Artists

Augustine O’Donoghue is a visual artist based in Dublin whose practice spans photography, documentary film, painting, sound, live performance, installation, publications and event-based work. Her work engages with a range of local and global issues and is deeply informed by her involvement in political activism.

O’Donoghue has exhibited widely throughout Ireland and internationally. Her work has been presented at venues including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Crawford Art Gallery, Project Arts Centre, Limerick City Gallery of Art and Butler Gallery, as well as internationally in China, Brazil, Canada, the USA, France and the UK.

Solidarity and social justice have been defining features of O’Donoghue’s practice over the past two decades, with a sustained commitment to addressing human rights, inequality and the social and political forces that shape everyday life. She has developed interdisciplinary and collaborative projects with diverse communities, including refugees, scientists, students, migrant workers, academics, members of the Traveller community and social organisations across Ireland, Latin America and Africa.

O’Donoghue was a founding member and co-director of the Wexford Documentary Film Festival (2009–2020), an annual festival dedicated to films exploring social, political and environmental issues. She has also been commissioned to create public artworks for the Department of Education and Skills, Kerry County Council and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

She has worked extensively across a range of educational contexts, developing collaborative projects and public artworks through processes of collective learning, research and participation. She has also been a guest lecturer and invited speaker at third-level institutions throughout Ireland.

In 2020, O’Donoghue was appointed Artist-in-Residence in the College of Engineering and Architecture at University College Dublin. In 2023, she was appointed Artist-in-Residence on the Data Stories Project at the Social Sciences Institute, Maynooth University. In 2024–25, she undertook the Collective Futures residency with Common Ground as part of School of Thought, a collective practice developed with Conor McCabe.

She has received a range of awards, including the Eamon Kelly Award and the Victor Treacy Award, as well as numerous awards from the Arts Council of Ireland.

School of Thought is currently developing a major new critical public art project in collaboration with local residents, activists and community networks in Dublin 8. The project explores the flows of capital and their impact on housing, land and community in Dublin 8.

Mel Galley’s artistic practice is (somewhat) constellation-shaped, weaving together research, making, teaching and writing. Building from research on planning, housing, data and place to create speculative worlds, Mel uses narrative and modelmaking to welcome audiences into these deeply personal debates. Often, she is found fabricating in workshops, digging through archives, searching across databases, wandering within landscapes and bookbinding in the studio.

Mel holds a Masters in Art and Research Collaboration from IADT, 2025, and a Professional Diploma in Digital Making from NCAD, 2026. Her work has shown across Ireland and the UK, including the LAB Gallery, BETA Festival and Signal Film and Media.

Mel is the inaugural artist-in-residence at Marsh’s Library for the Museum Plinths Project, 2026, and was an artist-in-residence for Data Stories at Maynooth University, 2023-2024. Her artist books are held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and (as importantly) on the walls and bookshelves of strangers and friends.

Ella Harris and Hannah Mumby are a creative partnership with combined experience in illustration, graphic design, game design, interactive interfaces and experimental methods. They regularly collaborate with and work within cross-disciplinary research projects, helping researchers to find creative ways of doing and communicating research. Ella and Hannah are interested in using humour, subversion and experimentation to activate new modes of attention and to bring research to life in novel ways.

Helen Shaw, (BA, MA, MSc), is a digital storyteller, documentary-maker and writer engaged in climate justice and housing research and solutions. She is a former journalist and broadcaster who leads Athena Media, an award-winning storytelling agency.

Between 2018-2022 Helen created 'This Is Where We Live,' an audio-led Dublin housing project and website, supported by Dublin City Council. When she undertook an MSc in Climate Change, in 2022, she focused on the polycrisis of housing and climate and developed work that led to her engagement as an artist/writer in residence with the Data Stories Project and collaborating on the City Edge study. Her storytelling work, relating to the City Edge, including audio, text and images can be seen on the website 'This Is Where We Live'.

Helen is currently leading a Just Transition programme in the Midlands called Tóchar Stories, documenting the changing relationship of people and places with the bogland; in the transition from fuel to nature. She is editing a book on this work called 'Where the Curlew Calls,' published by Lilliput Press in 2027.

Joan Somers Donnelly is a Dublin-based artist with a collaborative performance practice. They are primarily concerned with examining existing social structures and creating not-yet-existing ones, using live performance situations as testing grounds for experiments in different ways of relating and knowing. For Data Stories Joan created scores for conversation and mapping involving drawing, objects and movement in an attempt to bypass conventional social scripts and open up different ways for the stakeholders to reflect on their data practices, making space for the subjectivities at play.

Much of Joan’s work in recent years has focused on the creation of frameworks for exchange and collaboration, such as the group improvisation practice messing, the platform for experiments in one-on-one collaboration You and Me, an Anger Club, The Truck Stop Cultural Center with Does Vandoesselaere, and a practice-sharing space for women and genderqueer artists called In practice(s). Previous performances include Everything Can Be Dismantled, an interactive fantasy about the politics of housing in Dublin (2018); You and Me, Here and Now, a lecture performance about the first year of You and Me (2021); and most recently the improvisation-based co-creation project when the world shifts, in collaboration with people living with brain injury and a multidisciplinary artistic team, in partnership with Headway Ireland (2025). Joan is currently a studio artist at Rua Red.

Sean Borodale works as an artist and writer, often using interdisciplinary, situated approaches. Output includes film, voice, staged sculptural installation, print, radio, poem-work, essay. Notes for an Atlas, a 370-page topographical poem written whilst walking around London, was adapted and directed in collaboration with actor Mark Rylance as Monument for a Witness for Southbank Centre, and raised questions about surveillance inside everyday acts of witness and the many crossing narrative paths which make the fleeting composite urban experience.

Sean has four collections of poetry published with Jonathan Cape/Penguin, his debut Bee Journal being shortlisted for a Costa Books Award and TS Eliot Prize. Mighty Beast, a BBC Radio poem-doc feature about cattle markets won the Radio Academy Gold Award for Best Feature or Documentary.

Other work includes a 2-year engagement with people of Liverpool on Ulysses Democracy: a city-wide recorded reading of James’ Joyce’s novel and a series of recorded conversations around themes of family archive, politics, ethnicity, racism, political resistance, now lodged as an audio archive with Liverpool Central Library. As inaugural writer-in-residence at the Portiuncula University Hospital at Ballinasloe, Sean established Sólás, a hospital-wide project exploring dreams and realities of solace with staff, nurses and patients over a period of 3 months.

Sean’s poetry is internationally acclaimed, widely anthologised and features on a number of higher education/ third level teaching and research programmes in environment, situated writing, nature, ecology. His teaching includes the Slade School of Fine Art and Trinity College Dublin.

Dr. Conor McCabe is a researcher and historian. He works mainly with grassroots political, trade union, artist, and community groups, and is currently editing the complete writings of James Connolly.

Clara McSweeney is a curator, researcher, and artist from County Cork, currently based in Dublin. From 2023 – 2025, she completed the ARC-LAB Curatorial Scholarship with the Dublin City Arts Office and The LAB Gallery. Additionally, as part of the scholarship, she was a fully funded student in the IADT Art Research Collaboration Master’s program, where her master’s project Now Listen Closely Fellow Humans was shortlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards and won the Taylor Art Trust Award 2025.

Clara's current research interests lie in the peculiarities of certain vacant spaces in Dublin City, the potential dystopian future stemming from the housing crisis and potential flooding as a result of climate change. Previous experience includes: Curatorial Assistant at the LAB Gallery and Curatorial Resource Development Manager with the National Sculpture Factory, Cork. Currently, she is working as a Programme and Outreach Manager (Maternity Leave) at Fire Station Artist Studios.

Conor Burke is a visual artist, activist and construction professional based in Galway city, Ireland. His artwork utilises geometric structures and architectural images to explore the dialectical processes of change that shape our built environment, to critically examine how architecture, urban planning, and spatial design have historically perpetuated and reinforced socio-economic inequalities. Through his work, he aims to stimulate debate, raise awareness and challenge the dominant narratives that have marginalised and disempowered working-class communities and minorities within the context of a class-based society. Burke adopts a multidisciplinary approach by utilising a diverse array of mediums, including painting, sculpture, installation, video/digital media, collage, and drawing.

As a long time political activist Burke infuses his art practice with a deep sense of social justice incorporating themes of equality, inclusion and solidarity while often challenging prevailing social narratives that perpetuate class and social inequities, his recent work adapts the conceptual framework of brutalist architecture and places it in a contemporary context as both a form of critique and the potential that exists in dealing with political and social difficulties that encapsulate the contradictions of capitalist class based society.

@the_liberties_sos is an online artist-led photographic and film archive examining corporate-led gentrification, displacement and community resistance in Dublin's Liberties. Through long-term documentary practice, Meek and Caffrey explore how photography and film can act as both cultural record and civic intervention, examining the relationship between place, memory, housing and spatial justice while building a public archive of a community undergoing profound change.

Their work has led to collaborations, public talks and screenings with organisations including the Community Action Tenants Union and The School of Thought, founded by artist Augustine O'Donoghue and historian and educator Dr Conor McCabe. Their films were presented as part of Culture Night 2023, curated by Contemporary Quarters. Writing in The Irish Times, Una Mullally described @the_liberties_sos as "one of 2025's top activists to watch". Meek also contributed to Mullally's podcast Saving the City, which explored gentrification in Dublin. Their practice continues to contribute to public conversations on housing, heritage and spatial justice in Ireland.

Aoife Ward and Eve Woods work together as Con: temporary Quarters since 2022; a collaboration inspired by the rapidly changing landscape of Dublin city. This project focuses on the replacement of cultural and community spaces, unique architecture and amenities with large, closed developments pushing users towards a short term lifestyle through anti-community focused architecture.

They have presented a number of performances and public artworks including A Cultural Tour of Hotels in The Liberties (2022), An Couch Pleanala (2022), How to Exist in a Public Space (2022), Open House (2023). In 2023 they exhibited Con: temporary Quarters, in StayCity Tivoli’s ‘exhibition space’. This exhibition exposed the failure of the planning system to preserve and protect communities through provision of space.

Select exhibitions include NCAD Research Show, NCAD Gallery, 2026; Guzzle, 2026; Liquid Urbanisms, curated by Clara McSweeney, in The Lab Gallery, 2025; The Cosmos, The Earth and Us, WOWTE A4 Sounds, Dublin, 2025, Satire, Gentrification, and Dissent: Cultivating a City of Care through Arts-Research Collaboration in Dublin’s Liberties, Data Stories (Maynooth University, 2025); Sluice Radio, Céad Míle (Fail)te, Con: temporary Quarters, 2025; Ranelagh Arts Festival, Ranelagh Arts Centre, 2025; Performative walking tour; Gentrification, Uneven Development and Resistance in the Liberties by Lidia Manzo of City of Care, for the 35th International Geographical Congress 2024, The Perennial Affair: An Exploration Between Art and Politics, Trinity College Dublin.

Aoife Ward is a sculptor with a BA Honours in Fine Art from NCAD & AKI ArtEZ, (2019), and a Post Graduate Certificate in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship from TCD (2023). Recently, Ward has exhibited in Spring '26, Draíocht Gallery, NO INTENTIONS, Peripheries Gallery, Gorey and completed a residency in The Kiosk Project Space, Drogheda. She is currently preparing for an exhibition in Pallas Open Projects, November 2026, curated by Mark O’Gorman.

Eve Woods is an artist, curator, and researcher based in Dublin. Her practice includes organising, collaborative research, and artistic production, engaging themes of resistance, humour and intimacy within social, digital, and spatial systems that structure contemporary experience. Recent projects include Wild Culture, Culture Night 2026; Obedience, an exhibition about buildings, The Liberties Festival 2026; I’ve got nothing left to give, IWD 2026; Salon of Diúltaíodh, Gallery X, 2025; & AFAR textile art and sustainable practices residency, Maramures Romania, 2024.