouTube) accessed 17 March 2025.

Dawn Williams, Crawford Art Gallery