Exhibition Programme 2024 & 2025

Please note that dates are subject to change. 

The School of Hibernia (after Raphael)
Friday 1 to Monday 11 November 2024
James O’Driscoll Gallery

This project by the art collective Na Cailleacha, is part of their ongoing aim to increase visibility for women artists and to challenge patriarchy. They have taken a key work of European Renaissance art history, Raphael’s School of Athens (Vatican Museum 1509–1511), and recreated it to reflect a more inclusive world view. Raphael’s original fresco drew together the dominant influences on academia deriving from Ancient Greece and led by such male figures as Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes. Na Cailleacha’s full-scale re-enactment of Raphael’s School of Athens with an all-women cast is set in the Museum Building of Trinity College Dublin. This image features forty-one contemporary Irish women from a variety of age profiles and backgrounds, all leaders in their fields, who have contributed to human knowledge.

Na Cailleacha is a collective of six visual artists: Helen Comerford, Barbara Freeman, Patricia Hurl, Rachel Parry, Therry Rudin, Gerda Teljeur; one jazz musician Carole Nelson and curator/writer Catherine Marshall who have come together to explore being female, older creatives.

 

 

Meshworking
MA Art and Environment Graduate Exhibition

23 November to 21 December 2024

This curated exhibition features the work of the MA Art and Environment students – Dianne Curtin, D. Martins Lerias, Terry Farnell, Hina Khan, Niamh Seana Meehan, Niamh Ní Chearbhaill and Fiona Hayes. The MA Art and Environment (MAAE) uniquely combines post-studio art practice, interdisciplinary research, virtual teaching, Island Studies and community engagement, and is delivered across the islands of West Cork since 2020 by TU Dublin and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Caoimhín Gaffney
All At Once Collapsing Together
11 January to 15 February 2025

All at Once Collapsing Together brings together film, photography and text for a cross-pollination of ideas about different relationships within our natural environment: the bog as a liminal site of death and transformation, climate change, climate anxiety, healing through psychedelics, the importance of wildlife to our sense of self, and the legacy of colonisation.

An ambitious new body of work, this touring exhibition with Butler Gallery, Kilkenny (lead partner) and Highlanes, Drogheda examines the restorative power of nature, alongside the irreconcilable reality of climate change. The exhibition represents a huge development in the artist’s practice, as he expands from his film work into an installation of multi-screen film, medium format photography, printed text pieces and neon text.

 

 

 

 

 

Debbie Godsell

Flail (working title)
22 February to 5 April 2025

This new body of work encompasses a peripatetic clash of history, tradition, custom and ethno-cultural notions as seen through the lens of the harvest. Harvest time in Ireland is an annual event that has both divided and bound communities across all aspects of life, for many centuries. Famine, war, religious tensions, social divisions, providentialist belief, love and folklore are all bound up in the complex rituals and labours related to the gathering in of grain.

The exhibition augments work created by Debbie in 2023, which re-evaluated the silences in the historiography of the collecting of Protestant stories of custom and belief in Southern Irish museums and archives, mainly relating to the custom of the harvest thanksgiving, which itself has rich and complex origins.

Through an eclectic fusion of film, installation, printmaking and digital photography Debbie re-evaluates our current understanding of identity construction, nationality, and belonging within a multicultural contemporary Ireland, creating a vital space for dialogue in relation to a minority community and its inherent historical tensions and entanglements.

WCAC acknowledges the financial support of Arts Council Ireland and Cork County Council in making these exhibitions possible.