- Matthew Coll, Tension, 2021, Acrylic, Twine, Glue, Nails, Tape, Wood, 30.5cm x 30.5cm x 4cm
- Matthew Coll, Tension, 2021, Acrylic and Oil on Canvas, String, Thread, Tape, Wood, 80cm x 60cm x 6cm
- Steven Gilligan, untitled, oil on board
- Laura Wade
- Niall Cullen, Island, 100cm x 100cm, Acrylic, spray paint and alcohol based pigment on canvas, €1900
- Laura Wade
- Tadhgh Cuirrin, Studio, Oil on canvas, 120cm x 90cm, ‘To some extent each painting is a controlled failure’ – Glen Brown
- Sarah Wren Wilson, Over time, acrylic and oil bar on canvas, 35x45cm.
- Laura Wade
- Aaron Moroney, Boundless Future, Now I’m Free, Oil, plaster & dust on handmade board, 590mm W x 880 H
- Dee Walsh, Mixed Media on Panel, 30cm x 30cm
- Sinead McKillican, Roseus-Supermoon, 1100 (h) x 1100
x 160(d), Mixed Media: Flexiplywood/softwood timber / wood glue /sanding sealer / enamel paint /clear varnish - Dee Walsh, Mixed Media on Panel, 30cm x 30cm
- Sinead McKillican, Aqua-Blue Moon, 1100 (h) x 1100 x 160(d), Mixed Media: Flexiplywood/softwood timber / wood glue /sanding sealer / enamel paint /clear varnish
- Dee Walsh, Mixed Media on Panel, 30cm x 30cm
- Sarah Wren Wilson, Let’s Attach, acrylic and oil bar on canvas, 120x90cm.
- Laura Wade,
- Emily Lohan, Liver performance, circle of mud left behind.
Matthew Coll
Matthew Coll is an Irish artist based in the Fingal area of County Dublin. Working within
painting, photography, sculpture and installation.
“The fragility and fabrication of memory and the process of loss and grief are central points
of exploration within my practice. Often depicting everyday events that try to evoke a sense
of fading memories and the passing of time. Representing the uncertainty of life by removing
my control over the painting. Submerging, dragging and pouring paint across their surfaces
and occasionally deconstructing their structural components.”
Steven Gilligan
Hello, my name is Steven Gilligan. I am a visual artist, mark maker, wall painter and 2 time art college dropout, from Galway. With my work I’m interested in the traces and marks, both conscious and subconscious, left behind by people. How they interact with one another and sometimes can tell or cover up a small snippet of a person’s story. I also enjoy scribbling on a variety of different surfaces with a variety of different materials.
Laura Wade
Laura Wade is an Irish artist, originally from Cork City, is now residing in Mayo in the North West of Ireland. She spent the last few years in West Cork, an area that profoundly shaped her creative path. However she was pleased to be drawn back north as she had studied in Galway/Mayo IT. At GMIT’s Centre for Creative Arts & Media, she specialised in printmaking, a process that has always been the root of her artistic practice. In 2014, graduating with a first class honours, she received an academic achievement award and 12 month bursary with Cork Printmakers.
Over the last few years, Laura has primarily worked in the medium of brush and ink on paper while incorporating other image making ways such as collage, photography and mixed media techniques. The pinhole texture that appear in her works on paper are another form of mark making, adding intrigue and refer to something other. These minute pinholes often incite wonder while geometric overlays and lines contrast with the soft fluidity of ink marks giving the viewer a sense of something unfolding. Her visual language delves into our sense of place and how we connect to our surroundings.
Her current body of work utilizies the photography process of cyanotype to explore her new surrounds in Co. Mayo. Developing imagery by blending the digital and the cyanotype printing process has an immediacy and tactile quality that conforms to the artists way of experiencing the landscape. Intrigued by the layer and lore of the land, the lone May bush recurs throughout her series ‘Meeting Place’. This ongoing body of work documents her musings and meanderings while contemplating connection to place.
Niall Cullen
Niall Kurb Junki Cullen (b.1989) is a contemporary visual artist with a first class honours degree in sculpture from the National College of Art and Design.
He began an experimental project titled Kurb Junki in 2015, which explored the motif of a burger through a series of unauthorised public installations and videos that were shot in public space. This project organically developed while laying a foundation and identity for
Cullen’s career as a contemporary visual artist.
Cullen continues to use the image of a burger as a form of artistic identity; it is a universal symbol that supersedes conventional language, embodies mass consumption and is understood worldwide. With that in mind Cullen has adopted and appropriated this
symbol. His interpretation of the burger is becoming progressively more abstract as his practice develops through painting, print, video, murals, installations and performance. His work investigates themes around identity, public space, mark making, reappropriation of data and imagery while he also explores a collaborative practice with other artists and the public.
This year Cullen hosted a lecture in NCAD about his practice alongside the relationships and overlapping which occur between skateboarding, graffiti, the commercial world and the contemporary art world. He is a recipient of the Arts Council Agility Award 202 and is one of three artists to receive a commission from Dublin City Council and Culture Night for the Dublin Holds My Mind open call. His recent solo exhibition ‘Meditative Monitor’ received a critique in the Visual Artists’ News Sheet. He currently works from a studio space in Dublin and also fulfills the role of Creative Director of Goblin Magazine which is available in the National Library of Ireland and the Gallery of Photography Ireland.
Tadhg Ó Cuirrín
Tadhg Ó Cuirrín is an artist and teacher based in Co Galway, with a BA in Painting from the Limerick School of Art and Design. He works in a variety of media, and has worked for a number of Irish artist-run spaces and organisations.
Recent projects include “The Unexamined Life” an exhibition of new work at Engage Studios Galway in July 2021, and “Everyone, everybody, every person, every person, every person, every person” a solo exhibition and book also at Engage Studios, Galway; and “Lift Yourself”, a solo exhibition at Pallas Projects/Studios in Dublin. Upcoming projects include; the 191st RHA Annual Exhibition; and In Cahoots with the Earth at A4 Sounds in Dublin. In 2022, he will present new work in a solo exhibition at Custom House Studios, Westport, Co Mayo.
His recent work has leaned increasingly towards CGI and is interested in; how we process personal, cultural, and architectural memory; how we overcome blockages and breakdowns in communication at a personal level and public level; and the point at which verisimilitude fails.
His work is supported by Ealaín na Gaeltachta and the Arts Council of Ireland.
Sarah Wren Wilson
Sarah Wren Wilson is an Irish artist originally from Monaghan. She studied Fine Art at Loughborough University, England before completing her Fine Art Masters at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland and the Turps Banana Correspondence Course, London. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including a solo installation at Espacio de Creación Contemporánea Cádiz, Spain and group exhibitions in China, New York, Sweden. Sarah has been awarded residencies in Spain, Iceland, UK and Ireland and was a recipient of the Irish Emerging Artist Residency at Burren College of Art 2017.
Recently, she has received the RHA/IPUT Wilton Park Studio Residency 2021-22, funding from the Arts Council Professional Development Award and Monaghan County Council to develop her practice in 2021.
Aaron Moroney
Aaron Moroney is an Irish contemporary abstract painter – currently residing in Cork City, A student of Fine Art in Crawford College of Art & Design and member of Over The Line Studios, Cork. Aaron has many passions – Food, Cycling, Travelling to name but a few.
He started out his career as a chef. After working in some prestigious restaurants and hotels – He decided that wasn’t the life for him and returned to the creative arts as a self-thought designer. After a two and a half year period of backpacking Asia – Aaron found his long-lost childhood passion – Painting, and hasn’t looked elsewhere since.
Adventure, The great outdoors and a ‘seeking for more’ mentality has informed Aaron’s work – Currently Aaron is taking a year out from his Degree Course to push himself creatively and on his own schedule.
My current body of work is a process-based, experience led exploration of the transcendent nature of The Sublime and Awe. According to Burke’s Sublime, ‘terror is the most powerful cause’. Darkness is an inevitable part of our lives and I often try to find a visual balance
between dualities such as darkness & light or chaos & order within my work.
Recent imperical research on The Sublime found that awe in the face of powerful realities, such as nature – has very beneficial and positive effects on our mental health. Subjects reported an increased awareness in the present moment, increased generosity and an overall better mind-state. The paired down approach to the work is an attempt at conveying the experiental qualities of The Sublime rather than the object that is illiciting these physiological responses itself.
Formal art devices such as colour, materiality and mark help communicate an entire range of emotive and experiential qualities – sometimes within one piece. At the core, I’m interested in creating a visual attentiveness within the work that allows a viewer to remove oneself from the everyday and enter more experiential or contemplative headspace.
Dee Walsh
Dee Walsh is an award winning artist based in Drogheda, she studied at Gorey School of Art and Carlow I.T where she received an Honours Degree in Fine Art. Dee has also completed a Professional Diploma in Education from NCAD. She has worked as an Art tutor and educator with all age groups and is a member of the Borrowed Ground Artist Collective in Drogheda.
She has exhibited both nationally and internationally including Concrete Abstractions (Solo), Straight Out of Ireland (Philadelphia), Connections & Borrowed Ground (Droichead Arts Centre), Royal Ulster Academy 139th Annual, Tulca, Brown Thomas Art & Style and Irishwave in Beijing China. She is also the recipient of the R.C Lewis Crosby Award for painting from the RDS.
Dee’s work is primarily based in painting and drawing and is rooted in a fascination with the urban landscape and the structures and infrastructures that facilitate and influence our lives. This line of enquiry also encompasses how nature and the urban landscape interact.
The starting point for her work comes from photographic observations of the urban landscape and results in calculated paintings/drawings that play with mixed media, layering and geometric precision. Her work focuses on interpreting what is perceived and creating a new visual reality that appears familiar and strange all the same time.
She works on a varied scale from large paintings and drawings to small scale pieces. The paintings are mixed media, including oil, acrylic paint and collage. Her work is built up of overlapping layers, shapes and colours which creates the abstracted and colourful landscapes.
Sinead McKillican
Sinead McKillican’s work evolves organically through the physical process of reshaping,
restructuring and / or layering both found and new materials; activities driven by Sinead’s
fascination with art, design, and architecture. Exploration, experimentation, and investigations give rise to a lively process of gathering, layering, culling, and distilling materials. Significantly, Sinead’s physical engagement with materials generally leads to the emancipation of simple geometric shapes, transitioning formal 2D shapes into 3-dimensional minimal abstract forms. Transformation methods include the utilisation of folds, pleats and curves; techniques that permit the fashioning of relief works that blur the boundary between paint and sculpture. Sinead’s vision is focused on creating thought-provoking elegant aesthetics that manifest through the fusion of simple forms, neutral colours and a limited materials palette, elements key to tantalising the viewers tactile and visual senses.
Visuals created are free from any literal expression; intended only to serve to induce the viewers curiosity and / or natural desire for contemplation. Outcomes reflect Sinead’s interest in spatial awareness, placement, repositioning, and facility to re-orientate the work. In essence, Sinead’s work is a personal expression, a synthesis of intuition, life experiences and critical analysis; a journey intended to fashion lively objects that stimulate optimism.
Circuit Arts Festival 