Exhibition Launch: Friday 8th August, 5pm-8pm
Gallery opening times - 11am - 1pm & 1.30pm - 4pm Wednesday to Saturday
Exhibition closes Saturday 6th September 2025
Matters of Process is a new series of exhibitions that explores the work of artists who completed a Technical Development Research Residency (TDR) the previous year at the Centre. During their research phase, artists conducted experiments with diverse materials and objects, examining the often hidden processes and energies involved in their creation. Matters of Process highlights these processes and showcases how they influenced the generation of new work and ideas.
Niamh Fahy
Niamh's new work, Cornucopia (2025), adopts a playful approach to addressing tensions around ownership and boundaries in the landscape. Separated from their bodies, disobedient cows’ tongues roam freely in the gallery. Disembodied and loosened from notions of human ownership, the viewer’s presence interrupts their gathering. Indifferent to inhabiting built environments, a rising insurgence is imagined as these creatures assemble and occupy the space. She investigates the body as unfixed, moving between states of print and casting, shifting forms continually recompose themselves, leaving behind traces of previous identities. Referencing folklore and local stories, speculative characters emerge to examine tensions between bodies in response to anthropogenic hierarchical structures.
Niamh Fahy is a visual artist and researcher from Galway. She completed her BA in Fine Art Printmaking at the Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland and holds an MA in Multidisciplinary Printmaking, University of the West of England (2019) and she is currently studying towards completing her PhD. 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. Find her at @niamhfahyart & http://www.niamhfahy.com/
Lucy Mulholland
Lucy Mulholland’s sculptural practice explores ecological precarity, interspecies entanglement, and the ethics of care through labour-intensive processes such as mould-making, slipcasting, and metal casting. Humour and play are key strategies, allowing her to navigate the emotional complexities of crisis. Developed during her Technical Development Residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2024), this body of work reflects on how small, seemingly futile gestures gain weight in the face of environmental collapse. Works include darkly playful metaphors like Frog in a Pot and Am I Causing a Commotion?, alongside process-led pieces referencing human and non-human bodies, inaction, risk, and the possibility of more hopeful futures.
Lucy Mulholland is an artist based in Belfast. She holds a First-Class Honours degree in Sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art (2022) and was awarded the 2025 Gilbert Bayes Award by the Royal Society of Sculptors and the Meyer Oppenheim Prize at the 195th RSA Annual Exhibition. She has exhibited across Ireland and the UK, including Hidden Door Arts Festival (Edinburgh), AWAKEN (Artlink, Buncrana), Materials, Messages and Meanings (R-Space, Lisburn), and They Had Four Years (GENERATORprojects, Dundee). Residencies include the Bothy Project and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. In 2025, she received SIAP funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Blaine O'Donnell
Blaine O'Donnell has created new work investigating the sculptural potential of electro-mineral accretion processes. In neamhábhartha (2025), limestone deposits gradually build up on wire forming the Irish word (meaning immaterial or incorporeal) in a tank of mineral-enriched water. In the work nithiúil (2025), the Irish word (meaning real, concrete, corporeal) is inscribed by hand into a thin layer of limestone dust on the gallery window. O'Donnell explores the art object as a site for the meeting of disparate things – Carboniferous Period limestone, metals, electricity, water, solar energy, and the Irish language - tracing points of separation and connection between the material and incorporeal, presence and absence, artwork and place.
Blaine O’Donnell is an artist working primarily in sculpture. O'Donnell received the 2019 Emerging Irish Artist Residency Award at the Burren College of Art, followed by the exhibitions CAOL ÁIT, BCA, Clare (2019) and CAOL ÁIT Cuid a Dó, 126 Gallery, Galway (2020). Recent exhibitions include hinder/further,The Complex, Dublin (2022), and TWO PHOTOGRAPHS AWAY, Ardgillan Gallery, Balbriggan (2024). Residencies include the Temple Bar Gallery+Studios / HIAP Residency Exchange (2023), the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico (2024), and Fire Station Artists' Studios, Dublin (2024/5). Awards include the EMERGENCE Award, Wexford Arts Centre (2024) and the Paul Robinson Award, TBG+S (2025)
Kate Oram
Kate Oram used her Technical Development Residency to explore welding as a meditative, repetitive practice, creating fractal-inspired steel assemblages, working with the Fibonacci sequence and recursive geometry to echo tree growth. The process became a form of three-dimensional drawing — translating sketches into lines in space, guided by the visual logic of trees’ natural patterns. These sculptures invite quiet attention and propose that engaging with rhythmic, organic forms can support a sense of calm, connection, and embodied reflection akin to spending time in nature, especially woodland environments. The work is part of a broader enquiry into the wellness potential of Forest Bathing and nature-based art.
Kate Oram is a sculptor and ecological artist working with bronze, stone, and nature-based processes. Gaining a BA in Wood, Metal, Ceramics and Plastics at Brighton Polytechnic in 1991, she completed an MA in Creative Practice at IT Sligo in 2021, deepening her engagement with the landscape and exploring more conceptual, environmentally focused approaches. Her practice is shaped by ongoing residencies at Drumhierny Woodland Hideaway and annual research residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and currently integrates Forest Bathing and nature art in primary schools. Rooted in materiality and ecological connection, her work has been exhibited in Ireland and abroad, including Sculpture in Context, Dublin, and Bloodroot, Pulchri Studio, The Hague (2025). www.kateoram.com
Sonya Swarte
Sonya Swarte is fascinated by mechanical devices, like early cameras because of the physicality of them and the illusions they create. The moments captured in photographs, drawings, prints, collages or moving images can move through time and space and meaning. For this exhibition Sonya wants to show where our reels and videos originated, whilst showing the mechanics and the illusion that is created by looking at still images played with intervals at a fast pace (generally 24 per second in film).
Sonya Swarte grew up in The Netherlands where she acquired a BA in Archaeology in 2005 at Leiden University. In 2007 she came to Ireland and has since been based in Leitrim where she lives with her three children. Swarte finished an Art and Design course (ETB) in 2017 and a Masters in Creative Arts (ATU Sligo) in 2022. During the Masters she started working in film photography and (stop motion) animation and later made a collaborative work entitled Bridey, with M. Blake, which was shown at the Galway Film Festival that year. In 2023 Swarte took part in the Chervona Kalyna animation project for Creative Leitrim and is based at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre where she continues to explore various ways of printing, developing photos and super 8 film. In 2025 Swarte joined the art collective ^ in Manorhamilton and is also a member of the Manorhamilton Print group where she facilitates print workshops with other artists.
