GALLERY

NIAMH COFFEY
LISA CROWNE
MARIE DENHAM
SARAH DEVEREUX
ASHLEIGH ELLIS
Aideen Farrell
Kate McElroy
DAVID MCGOVERN
LIESELLE MCMAHON
ANDREW MC SWEENEY
PAUL MALONE
KIM-LING MORRIS
Tadhg Ó CuirrÍn
GRACE O’LEARY
EMMA PRICE
ERIN REDMOND

BROADCAST

Daniel Brennan, Fiona Burke & ICEBEAR
HANNAH-CLARE DE GORDUN
DAVID MCGOVERN
ANDREW MC SWEENEY
EOIN WHELEHAN

INVITED ARTISTS

Icebear
Angus KEMP
Yves Lorrhan
Day Magee
Fionnula O’Connell
Raphael Olympio
Daisy Smith

SILK/FLOWER / HYPER/OBJECTS
2022

Video 6:42 mins

“Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness…” Han Kang – The Vegetarian

The future springs eternal algorithmically generated. The future is jouissance, an excess of feeling so much it hurts. 

This work looks at the explosion of Spring and the expanding climate/political crisis through an abundance of flowers photographed and processed through a generative adversarial network. Overlaying the original digital copy to parallel digitally mediated world /hyper objects with which we joyfully/painfully grapple.

DANIEL BRENNAN, FIONA BURKE & ICEBEAR

Danny Brennen is writer, organiser and collaborative artist working across disciplines including film, radio, theatre, glitch art and participatory art. He explores horizontal organising and collaborative storytelling to build a new world inside the shell of the old.

Contact Info
Email: danny.arranges.letters@gmail.com

Fiona Burke is a creative producer and arts manager, working between Dublin and Limerick. She holds a BA in Art History and English Literature from UCD Dublin. Her practice is informed by a fascination with nature, film and the unknown. She enjoys working with audiences of all ages and presenting works in unconventional settings, from exhibitions in old station houses to film screenings in Georgian Churches.

Contact Info
Email: Fionadeburca1@gmail.com
Instagram: @fionadeburca

ICEBEAR is Eilis Mahon, a 23 year old experimental musician from Kildare who draws inspiration in equal parts from ambience and noise. The project began as a lofi recording project whilst Mahon was still in secondary school, and has since evolved to a primarily performance based project which uses live improvisation on electronics to explore alienation, anxiety and trauma. Icebear’s music is marked by a desire for catharsis & a belief in the healing power of collective noise making.

Icebear also currently curates a monthly mix show on Dublin Digital Radio called Pure Phase. 

Contact Info
Email: icebearnoise@gmail.com
Bandcamp: Icebear99
DDR: Listen
Instagram: @icebearnoise

FLESH FUR FUNGUS FEATHER
2022

Expanded Collage; Ink, lino print, dry point etching, Fabriano paper, acrylic paint, clay.

Flesh Fur Fungus Feather is a collage of interlocking cyclic systems, where humans and non-humans generate new and queer connections. Creatures and forms of flesh, fur, fungus and feather mingle and merge and begin to exhibit peculiar actions, establish unusual habits and develop some intimate symbiotic relationships.

In an earlier Irish imaginary world, the ontological and conceptual boundaries that separate us from nature and other entities were not so separate and fixed, but porous and blurred. Irish folklore is scattered with myths and beliefs about metamorphosis in nature. Niamh has used examples of these taken from UCD’s national folklore collection as a starting point to generate imagery of an interworking system where dichotomies are broken, queered and made into new and absurd cyclic networks. These absurd systems of symbiosis will offer an invitation to imagine divergent ways of being by breaking with the logic of human exceptionalism and anthropomorphism and considering new ways of interacting and existing within the larger matrix of nature.

NIAMH COFFEY

Niamh Coffey is a Dublin-based artist from Laois. Working through drawing, print and sculpture, Niamh Coffey’s work creates new narratives, myths and hyperboles surrounding queer subjects and relationships.

Niamh graduated from NCAD in 2016 with an honours degree in Sculpture and Expanded Practices and a highly commended thesis titled ‘Through the telescope, under the microscope: Sarah Sze’. Recent exhibitions her work has featured in include: Halftone at the Library Project, Locale #3 at A4 Sounds and Awkward Interjection at Pallas Projects/Studios. Most recently she has made work for the theatre show ‘Looking Through My Telescope at Another Telescope (Infinite Telescope Loop)’, supported by Laois County Council. 

Contact Info
Email: nkcoffey@gmail.com
Website: Niamh Coffey
Instagram: @niamhnomilktwosugars

EXPERIMENT 2
2021-22

Text

LISA CROWNE

Lisa Crowne is a visual artist with a social practice exploring what it means to be ‘useful’ and/or the ‘usefulness’ of art in societal change. Lisa uses a range of tools in order to do this, including production, curation, administrative, management, educational, developmental, conversational and collaborative approaches. Lisa develops relationships with artists, activist groups, communities, and campaigns to produce exhibition programmes, educational programmes, and events which facilitate important conversations on issues impacting our lives locally and mirrored nationally. She explores ways to leverage A4 Sounds’ position as an artist space to intervene in society through big and small actions. This work has been guided by a question ‘If we are to push for an equal society, what form should art take?’

Lisa holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Community Arts Education from NCAD and a BA Hons in Textile Design from GMIT, where she focused on printed textiles and fine art installation. Lisa has curated and produced numerous A4 exhibitions both nationally and internationally and is the lead producer of A4 Sounds’ arts programme We Only Want the Earth 2020-2022. Lisa was awarded the Arts Participation Bursary Award 2020, Professional Development Award 2020 and Agility Award 2021 to support her ongoing research into arts production and socially engaged art practice. 

Contact Info
Email: sitex.link@gmail.com
Website: lisacrowne.com
Social Media: sitex.link

Tir na Where?
2022

Live Performance, 1 hour

“Tir na Where?” is the mixed up place we have ended up post-pandemic. Turned inside out and thrown upside down. Between the world closing up and reopening, have we been forced back into consumerism, or did we ever leave? This performance will travel to the land of youth, the land where dead souls meet, jump into the ocean, and climb underground. Through themes of chaos and grounding we will travel between these worlds and ask; Where is this world we are in now? The hope is through the voyage we will rediscover how to reconnect with this earth our own souls.

Join us in the garden of A4 Sounds when the sun sets and the shadows come out! Through shadow puppetry and storytelling Marie will create a beautiful experience under the stars. The show will be live scored by violinist and fiddle player Lucie O’ Flynn (Shiftwork).

MARIE DENHAM

Flight of Fancy means the imagination in your mind’s eye. Flight of Fancy was co-founded by Marie Denham and Megan woods 10 years ago as an exploration of the imagination and a reimagining of Irish myths from a female empowerment and eco-friendly standpoint. Today Marie continues to hold up this torch as the artistic director and producer. She works in collaboration  with different artists, musicians, storytellers depending on the project. Marie is a self-taught puppet maker and puppeteer. She is the secretary of the Irish Puppetry Union “Irish UNIMA”. Her puppetry style is experimental using intricate hand cut card puppets and found objects, flowers, herbs to weave spells around each piece that she creates. Her puppetry has been recognised on a national scale in the “Cork Puppetry Festival” as one of the top shadow puppeteers in the country and internationally her work was shown in “Shadows Across the Globe” the first global shadow puppetry festival.

Marie has been developing her own style of storytelling and is interested in the retelling of ancient myths with a modern lens. Her influences include the philosophy’s of John O’ Donohue and John Moriarty. 

Contact Info
Email: marie.denham@gmail.com
Social Media: @Flights of Fancy 

LIVE LAUGH SLUG™
2022

Ceramics and Text

Inspired by fibromyalgia™*  and a constant use of the expression “feeling sluggish” Sarah Devereux embraces this enforced Slug State™. Using the slug as the ultimate symbol of slowing down, Devereux began to question ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING ABOUT LIFE while spending these past 2 years in an experiment trying to balance her energy between Work™ and REST OF LIFE™. How can a glam, wild, ridiculous performer and CONSTANTLY BUSY AND HUSTLING CREATIVE GAL ABOUT TOWN learn to un-Dick Van Dyke myself?** 

After many years of being in a constant state of production within her arts practice Devereux became interested in interrogating ideas around labour & capitalist production. Her practice explores a chaotic ideal of MORE IS MORE. Under the umbrella of play LIVE LAUGH SLUG™  challenges this by embracing slowness & skills based process “I like your manifesto, put it to the test-o” The LIVE LAUGH SLUG manifesto is to reimagine joyful anti-productivity.***

This work includes an invitation to the first meeting of the SLUG PEOPLE™ who want to LIVE LAUGH SLUG and relearn to live through embracing their inner slug. The meeting takes place on Sunday 21st August from 2pm.

*is a condition that causes pain all over the body, chronic fatigue, sleep problems, emotional and mental distress

**Ya know in Mary Poppins where he has the whole band on his back, this is the reference.    

***Ask her about her dream AKA the real reason she made her ceramic piece.

SARAH DEVEREUX

Sarah Devereux is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice traverses both visual arts & performance. Her practice stems from the deeply personal, relating to mental and emotional states, explored through the central themes of labour, humour & play to form connection to
the audience. Sarah’s work often accumulates as immersive & experiential exhibitions or events where the audience upgrades to participants. Sarah strives for her work to always embody the state of being “Fun-erable”- A state she is claiming as her own, a means of making vulnerability, fun!

Her recent achievements include “Let’s Get Fun-erable!” a commission by Dublin Fringe Festival 2021. She is Artist in Residence at VISUAL Carlow, 2020-2022. “My Fringe Show”, at Dublin Fringe Festival, was nominated for The Spirit of Wit:Moira Brady Averill Award 2019. She is co-founder of acclaimed Dublin-based, queer performance event SPICEBAG. She has performed at numerous festivals & events across the country. She has been a member of A4 Sounds Studios since 2016, making her a part of the furniture at this stage.

Contact Info
Email: sarahdevereux1@gmail.com
Website: Sarah Devereux
Instagram: @sarah.deverux.artist & @thedirtbird

THE HUT
2022

Documentary Video, 3:30 min

The Hut is a living willow structure installed in the community garden of Mud Island, North Strand, Dublin 3. This film documents the making of the hut, the community of growers who were involved in its making, hand drawn stop frame animation as well as a collage of archival animated and live action footage. The voice over is a series of original poems read by poet Otilia Galca who wrote them in response to the sculpture series. 
This installation is part of a series of sculptural works. The Hut is the largest of the sculptures which is inspired by French Philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book “The Poetics of Space” which examines nests and shells as safe places: ‘an empty shell, like an empty nest, invites day-dreams of refuge.’ This woven willow hut is modelled on the structure of a mollusc but also is reminiscent of early forms of human shelters; a beehive hut or a crannóg and it’s construction aims to reconnect our habitats back to nature. The willow harvested from Newgrange was woven into a human-size liveable nest and will be added to later in the year with living willow fronds allowing for the piece to continue to grow into a permanent living installation. As the structure is currently absent of the living branches, it has been wrapped in yarn until the Spring when the new sprigs will take over creating a natural canopy in place of the wool.

HANNAH-CLARE DE GORDUN

Hannah-Clare De Gordun began to work with textiles as a way of visualising and interrogating a language of belonging, loss and identity. After experiencing grief, she became preoccupied with understanding her heritage. She discovered that she has come from a long line of seamstresses and lace makers. By working through the medium of textiles De Gordun had the opportunity to explore and celebrate embodied knowledge in the making of her work and to reconnect with the fore-mothers of her ancestry.

She is influenced by The Arts & Crafts Movement and the physicality involved in the process of producing textile art. abric sculptures of Louise Bourgeois. In the creation of my current sculptural textile series, “Mollusc X” I’m exploring combining the themes of Land Art with craft, and exploring the space between function and fantasy.

Contact Info
Email: hc@hcgordon.design
Website: www.hcdegordun.com
Instagram: @hcdegordun

HOW WE CHOOSE
2022

Sculpture; silk, dye plants Madder Root and Dyer’s Camomile, used and dried dye plant materials, water, glass

How We Choose is a sculptural reflective space to think through practices in our daily routines. Ashleigh is interested in how we relate to material and living beings and how we can give gratitude and care for the overlooked presences that share our world. Like seeping liquid, slow yet steady, collective change is possible by actions that are from a contemplative place of care, of being with the grief for our changing world and taking steps together, always together. 

How We Choose invites you to take a moment to yourself and contemplate what steps can be made in this time of great change. 

To walk; Feather Soft
With the Earth
Our footsteps treading Sweet Reverence
And fill the Cup of Abundance
Slowing Thought to meet our Presence
It Dare not break our Fast
And Vastness extends to show us
What we are not missing
A Space to hold inside when leaving
To Walk; Feather Soft
Seeding. 

ASHLEIGH ELLIS

Ashleigh Ellis is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Cork, whose practice is focused on interconnected eco-social concerns; the crossover between art, ecology and community. She is passionate about fostering life-promoting reflection and activities with communities so that we gain agency to value and protect the wider Earth communities that support us and flourish together. Her practice develops many different media, processes and disciplines to explore the relationships between people and the more-than-human world and to re-imagine our world together. Recently she has been developing skills in natural dyeing, and growing dye plants with communities and facilitating workshops with funding from Create Ireland (Arts in the Community award 2021) and Cork City Council Arts Office (Arts in Context award 2022).

Contact Info
Email: ashleigh7ellis
Instagram: @ashleighellis_natureartist

BRITTLE
2022

Etching on porcelain paper clay, various metals, and oxides

Brittle examines processes of decay, spatial ruination, and regrowth and imaginesdesigns of possible spaces as fossilised ruins. This work takes its starting points from drawings and images of stilled, defunct, or reshaped infrastructure: Railways, building sites, greenways, and canals. The work consists of steel plate etchings on porcelain paper clay and the etching plates themselves. Oxides and the copper sulphate mordant were used with etching ink. Plates were also left to rust and this rust transferred onto wet clay. Brittle was created during a recent residency at the Cork Printmakers and National Sculpture Factory. This residency focused on material experimentation in the intersections of etching and ceramics. The work was made with support from the Arts Council of Ireland and Fingal County Council.

AIDEEN FARRELL

Aideen Farrell is a Dublin-based installation artist. Her work examines processes of spatial ruination. Her practice critically examines narratives of linear progress, planning ideologies, and dichotomised understandings of the built environment and the natural landscape. She creates installations consisting of objects and structures of plaster, steel, found objects, and ceramics.

Aideen graduated from NCAD in 2017 with a BA in Fine Art Painting and Visual Culture.Recent exhibitions include solo shows; A Weight of Windows at Pallas Projects/Studios in 2019; Showroom Linenhall Arts Centre in 2018; and group shows; In Cahoots with the Earth at A4 Sounds, and Halfway to Falling at the Lord Mayor’s Pavilion in 2021. She was awarded the Fingal County Council Artist Support Scheme from 2018 to 2021, the Arts Council’s Professional Development Award 2020, Agility Award 2021, and Visual Arts Bursary 2021. She was awarded the Dublin City Council Residency at St Patrick’s Lodge 2018-2019 and Fire Station Artists’ Studios Sculpture Award for 2021. She most recently undertook a joint residency at The National Sculpture Factory & Cork Printmakers.

Contact Info
Email: aideenfarrell9@aideen-farrell
Website: www.aideenfarrellartist.com
Instagram: @aideenfarrellart

TRACKING CHANGE: SEEN AND UNSEEN
2022

Newspaper articles on tracing paper

Tracking Change: Seen and unseen examines the articles on climate change in the most read newspaper in Ireland; The Irish Independent. The project examines the coverage the climate change crisis receives in this selected media format and questions whether it was sufficiently being treated as an imminent world crisis. The artist collected the headline, image, page number and a selected aspect of text from each article archiving  and has catalogued them as a means of analysis.

The project documents the articles for the month of July 2022. In the middle of the month severe fires happened across Europe and the  articles and images began to increase in length and number, and become more prominent on the front pages of the newspaper. Debates discussing carbon emissions for agriculture also featured prominently. Contrastingly, the severe effects seen in countries across the world were often limited or reserved for the World section in the end section of the paper. For the true impact of a global crisis like climate change to be felt, its multifarious effects across the world needs to be seen. The artist calls for a broader reporting on the impacts of climate change for the true resonance of its repercussions to be seen.

KATE MCELROY

Kate McElroy is a multidisciplinary artist from Limerick and based in Cork City. Coalescing a sense of space and time, Kate’s work combines photography, found objects, recordings, text and installation.She received a first class honours Masters degree from Crawford College of  Art and Design (2021) and an honours BA from Limerick School of Art and Design, 2013. Kate is currently on residency in PADA, Lisbon with two upcoming exhibitions there in August, 2023 and is supported by a Cork City Council Artist Bursary.

Recent exhibitions include Fragments in Constellation with Re:Group for Skibbereen Arts Festival, July – August 2022. Kate is a member of the artist collective inter_site and were awarded a Project Award from the Arts Council, Ireland. (2021) Recent exhibitions include inter_site at Queen’s Old Castle for STAMP empowering Cork, Pulsating P(l)ace, at Wandesford Quay, curated by Ciara Rodgers, 2022, ‘Oileán’ curated by Sinead Barret on Spike Island and The Lord Mayor’s Pavillion, Fitzgerald’s Park and inter_site at the Marina Market, Cork City, 2021. Kate was a selected graduate for ‘Origins’ in Lismore Castle Arts, November 2021 and ‘In Cahoots with the Earth’, A4 sounds studios, Dublin, December 2021. She was one in four selected artists for ‘And, if we observe the present’ Catalyst Art Centre Belfast as part of Future(s), Belfast Photo Festival, 2021. She was artist in resident at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre 2020 and 2021.

Contact Info
Email: katemcelroy7@gmail.com
Website: www.katemcelroy.com
Instagram: @kate_mcelroy

SOLVING YOUR PROBLEMS BY TOUCHING THE FLOOR
2018

Video work, 1:29 mins

It’s not easy, is it? When we can’t progress with clarity and ease, we can slip into an unpleasant state of uncertainty and doubt. It can feel disorientating and overwhelming. Whether we are making a new piece of work, invested in social change, or tackling the climate crisis, we are likely to face problems and feel stuck.

Solving Your Problems by Touching the Floor, with performer Daisy Smith and sound designer Angus Kemp, demonstrates thinking through a problem with movement. The body is intelligent. Could the psyche mimic the body’s way of problem-solving? Is there a way our thoughts can perform twists, releases and inversions? Barriers, resistance and stuckness are not signs to give up. They do not reflect the quality or importance of the work. We must not lose hope. There is a way forward. There is always a way.

DAVID MCGOVERN

David McGovern is an Irish socially-engaged artist and educator. He works with moving image, audio and text to create space for self-enquiry, reflection and speculation. His work centres on deeply personal, complex moments of human behaviour. He is passionate in exploring what is common in our experiences, even if that commonality is ambiguous and niche. Themes in his work include creative block, masculinity, memory, care, and queer
futures.

David is currently developing new work entitled ‘HARD CARE’. This socially-engaged project explores non-normative experiences of care, working towards crip, queer and feminist futures for medical and self-care. In 2021, David began working on What Does He Need?, a long-term project by artist Fiona Whelan, theatre company Brokentalkers and Rialto Youth Project, exploring how men and boys are shaped by and influence the world they live in. David is a member of A4 Sounds artist studio in Dublin, and a recent graduate from Limerick of School of Art and Design.

Contact Info
Email: david.mcgovern1@gmail.com
Website: www.davidm.tv
Instagram: @davidm.govern

SOLVING YOUR PROBLEMS
2022

Live Performance & Conversation

It’s not easy, is it? When we can’t progress with clarity and ease, we can slip into an unpleasant state of uncertainty and doubt. It can feel disorientating and overwhelming. Whether we are making a new piece of work, invested in social change, or tackling the climate crisis, we are likely to face problems and feel stuck.

Solving your Problems is a live performance with bodies that both complicate and simplify things. Three dancers of different disciplines, in a surround of soil and dirt, will demonstrate bodies using movement as a problem-solving technique. Barriers, resistance and stuckness are not signs to give up. They do not reflect the quality or importance of the work. We must not lose hope. There is a way forward. There is always a way.

Solving Your Problems is a new piece of work by Daisy Smith and David McGovern, with sound design by Angus Kemp. The work features invited performers Yves Lorrhan & and is supported by A4 Sounds.

DAVID MCGOVERN & DAISY SMITH

David McGovern see above for info.

Daisy Smith is a Choreographer and Movement Director from London, with a first class degree in Dance Theatre, comprising of formal training in classical ballet and contemporary dance.

Daisy weaves contemporary dance techniques through film, theatre and art. Her work draws on the power of the human body in its inexhaustible capacity for story telling –  its ability to express the conflicts that lie within us, deeper than the words we have to describe them.

Daisy typically works with actors, musicians and models – coaxing out their unique movement expression and folding in her own, to build on a movement language that both draws their individualism to the surface and leverages the artistry which comes to light.

Contact Info:
Email: daisyjtsmith@gmail.com
Website: www.daisyjtsmith.com
Instagram: @daisyjtsmith

COLLABORATORS

Angus Kemp is

Contact Info

Yves Lorrhan is a dancer, instructor and choreographer based in Dublin.

Contact Info:
Instagram: @YvesLorrhan

SECOND NATURE
2022

Invitation and Converation

A return to the awareness of breath, body rhythms, the turn and return of the seasons, the movement of the planets is what is experienced when we touch soil (earth). Past, present and future coexist in the form of elements from stars, the bones of our ancestors and the future life and growth potential contained within it.

Second Nature invites you to take off your shoes and socks and to put your feet in the soil and contemplate/discuss:

When was the last time you felt soil between your toes? Or picked up a handful and let it run through your fingers? How does it feel? Have you ever planted a seed and watched it grow? When was the last time you took a walk in a green leafy area with the time to enjoy it (not rushing to go somewhere else)? Have you ever tried Forest Bathing? What does it mean to you to put your hand and footprints in the soil?

To accompany this work, Lieselle invites you to join her for a conversation on Sunday 21st at from 5pm. You will be invited to sit with her in the earth and discuss the questions above.

LIESELLE MCMAHON

Lieselle McMahon is a visual artist living in Dublin. Following working as a Conservation Geneticist in the Azores, she studied Music & Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin and Art & Design at CEAD at NCAD. Her practice is sculptural, encompassing 2D, 3D installation, live art and sound sculpture. Drawing on the assertion that the personal is political, conceptual themes around feminism and anti-capitalism manifest in her work and she has been a member of A4 Sounds Art Studios since 2017.

Lieselle’s practice is centred around the “drawing down” of the intangible into a tangible form that the body innately recognises and understands, achieved through sculpture, sound, performance art in a process of naming visually and viscerally that which cannot be named. She has showed work in group and solo exhibitions at DeAppendix Gallery, NCAD, Filmbase and A4 Sounds Gallery, as well as live art performances in The Complex Dublin, Mart Gallery Rathmines, the Grand Social, Donnybrook Youth Club beside the Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry, at NES in Skagastrond, Iceland, and online with the Post Collective in 2021 at Kunsthal Gent Gallery, Belgium. Her recent and current practice is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. 

Contact Info
Email: liesellemcm@gmail.com
Website: www.liesellemcmahon.weebly.com/
Facebook: @lieselle.mcmahon

TO THE BIN MY FRIEND, TONIGHT WE VACATE THE EARTH
2022

3D Simulation & Audio 4:10min loop

To The Bin My Friend, Tonight We Vacate Earth is a three piece digital simulation consisting of photogrammetric processes, animation and audio. The work explores ideas around mortality as well decisions that are made daily by people and those who influence them. Insects and flies are simulated along different paths while the weather experiences rapid changes throughout the piece, ultimately heading towards one outcome. The audio for the work is a combination of collected sounds from nature and effects created by the artist highlighting the playful approach to producing the piece.

ANDREW MC SWEENEY

Andrew McSweeney is an Irish artist currently based in Cork, Ireland. He uses 3D software to create digital reproductions taken from his natural surroundings. Andrew’s work is based around themes of nature and fictional environments. He creates installations consisting of neon, sound & video. By developing familiar settings, he aims to present simulated moments that highlight ongoing concerns that may impact our temporality.

Andrew completed a BA in Fine Art at CIT Crawford College of Art & Design, in 2015 and an MA in Interdisciplinary Design Practice in 2021 from LSAD, Limerick. Andrew’s most recent exhibits include As Above, So Below, Cork Midsummer Festival, Cork curated by Pluck Projects (2021), his solo exhibition Alone Again, Natura Diddily at the Marina Market (July 2022) and the upcoming IMMA Outdoors: Eco Festival (October 2022). He was recently awarded the Visual Arts Agility Award in 2021 by the Irish Arts Council and is a member of Sample-Studios in Cork City.

Contact Info
Email:  andrewmcsweeney8@gmail.com  
Website: www.andrewmcsweeney.ie
Instagram: @duckandrewduck

SCORCHED EARTH
2016

Mixed media on panel, ash, soil, burnt worrd, limestone

I saw smoke in the sky over Galway, There was a large forest fire near Oughterard and the wind was sending the smoke over the city. It took years for the plants and animals to grow but a second for someone to light a match. I took photos from the distance. Ash was falling out of the sky. To my back I felt the strong prevailing winds coming in off the Atlantic feeding the fires. What took me by surprise was the speed the flames consumed the flora and fauna that lived there. I went to the same location the following day. The ground was still smoldering in places. I scraped up the burnt soil and the carbon and ash from the forest floor, I used the rust created by the cyanbacteria in the boggy soil as well as some charred peat. Out of a disaster I wanted to create something beautiful and poignant as a testament to all the life that
perished in the flames and something more fitting than an article in the local newspaper. I created my paints and created a piece that simply showed the colours and feeling of the landscape that day. The painting has the appearance of ground that suffered too much heat.

PAUL MALONE

Paul Malone is a visual artist based in Mayo. His visual art practice utilises painting, photography and film. Erosion, magnetism, and gravity are some of the forces that shape Paul’s art. Rather than painting the landscape Paul engages directly with the environment, using found materials to create textures and pigments. He is interested in the connection between the influence of the physical forces on the environment and the seemingly unrelated process by which human thoughts are formed. In the romantic tradition of landscape painting, thoughts are disembodied. The observer is outside the environment. In
his work, by contrast, Paul sees thoughts, about the painting and about the environment that produced it, as forming patterns which are created by physical forces and chemical reactions that are rooted in the body. He likens the influence of physics on matter as being analogous to how ideas take form then influence people, events and things.

Paul is a graduate of NUI Galway and has an honors degree in Visual Communication and a Masters in Film Direction and Production. Paul is also a qualified adult educator in the creative arts sector and a published author and photographer.

Contact Info
Email:
Website: Paul Malone
Facebook: PaulMaloneArt

BURIED STORIES
2022

Sculpture

The bone marrow is the core of the body’s structure and is where blood cells are produced. Bloodlines going back generations (and beyond homo sapiens) giving clues to creatures that once came to being, each with its own story. Fragments of their existence lie buried in strata of earth which can be excavated to understand life in their time, in both an archaeological and a geological sense. Buried Stories is a partial submergence of modern cow remains into today’s waste products.

While past life forms have made their own -often lethal- waste (oxygen for algae), our modern legacy is the production of plastics and other persistent molecules coupled with intensive industries such as farming and travel. Our activities are also being written onto the earth to be viewed by future eyes. There have been many catastrophic events that have changed the nature of the earth both locally and globally. All these events are tattooed into the surface of the earth and held in stasis as new layers are formed on top. Each captured existence –man, dinosaur, diatom-  has lived their time, however briefly. Each is a star with its own unique story.

KIM-LING MORRIS

Kim-Ling Morris is UK born and has lived in Europe, Africa and South-East Asia before settling in Cork, Ireland. She trained and worked as a Biochemical Engineer, creating her art practice in parallel. Beginning with sculpture in Leamington Spa, UK, she continued at the École Duperré, Paris, France. In Ireland, she developed her interest in textiles at CIT Crawford College of Art & Design, winning their 2009 Continuing Education Student of the Year award and gaining a Fine Art Textiles Special Purpose Award in 2014. Morris has exhibited work in Ireland and in France.

Contact Info
Email: kimlingmorris@gmail.com
Website: www.kimlingmorris.com
Social Media: @kimlingmorris 

CAPSIZING ON YOUR HOLIDAYS
2020

Cyanotype on jersey cotton

‘As I look over this beautiful land i can’t help but realize that I am alone
Why am I able to waste my energy to notice life being so beautiful?
Maybe partying will help
What of the people who don’t have what I got?
Are they victims of my leisure?
To fail is to be a victim
To be a victim of my choice
Maybe partying will help‘ Minutemen – Maybe Partying Will Help

Capsizing on your holidays tries to walk a line between our social pleasures and our social anxieties. Tanning while others overheat. The joy of travel and the necessity of emigration. The global economy and its winners and losers. Lying on a beach and thinking about ecological disaster.

TADHG Ó CUIRRÍN

Tadhg Ó Cuirrín is an artist and teacher based in the west of Ireland. He received a BA in Fine Art, Painting from the Limerick School of Art and Design in 2009. His work was recently shortlisted for the Hennessey Craig Award at the RHA 192 nd Annual Exhibition. In November 2022 he will present new work at TULCA Festival of Visual Art in Galway. In March 2023 he
will present a new exhibition at the Custom House Studios in Westport. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include “The Unexamined Life” in July 2021, and “Magic, Metallic Saliva” with Karen Conway at 126 Artist Run Gallery in March 2022.

His work is supported by Ealaín na Gaeltachta, the Arts Council of Ireland, and Galway
County Council.

Contact Info
Email: tadhger87@gmail.com
Website: www.tadhgocuirrín.com
Instagram: @tadhg.o

CONFIDENTAL
2022

Found Objects, Led Lights, Inkjet – Duratran

Confidential is a series of light boxes created from found materials collected within a hidden urban void site, situated along the outskirts of Dublin City.
This void site has become a portal suspended between alternate realms; a false utopian future and a neglected dystopian present but a metamorphosis is occurring, one which will soon emerge.

Lingering in a seemingly perpetual liminal space, living species are reclaiming their place, engulfing, submerging and decaying artefacts within a haunted landscape which marks the trace of a destructive human presence. Through digital photographic processes flora, debris, ash and soil from where these exhibited artefacts were removed are represented as mutations conjured within this urban portal. Their appearance resembles that of x-ray scans but of an otherworldly being.

Artworks: Haunted by Default, Confidential, Hijacked

GRACE O’LEARY

Grace O’Leary’s practice explores tropes of failure and chance which occur in our otherwise considered and planned urban landscapes. Constantly drawn to explorations along the outskirts of Dublin City through analogue and digital photographic processes Grace documents and observe’s the effect of both human and non-human activity among sites and architecture which are neglected or seemingly forgotten.

Rising to ruin these structures and their artefacts symbolise both literally and figuratively the failure of our neoliberal
political systems. Yet through their very failure, these physical manifestations have the power to reveal unheralded
potentials of the past, present and future through the portals which they as ruin conjure. Through experimental processes, Grace seeks to push the work back and forth between; negative and positive, lightness and darkness, utopian and dystopian, attempting to revel within the realms of these portals conjured evoking alternative readings of the worlds in which we do/and have potential to inhabit.

Contact Info
Email: olearygrace5
Website: Grace O’Leary
Instagram: @graceyoleary

KERRY,
UNTITLED,
IN THE GARDEN
2020

Photography

The 3 images ‘Kerry’, ‘Untitled’ and ‘In the Garden’ highlight the strange and wonderful events that can take place on this planet, by chance or by strategic planning. Emma makes work about the things she sees as often taken for granted. She thinks about the need for people to have time to stop and look around at the most natural states of this life.

All works contain natural landscapes and settings, but as to what is occurring within them is a conversation the artist had with herself about natural phenomena, thinking of these settings differently. Emma wants to make space for people to think of the beauty contained within earth, the possibilities of supernatural occurrences, or to be thankful for what this planet can offer to us.

EMMA PRICE

Emma Price completed a fine art degree in Crawford College of Art and Design in 2021. Emma creates work based on ideas of parallel universes and the complexities of other possible realms and dimensions taking inspiration from 1990s sci-fi and fantasy movies, Irish folklore and mythology. She predominantly uses analog photography and endeavours to make work that allow people to take a moment to have a conversation with their inner self and reflect, or to just be curious about the world around them, opposed to being stuck in a never ending loop of being present in the digital world. 

Contact Info
Email: emmaprice599@yahoo.co.uk
Instagram: @emmaaprice

EARTHLY CONSTELLATION
2022

Wildflowers, soil, recycled newspaper

Earthly Constellation consists of newspaper seedling pots with live plants, mirroring the constellations of stars that shine down on us from above. The plants used in this piece are a mix of wildflowers specifically for bees who have the important role of pollinating and allowing all of our plants to reproduce and grow. These pots can be placed straight into soil without disrupting any roots as the newspaper will biodegrade. Become part of the growing artwork/constellation of earthly stars by bringing a piece of starlight home with you to plant your own constellation.

Our Sun is a star and this starlight is fundamental to the survival of the lifeforms on this planet we call home. This includes plants that will absorb this light and convert it into energy in order to grow. Growing plants is vital to us humans as sources of building/craft materials, medicine, and most importantly food without which we can’t sustain ourselves. Through this work Erin Redmond would like to recognise and show appreciation for the stars in our earth, growing and allowing us to grow too. They would like to emphasise the importance of gardening and growing plants which is good for the earth and for our own mental and physical health.

ERIN REDMOND

Erin Redmond’s practice inhabits a space between art, science, and ecology and has elements of sculpture, installation art, and participatory/interactive art. Their work often materialises in the form of temporary/ ephemeral/ portable interventions that are a way to spread awareness about environmental issues such as plastic pollution and climate change. They are concerned with the relationship between humans and the natural environment and how we can limit our negative impact on it. Their work uses recycled and renewable materials such as newspaper, coffee sacks, seaweed and plants. Their practice can be interpreted as an ongoing research process to discover more environmentally aware ways of creating art and architecture. 

Erin studied Sculpture and Expanded Practice at NCAD. Their degree show project An Enduring Hiraeth for Eden was elected as Highly Commended in The Global Undergraduate Awards in 2019. After graduating they interned at the Kling og Bang Gallery in Reykjavik, Iceland where their love of nature was further distilled. They then went on to work at Science Gallery Dublin during 2020 and 2021 as a mediator and as a workshop facilitator. At SGD they got the opportunity to show others how to make their own fun at home during the lockdown by using recycled paper to make things like origami stars, bookmarks, and the newspaper seedling pots which are featured in this piece for The Stars are in the Earth exhibition.

Contact Info
Email: erin.redmond.95@gmail.com
A4 Profile Page: Erin Redmond
Social Media: @_erin_red_

GOING UNDERGROUND
2022

Motion Graphic Video

Going Underground is a short, experimental motion graphic piece addressing the topic of climate change and how it affects the world we inhabit. It utilizes stark, sketched artwork frame blended to create a sense of movement. The piece seeks to explore the effect on both the planet and its populace, whilst referencing the theme of subterranean fiction as a means of responding to the worsening climatic conditions.

EOIN WHELEHAN

Eoin Whelehan is an illustrator and designer from Dublin. Eoin originally trained and worked as an animator. Since 2012 he has worked as an image maker, working predominantly in digital media. Influenced by popular culture (music, comic book art), urban environments and historical references Eoin likes to incorporate text in his visual practice as well as elements of humour. 

Eoin Whelehan is a graduate of IADT’s Animation degree and his animation work has featured in award winning short films as well as on national TV and festival circuits. His illustration work has appeared in numerous publications and my graphic short was awarded in The Irish Times Graphic Short Story Competition. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Phizzfest (2022), a group show at Dublin Comic Book Festival (2022) and a solo show at Ballina Arts Centre (2019). Whelehan is currently producing a short film for the Frameworks award scheme.

Contact Info
Email: eoinwhelehanillustration@gmail.com
Website: Eoin Whelehan
Instagram: @eoinwhelehanillustration

Artists
Studio members from:
A4 Sounds, Dublin
Engage Art Studios, Galway
Sample-Studios, Cork

Invited Artists
Icebear
Angus KEMP
Yves Lorrhan
Day Magee
Fionnula O’Connell
Raphael Olympio
Daisy Smith

A4 Curatorial Team
Lisa Crowne
Andrew Edgar
Cathy Flynn
Linda Kavanagh
Dónal Holland
Kate O’Shea
Lucia Pola

Research Workshop Facilitators
Friends of Ardee Bog
Jen Delos Reyes
Helen Flanagan
Brendan Owens

Production Team
Lisa Crowne | Installation
Andrew Edgar | Installation
Aideen Farrell | Installation
Kate-Bowe O’Brien | Photo Documentation
Tom McDermot | Film Documentation
Lucia Pola | Website Design & Build