2025
Exhibition Residencies
Residency 17/6/24 - 14/7/24
Niamh Fahy’s practice investigates the use of experimental printmaking, photography and installation to examine tensions emerging from slow violence and environmental degradation. Her work is concerned with human notions of boundaries and ownership. Her work challenges perspectives on anthropogenic hierarchical structures that limit imagination and create a sense of separation from other living beings. Through her use of scale and perspective, she assembles conflicting narratives of intimacy and anxiety, arising from both the slow thinking of embodied experience and the accelerated pace of capitalist demand. She constructs imagery and installations that interrupt, repeat and dissolve, inviting the viewer to re-imagine the complex and often contradictory relationships between humans and land dynamics. Concerned with ideas of reciprocal perception between body and place, her work evolves from somatic experiences of land through the thoughtful handling of materials and installations within a multidisciplinary print practice. Her work imagines the rituals, narratives and objects that might challenge and make permeable the boundaries between bodies that inhabit the land.
Her practice is attentive to finding gaps beyond language where artworks can be used as a vehicle for empathic encounter with the other-than human.
Niamh Fahy is a visual artist and researcher from Galway, for the last four years she has worked as a Research Associate at the Centre for Print Research (CFPR) at the University of the West of England. She completed her BA in Fine Art Printmaking at the Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland and holds her MA in Multidisciplinary Printmaking, University of the West of England (2019) and she is currently studying to complete her PhD. Through her practice, she investigates the possibilities and capacity for the print artist to challenge and expand modes of understanding anthropogenic changes within landscape. Her research investigates how print artists can contribute to understanding hydro-morphological changes within the landscape as a result of slow violence. Between 2021 and 2023 she was awarded the UWE HAS-ACE connecting research project grant for the project Slow Violence and River Abuse: The Hidden Effect of Land Use on Water Quality.
The purpose of the project was to engage communities in the issue of declining water quality through producing an exhibition and publication. She collaborated with environmental scientist Dr. Gillian Clayton to create an extensive body of work in response to the relationship between land use and aquatic health. In 2021 she was invited to work on collaborative research project Púca in the Machine. A body of printed work was developed in response to the building of a hydroelectric dam, Poulaphuca reservoir and the subsequent tensions rising between community, technology and other-than-human inhabitants. Exhibited at Blessington Library, Co.Wicklow and accompanied by a public talk, the project was also awarded exhibitions between Nov 22 to Jan 2023 at Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre, Limavady and Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at shows including The Masters: Relief, Bankside Gallery, London. The RWA, Bristol. The TYPA letterpress and Paper Arts Centre, Estonia. International Printmaking Conference Impact 9, Hangzhou, China and Woolwich Contemporary Printmaking Fair, London. Niamh was a member of the IMPACT 12 International printmaking conference, 2022 organisational team, she developed and chaired multiple panel sessions in relation to printmaking and environmental change and was an academic reviewer for the conference. She is the recipient of multiple awards including the 2019 Intaglio Printmaking Prize, The Rebecca Smith Memorial prize and the The Paul Hipkiss Memorial Prize, RBSA. Most recently she has been awarded the KUNSTKVARTERET Lofoten International Residency, Norway, 2024.
Past Residencies