Slabs

Slabs is an ongoing, growing, open-ended, and life-long photographic project. In essence, it consists of individual, used painters’ and decorators’ wallpaper pasting tables. These damaged tables are utilised to hold photographic material on their surface, the photographs from the artist’s archive spanning 30+ years. Choices as to what is brought forward, excluded, what does it all mean? And why these photographic works now? Hearne has long since grappled with the volume and value of his past and present photographic content, and issues around storage, care, and quality of the material abound.

The world of photographic practice has rapidly changed over these three decades, from the analogue age of film and darkroom production to the swift infiltration of the digital, information, social media, and AI ages we find ourselves entangled in today. The artist’s relationship with the new methods of working and engaging with the medium has at times been fruitful, frenetic, and maddening. Frustration with new technologies and the tech giants who now have a big hand in our ways of working and even bigger eyes on our archives.

Hearne doesn’t trust this digital age of photographic storage and ownership. It seems the users of this technology constantly have to keep a step ahead and fight to keep property accessible. Hearne values the printed photograph over the untrustworthy digital image, be these fine darkroom prints or mere desktop prints on scrappy bits of paper, and trusts that these objects will outlive the latent digital files. He finds both tiresome and enraging the technology with all its inbuilt obsolescence and the tech giants’ ever-changing monetisation of systems for iCloud upgrades, etc. To top it all off, we remember that Ireland has been infiltrated by data centres, to hold and house selfies, dick pics, and influencer inanity.

The content and themes within the photographic material on these tables vary. The numerous images bounce off each other, seemingly fitting together in some cases and clashing in others. A memory bank where some thoughts, traumas, situations, and people are remembered, truths rewritten, or buried. Hearne questions if this project is autobiographical, factual, or fictional. Flitting from the personal to the political, from self-reflection, family portraits to snarling, snarky piss-takes of an organisation (The Roman Catholic Church) he despises.

Maybe it’s an exercise in making sense of the world, the artist’s world, a world lived through the many ages of photographic practice. A world as a gay man, a queer person living through an age where the Catholic Church has lost some of its grip, kicking and screaming its way through the decriminalisation of homosexuality (1993) and two tumultuous referendums (same-sex marriage 2015 and abortion 2018) that sought to govern lives, loves, and bodies.

Austin Hearne

Born in Dublin in 1973. Recently completed an episodic project, The Raymo series, which included Raymo’s Spawn (solo) at Garter Lane, Co. Waterford (2024), Requiem for Raymo (solo) at the RHA Gallery (Nov 22 to Jan 23).  (which included a weekly performance as part of the installation.) I Fucking Hate you Cardinal Raymo, part of the group show Confessions at Lismore Castle Arts (2023), and Love Letters To Cardinal Raymo at Gorey School of Art, Co. Wexford (2021).

In 2025, he was commissioned by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios to make a work titled Terrible Certainty for their annual Dublin Art Book Fair. His film Whispers was shown as part of the Gaze Film Festival, where it won Best Irish Short (2022). Select solo shows include Slabs at The Complex, Dublin (2021); Select group shows include Staying With The Trouble at Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) (2025); The Scar as Archive (Stigmata Publishing), Reference Point, London, UK (2024); WEAREFETISHISTS (curated by James Merrigan), Garter Lane, Co Waterford (2022); Speech Sounds (curated by Iarlaith Ni Fhearois), VISUAL, Co. Carlow (2022); Images Are All We Have, PhotoIreland Festival, Dublin Castle (2022); Silver/Celebrating 25 years of Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin (2019); Periodical Review #8, Pallas Projects, Dublin (2018). Austin is a founding member and one half of the post-punk, goth band Satin Shadow with Glenn McQuaid. They have released 5 albums on Bandcamp. Austin Hearne is supported by the Arts Council Bursary Award 2020-2025.

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The Very End of Everything

In his latest project, The Very End of Everything, Billy Kenrick explores the concept of peripheral space, the idealisation of place, and the elusive nature of artistic revelation. Through a combination of techniques, formats, and processes, a sense of fragmentation and shifting perspective emerges. Kenrick’s work seeks to examine the indeterminate, material nature of images and their capacity to describe subjective experience.

The project is partly inspired by the story of French author Antonin Artaud’s 1937 visit to Ireland, which ended in his arrest and deportation. Artaud claimed to possess a holy relic — St Patrick’s crozier, or Bachal Isu — and sought to return the item to its native land. Artaud was ultimately drawn to the island of Inis Mór, seeking out what he imagined to be an isolated, somewhat idyllic place. He claimed to be on the brink of a visionary breakthrough, writing from Galway to André Breton: “You are going to see, once you have examined the Magic Spell, that things are about to become serious and that this time, I’m going to the very end of everything.”

The structure of the project is based on this journey, featuring images from related locations. The work is also informed by historical research and is framed more broadly as a study of the marginalised role of the artist within society.

Billy Kenrick

Billy Kenrick is an artist specialising in analogue photographic techniques used in combination with contemporary technologies. He also works with experimental sound and moving image. He applies a process-led approach to his practice, with an emphasis on the materiality of images and print media. He works in series, consolidating projects in formats such as handmade artist books, zines, and darkroom prints. His work is informed by a study of the history of photography, as well as movements in experimental film and painting. His educational background is in literature, philosophy, and fine art.

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How would you like it to happen to you?

This project offers a playful yet pointed critique of the renewed presence of traditional gender stereotypes in contemporary media. In visual cultures where masculinity remains associated with unquestioned power and femininity is frequently reduced to appearance, the work intervenes by subverting these familiar dynamics. By reversing the logic of the male gaze, it invites reflection on visibility, control, and the mechanisms of objectification.

Using found photographic imagery sourced from online platforms and search engines, the artist translates flat, two-dimensional images into tactile, three-dimensional sculptural forms. Through processes such as photomontage, kinetic automaton elements, and mechanical construction, the work reconfigures how bodies and images are encountered—shifting them from passive surfaces into interactive, unstable objects.

Historically, visual culture has reinforced uneven power structures, positioning men as active viewers and women as passive subjects. This imbalance is evident in the fragmentation and fetishization of women’s bodies, contrasted with representations of male nudity that emphasize form, strength, and artistic mastery rather than vulnerability. The project directly challenges this distinction.

The resulting anatomical sculptures deliberately unsettle these conventions. By fragmenting and reassembling the male body, the artist redirects the gaze and complicates ideas of authorship, agency, and control. Influenced by Dadaist strategies of disruption, absurdity, and anti-establishment critique, the work balances chaos with formal structure. Mechanical elements introduce cyclical movement, collapsing three-dimensional forms back into flatness and creating tension between surface and volume.

Ultimately, the project turns its focus toward the male body itself—cataloguing its parts, exposing sites of insecurity, and questioning the construction of the “ideal” male form. In doing so, it opens up space to reconsider how bodies are seen, valued, and defined.

Ciara Richardson

Ciara Richardson is an Irish photographer working primarily with collage and fine art sculpture photography, alongside ongoing experimentation across diverse genres and media. Their practice is shaped by recurring social issues and a sustained interest in how these conditions influence human emotion, behaviour, and response. A central concern is materiality, with a focus on how materials can be manipulated and recontextualised within photographic form.

Collaboration is integral to Ciara’s process. By working closely with subjects, they explore human reactions within challenging or unfamiliar situations, allowing photography to function as a participatory and investigative tool.

Looking forward, Ciara views photography as a means of engaging with urgent global concerns, including climate change, globalisation, and human rights. While addressing complex and provocative themes such as violence and racism, they prioritise ethical representation, remaining mindful of the long-term impact of images in the public domain. Respect for privacy is central, particularly within the heightened visibility of social media.

Through experimentation with tools, techniques, and materials, Ciara creates layered visual narratives that translate complexity into accessible, meaningful work, encouraging critical engagement and connection.

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Age is a privilege, unless you forget!

To select, edit, and narrate her father’s photography, albeit with his permission, is an ethical responsibility for the artist Debbie Castro. What started out as a cathartic journey of curiosity about and acceptance of who her father is has given Castro a better understanding of dementia and has offered the time to feel her way through the many emotions that this disease elicits among those witnessing its toll on a loved one. Castro knew that this process would not be easy, and there were many days when it was complete torture, but the conclusion of this therapeutic practice has been acceptance and a deeper relationship with her dad and family. Age is a privilege, but what if we forget?

This is the central question Castro explores in the ongoing project of the same title, which has developed out of a long practice of exploring mental and physical health, addressing a range of themes, such as vulnerability and control. In this project, she takes a close look at the wide-ranging effects of Alzheimer’s, reflecting on personal life and experiences as a starting point.

At the core of Age is a Privilege, Unless You Forget!, Castro considers the life of her father Charles, and elements of it that she was previously unaware of before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s eleven years ago, such as his penchant for photography and documenting moments in his everyday life, from site visits for his role as agricultural trader to family holidays and birthday parties. The artist and the father are united by a unique way of seeing and representing the world. Connecting their individual practices, they found a kind of common ground and Castro was inspired to not only scan and print the father’s images, but to manipulate and develop them further on the basis of recorded conversations with him in which she identified people, places, and objects that he has completely forgotten; remembering them vaguely but within different contexts; or can fully recall, including his wife Hazel.

Through processes of cutting, scraping, and the use of stickers to intervene with her father’s photographs, Castro is seeking to depict both the decline of his cognitive health and the physical approach she has adopted to grieve her father while he is still alive. In this project, the recurring use of stickers is intended to represent the loss of her father’s memory, while each sticker underscores the extent to which he has forgotten a particular individual, setting, or event. In this intimate examination, Castro manipulates these photographs based on conversations with him, where stickers are strategically placed over details he no longer remembers. The use of stickers is twofold: visually, they symbolise the erasure and fragmentation of memory, and metaphorically, they represent the ‘stickiness’ of dementia—how certain memories linger while others slip away, akin to the unpredictable adhesiveness of a sticker. The colours of the stickers indicate the extent of his forgetfulness, transforming these images into a tactile representation of memory loss and the physical manifestation of grief.

In the project, stickers are not just a creative tool; they are integral to conveying the complex emotions and realities of living with Alzheimer’s, making the intangible aspects of memory loss tangible and relatable. This enhances the closeness and intimacy of the viewing experience. When viewing these sliced, scraped, and crumpled images, viewers get the sense of the artist’s pain, as well as gaining an insight into the disorder and displacement of the memories of those with dementia.

If one were to combine the artist’s photographs with those of her father, it is quite possible that viewers would struggle to identify the image maker.

By illustrating the development of her father’s illness and giving his experience a physical form, this project invites others to gain a profound insight into the loss of memory. The personal becomes universal. Viewers are immersed in the life of the man, father and business owner, Charles Wynne–his work, his travels, his family–and his daughter’s experience of living and coping with his illness. Simultaneously, they are faced with thoughts and memories of their own loved ones who may be enduring the effects of dementia or other illnesses. This project then becomes a way of learning, coping, and feeling one’s way through losing the parts of a person they once knew and how that person formerly understood them.

Age is a Privilege, Unless You Forget! engages viewers and invites them to find their own unique way of responding to the project, as well as experiences they may have of witnessing the decline in memory of people in their lives. It is through engagement with this project, in the form of exhibition and/or publication, that viewers will learn more about the artist’s experience and practice, as well as discover more about themselves. The work stands as a poignant testament to the enduring power of personal history juxtaposed with the fragile nature of human memory. Through a deftly crafted blend of visual art and storytelling, this project delves into the effects of Alzheimer’s, using photography and mixed media to capture the slow erosion of memories.

The project invites a deeper understanding and empathy towards the complexities of memory loss, making it a profound exploration of human vulnerability and resilience.

Debbie Castro

Debbie Castro is an Irish visual artist whose work delves into psychological portraiture, the death instinct, and the unconscious mind. Through photography, mixed media, and physical interventions, she explores the fragility of identity, the interplay between control and surrender, and the hidden narratives buried within the psyche.

Central to her practice is the act of cutting and altering imagery—a process that disrupts the surface to expose the unspoken, the repressed, and the instinctual. By slicing, scraping, and manipulating photographs, Castro strips away layers of representation, revealing psychological fractures and tensions that exist beneath the visible self. Her work questions how memory, identity, and perception are constructed and deconstructed over time, often suggesting an underlying destructive impulse tied to self-erasure and transformation.

Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, her images function as psychological landscapes, mapping the unconscious through abstraction, fragmentation, and material intervention. Whether working with found imagery, archival materials, or staged compositions, her process plays with the liminal space between presence and absence, exposure and concealment.

Castro’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at a solo show in the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland. In 2024, she was selected for FUTURES Photography, a Creative Europe platform supporting emerging artists.

Her practice continues to challenge the boundaries of photography, materiality, and the unconscious, engaging viewers in a visceral confrontation with the unseen forces that shape human experience.

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Now is the Time

Now is the Time is a document of protest, repression, censorship, and state control.

It is also concerned with the positionality of the photographic gaze amid complex networks of digitised self-, citizen- and state-surveillance, exploring the multiple tensions between indifference, engagement, power, and performativity within the contemporary spectacle.

The protesters’ identities are concealed both out of respect for the physical and legal risks they are taking by occupying public space and as a formal reflection of a political landscape in which peaceful protest, free assembly, and critical speech are increasingly criminalised.

Dorje de Burgh

Dorje de Burgh’s practice uses photography, the archive, language, and film to explore libidinal excess within structures of power and the paradoxes of (image) desire in an increasingly fractured present.

Following nomination as a member of the FUTURES Creative Europe programme, Dorje received the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award 2020 and The Darkroom moving image residency 2020/21, producing his second solo exhibition, How To Kill Something That Doesn’t Exist, in association with PhotoIreland Festival 2021. What Are The Roots That Clutch, his first artist’s monograph, was published by PhotoIreland in January 2022

Dorje’s two most recent works—Under the Same Sky and Boring Photographs—resulted in his third solo exhibition at South Tipperary Arts Centre, a two-person site-specific show and publication launch in Berlin in collaboration with Chris Dreier of the Office of Joint Administrative Intelligence, and the historical photographic survey ‘FOTO-KUNST-FOTO’ at the Clemens-Sels-Museums, Düsseldorf.

His work is held in numerous private collections and has recently been acquired by The Arts Council of Ireland, PhotoIreland, and others for their respective public collections.

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and then I ran

and then I ran employs self-portraiture, image and text, visualising the narrative of my grandmother’s recollection of escaping a mother and baby home, 1964, Ireland. Mother and baby homes were run for over 200 years, funded by the government and run by a religious order. These homes forced unwed mothers into secrecy while neglecting to provide adequate care for mothers and babies. The project explores Ireland’s deep shame culminating from the separation and exportation of babies, as well as the oppressive conditions experienced by these women.

The work has three elements interlaced throughout. Black and white images are performative reenactments referring to the artist’s grandmother’s escape and a visual representation of loss. The colour landscape imagery brings the viewer to a specific landscape or still life to revisit a memory. Repetition lies throughout the work to nod to Freudian theories of “repetition compulsion” caused by trauma, a cycle in which you enact content that has been suppressed, repeating instead of remembering. The mixture of the three elements sits between the current day and history, going back in time to discuss ideas of freedom, distress, and confinement. The work discusses the oppressive conditions and psychological maltreatment experienced by women in Ireland. From 1922 until 1998, around 56,000 women and 57,000 children were placed into these homes.

The work uses different photographic techniques, such as long exposure, to create blur and distortion as a nod to the loss of identity that these women had to go through. In certain homes, such as the one Emily’s grandmother Muriel was admitted into, a practice whereby women were compelled to change their names was common. This was associated with the shame of giving birth and intended to diminish personal identity. Muriel had to adopt the name “Bernadette”, like many others who were named after female saints.

The artist chose not to show her face in the self-portraits as she was re-enacting her grandmother’s story, while asking further questions regarding the loss of identity women experienced throughout history.

Emily O’Connell

Emily O’Connell’s work focuses on equality and women’s health with a particular interest in phototherapy and using visual arts as a way to sensitively approach topics of trauma. She uses re-enactment and self-portraiture, as well as a research-based practice mixing documentary photography and performative elements throughout her work. Emily’s work has recently been exhibited at Peckham 24, Photo London, and was one of the Photo-book winners at Belfast Photo 2024.

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What Makes An Island?

What Makes an Island? is a multidisciplinary project exploring the contested nature of Rockall, a remote North Atlantic islet, through photography, video, archival material, and performance. By interrogating the physical and symbolic dimensions of Rockall, the project examines broader themes of territorial control, post-colonial legacies, and the fluidity of national boundaries.

In 1955, Rockall was annexed in the last land-grab of the British Empire, motivated by Cold War fears that Soviet agents might use it to spy on nuclear missile testing off the Outer Hebrides. Since then, Britain’s claim over Rockall has faced ongoing disputes with Ireland and the European Union. Although Ireland contests British ownership, it has never asserted sovereignty itself. Following Brexit, Britain’s intensified stance on fishing rights has mirrored its determination to retain Rockall, underscoring the economic and political tensions driving this territorial struggle.

At the heart of the project lies the question: What constitutes an island? Is it merely a geological formation, or does its significance derive from political, historical, and cultural narratives? Through an interplay of documentary and speculative approaches, the work investigates the strategic and ideological weight placed upon this seemingly insignificant rock.

The work incorporates a series of maps that highlight Rockall’s geopolitical relevance, some of which are presented as enlarged fragments, emphasizing the ways in which space is constructed and contested. Performance lectures offer an alternative mode of engagement, inviting dialogue on sovereignty, belonging, and the legacies of empire.

By blending visual documentation with critical inquiry, What Makes an Island? questions how territories are claimed, represented, and understood. The project positions Rockall not only as a geographical entity but as a lens through which to examine the enduring tensions between cartography, power, and identity.

Garry Loughlin

Garry Loughlin is a lens-based artist whose work interrogates power, territorial control, and the ways in which narratives are shaped and asserted. Through photography, writing, and archival material, he explores the intersection of history, myth, and geopolitics, questioning how authority is inscribed onto landscapes and collective memory.

His practice is driven by a curiosity for micro-histories—seemingly peripheral events that, when examined, reveal deeper structures of influence and control. By engaging with documentary photography’s language, he challenges the perceived neutrality of the photographic image, revealing its role in the construction of history. His use of archival material alongside his own imagery creates a fragmented aesthetic that reflects the complexities and contradictions of contested spaces.

Loughlin’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Dublin Castle (IE), Soap Works / The Centre of Gravity (UK), and The Capa Centre (HU). His work is held in collections such as the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University (US) and the Office of Public Works Collection (IE). He has also delivered performance lectures and workshops exploring the relationship between image-making, historical narratives, and performance.

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Baghdad Dawn

In 1981, when Nolan was just two, her family moved from Ireland to Baghdad for the following five years. Nolan’s father was the photographer of the family, and it’s his curated albums that the artist has been re-visiting, trying to understand and recollect their time there. A civil engineer and a tourist, the images switch easily between architectural, family album, and holiday snaps. He was employed by a German company to work on the construction of Haifa Street under the direction of President Saddam Hussein. Haifa Street was designed by renowned architect Rifat Chadirji, as a new modernist street synthesising Islamic culture with key principles of the international architecture of the 20th Century.

For Nolan, there are no real memories, just a sense of experience from what the family album evokes and the documents and ephemera her father has kept. Through ongoing conversations with her parents and sister, Nolan hears of the disconnect as ‘ex-pats’ from the local community, the fearlessness of her mother driving around Baghdad with her two young daughters in what was wartime, and Nolan continuously questions her memories of what felt like a long holiday.

Kate Nolan

Kate Nolan is an Irish visual artist based in Dublin, Ireland, focused on extended photographic stories that examine the nature of identity in areas in flux.

Intrigued by the effects of shifting histories, her practice is centred on sustained collaborative engagement with local communities and geographical locations where identity and territory are contested. Combining contemporary and archival images with oral histories and sound, she highlights the contradictions and tenuous relationships between political borders and cultural identity. This has resulted in her projects as multifaceted exhibitions, publications, and online re-narrations.

Recently, her long-term project LACUNA (2016-2022) has been supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and was a recipient of the Irish Research Council Scholarship for her Master’s by Research: Borders as a Peopled Space, at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin. Nolan has recently exhibited in the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, and Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, as part of Paris Photo Fair and PhotoSaintGermain. She has been the recipient of several residencies, recently in The Shelter, France, Digital Hub, Ireland, Headlands Centre for the Arts, California, and the Walkers Photographer in Residence, Ireland. Nolan’s work is held in public and private collections in Japan, the USA, France, Portugal, Mexico, the UK, and Ireland.

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Best Laid Plans

Best Laid Plans is the outcome of Mandy O’Neill’s four-year practice-based PhD, completed in 2025. In her research, O’Neill employed expanded photography practices to consider scenarios and outcomes in relation to housing and planning in the inner suburb of Cabra, Dublin 7.

The Cabra housing schemes were constructed between 1929 and 1948 by Dublin Corporation as a way to address a severe public health and housing crisis in Dublin’s inner city slums. Housing design in Cabra was influenced by the model of the Garden Suburb, which the new Irish Free State government saw as both a pragmatic and ideological solution to the accommodation crisis.

The modern town planning movement emerged at the turn of the 20th century, in parallel with the ‘garden city’ idea. Pioneering town planner Patrick Geddes brought his ‘Cities and Town Planning’ exhibition to Dublin in 1911, which was swiftly followed by the 1914 Dublin town planning competition. Competitors were specifically required to consider low-density suburban housing in their entries, with the prize awarded to Patrick Abercrombie, Sidney Kelly, and Arthur Kelly, for their plan entitled ‘Dublin of the Future’. An imaginative plan for the development of Cabra housing was included.

As O’Neill embarked on her research in 2020, the outcomes of new planning initiatives were beginning to materialise, resulting in the construction of two large-scale housing developments in the area. Compelled to walk and to photograph the building processes of these sites, she also recorded small everyday shifts in the built fabric of Cabra. While geo-photographic protocols, including the survey, time-lapse photography, the photo-walk, and field diaries, served as a point of departure for O’Neill’s methodology, she often relied on instinct and photographic impulse. She also engaged with residents through dialogue, photographs, and making, seeking to reflect the lived experience of housing development and the effects of planning on everyday life.

Moving beyond the often utopian premises of planning and its impact on individuals and communities, O’Neill’s work identifies slippages in time while exploring the potential of planning as a catalyst for collective transformation across the past, the present, and the future.

A first iteration of Best Laid Plans was exhibited at the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) in 2024, tailored specifically to the historical and architectural context of the 18th-century Georgian building. For New Irish Works, Mandy has reconfigured and updated elements of the work, while expanding on her site-specific approach to exhibition making.

Mandy O’Neill

Mandy O’Neill is a Visual Artist based in Dublin, Ireland. Her Expanded Photography practice encompasses photography, installation, and text, alongside recent experiments with sound and video. The concept of support structures or systems has underpinned much of her practice to date, particularly work about education and housing, and with community groups and young people. Recently, this concept has extended to observation of the built environment (and housing as a support system), and the impetus to construct photo-sculptural installations, which reflect this observation.

O’Neill’s recent PhD research utilised multiple photographic approaches in an attempt to capture the multi-layered transformations taking place in her immediate built environment. Ultimately concluding that her practice was not genre-bound but rather a multi-stranded set of ‘photographies’– a flexible visual language which is ever evolving.

Mandy holds a Practice-based PhD from DCU, an MA from IADT, and a BA in Photography from TUD. Recent exhibitions include Best Laid Plans (2024) at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin 2; ‘The Art of Sport’ (2023), Butler Gallery, Kilkenny; ‘Ireland’s Eye’ (2023), WTC and ISA Gallery Jakarta, Indonesia; ‘Making Art: Photography’ (2023), Draíocht Gallery, Dublin. Her work is held in public and private collections, including the Arts Council of Ireland, TU Dublin Faculty of Arts, National Gallery of Ireland, and The Digital Hub. She has won multiple awards, including the Zurich Portrait Prize at the National Gallery of Ireland, and has recently been awarded a three-year studio membership at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios.

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Fox=Cow

Fox=Cow is a project consisting of 8071 photographs automatically generated by a wildlife camera, intermittently over a period of two years. O’ Connor enlisted the camera, like a subcontractor, to produce photographs for her that she had no time to make herself. As a full-time carer for her mum and minder of the family farm, the camera enabled her to sustain her art practice while she committed time to caring for others. Mirroring the repetitive and sometimes glitchy nature of the camera, text also informs the project. These short texts are often unfinished or sometimes worked and reworked over and over again.

With its capacity to generate large volumes of photographs in short periods of time, the camera, as it turned out, was more of a problem than a solution. Multiple photographs of similar scenes made the process of decision-making about what to keep or what to dismiss a new thief of her time. Photographs were regularly repeated, subjects too dark, too bright, too near, too far away. Days, dates, times and years frequently got muddled up. Organisational tools and language rooted in everyday life were called on to make sense of the digital mess. Photographs were coerced into categories, filed into folders, stuffed into digital drawers in futile attempts to make sense.

After countless and often pointless schemes to order, configure, and control, the solution revolved around concepts of letting go. It lay in accepting the inconsistencies and errors and finding ways to tolerate the shortcomings and mistakes. The remedy uncovered a shared set of traits between the camera and caring, where moments of endearment, points in time worth remembering, or rare occasions of time well spent, mixed haphazardly, like cake ingredients, with half-finished jobs, incomplete lists, and repetitive, never-ending work.

For this presentation of Fox=Cow, a selection of random photographs is chosen from the large repository and presented in combinations, sequences, and sets. The selection pays homage to moments that matter, to things that feel important, to points in time worthy of attention. Universal paper ratios of A4, A3, A2, serve as spaces to reflect on the dual nature of Miriam’s life, of care and caring, of work and play, of day and night, of seen and unseen labour. The presentational strategies echo the non-linear ways in which the work was often produced and appraised, in bits and pieces, in fits and bursts, and regularly, towards the end of the day.

Miriam O’ Connor

Miriam O’Connor is a visual artist and small farmer from Cork in southern Ireland. She received a BA in Photography from DIT (now TU Dublin) in 2007 and a Research Master’s at IADT in 2011. In her lens-based practice, she is curious about the multifaceted roles photography occupies in culture and the manner in which this persuasive medium permeates the way we encounter the world around us. She employs photography in conceptual, playful, and inquisitive ways, and her projects regularly acknowledge the complexities and limitations of the medium that communicate her ideas. Her practice primarily encompasses photography, text, and printed matter, while diverse methods, approaches, and contexts are frequently employed for presenting her ideas. Following her relocation to the family farm in recent years, she occupies a dual role of artist and farmer and is interested in engaging with the elasticity and functionality of photography through everyday agricultural life. In attending to her day-to-day farming tasks, she often wonders what photography should do, or how, like other things on the farm, it could be put to work in meaningful ways.

Recent awards include Cork County Council – Creative Artists Bursary (2026), Arts Council Visual Artist Bursary (2024), Platform 31 Award (2022), Arts Council Agility Award (2021), Arts Council Visual Artist Bursary (2020), and the Visual Artists Ireland Experiment! Award (2020). O’ Connor was recently selected for PhotoIreland’s New Irish Works Programme, 2025-2027. Recent work includes Not Business As Usual, a new commission with the Glucksman and Cork University Business School for the UCC Art Collection (2023), The Fertiliser Spreader in ‘A Growing Enquiry, Art and Agriculture’ at the Royal Hibernian Academy (2022), Camera at the Mart at Roscommon Arts Centre (2022). Other recent solo shows include Tomorrow is Sunday at Macroom Town Hall, Co. Cork (2021), at Ashford Gallery, RHA, Dublin (2021), and Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh (2020). Publications include the Condition Report Register (2022), Tomorrow is Sunday (2020), The Legacy Project (2013), and Attention Seekers (2012). Her work is part of FUTURES, a photography platform that pools the resources and talent programmes of leading photography institutions across Europe, and A Woman’s Work, a project that uses photography and digital media to challenge the dominant view of gender and industry in Europe. She is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Cork County Council, Visual Artists Ireland, and Culture Ireland.

Visit Miriam O’ Connor’s website →