Dynamic new group exhibition to open in Solstice at weekend
Invitation to opening reception in Navan on Saturday
Opening at Solstice Arts Centre in Navan this weekend is 'Moments of Being', a dynamic new group exhibition curated by Brenda McFarland, which explores the diversity of approaches to painting by some of the most interesting Irish artists working today.
The exhibition includes figurative, abstract, experimental, open and expanded painting practices by established, mid-career and emerging artists. Ideas and themes explored include personal narratives, observations of everyday life, the body, identity and place, the natural world, contemporary culture, history, politics, the real and the virtual, and the materiality and essence of painting.
The exhibition features new works from established, mid-career, and emerging artists, including Laura Fox, Paul Hallahan, Elizabeth Magill, Colin Martin, Ciarraí MacCormac, Eleanor McCaughey, Eve O’Callaghan, Lesley-Ann O’Connell, William O’Neill, Ciara Roche, Annette Smyth, Mark Swords and Lee Welch.
Through their unique lenses, they reflect on contemporary life and its complexities. Several works in this exhibition are being shown for the first time at Solstice Arts Centre, offering audiences an exciting opportunity to view new and innovative approaches to painting. Laura Fox, Lesley-Ann O’Connell, William O’Neill, and Annette Smyth, are all based in Meath, adding a local connection to this expansive exploration of contemporary art.
Moments of Being invites visitors to engage with the materiality of painting, the essence of the medium, and the powerful stories each artist tells through their work. Whether through figuration, abstraction, or the blending of multiple styles and concepts, the exhibition provides a window into the varied ways in which artists respond to their world, capturing moments of existence, reflection, and expression.
Opening Reception
Solstice invites anybody interested to attend a reception on Saturday 18th January at 2.30pm to celebrate the opening of this exhibition. The curator, Brenda McFarland, will be on hand to discuss the exhibition and the selected works.
Exhibition Details
Moments of Being will be open to the public from 2.30pm on Saturday until 4pm on Saturday 15th March, and can be viewed during regular opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11:00am – 4:00pm. Admission is free.
The Exhibiting Artists
Laura Fox’s new paintings explore parallels between American Minimalism and Irish Minimalism in the works of Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, and William McKeown. By merging elements of these three artists’ works through a process of improvisation and mimicry, Fox creates a playful juxtaposition of their practices that invites a meta exploration of their shared philosophies and values. The work highlights the kindred approaches to painting seen in American artists Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin’s work, as well as the harmonious resonance connecting Agnes Martin’s work with that of Irish artist William McKeown. Each work from the series finds its origin in the work of others, forming a closeness with related aesthetics and shared narratives of the past. This process explores the longevity, variety and uniformity that can be seen within the broader scope of professional art practice and questions our understanding of what an authentic work of art is and the possibility of creating something partially or wholly distinct from what is already in sight.
Her practice, working within painting, examines the parallels in contemporary art and the development of increasing uniformity in artistic production. Drawing from existing artworks, she critically engages with recurring themes in relational aesthetics, examining how these themes shape and inform artistic expression. Fox’s work makes frequent reference to art historical discourse, utilising existing artworks to explore the merging's and slippages inherent within painting. By employing processes of improvisation and mimicry, Fox considers the extent to which an artwork can be fully informed or discovered. She fundamentally questions our understanding of creativity and its relationship to authenticity in contemporary art. Selected Exhibitions include The Annual Surveyor, the Solstice Arts Centre, Meath 2024, GradX at Technological University Dublin, Grangegorman 2023, Antecedent, the Cowshed Theatre, Phoenix Park, Dublin 2022. Recent Awards include the Arts Council Agility Award 2024 and the RDS Visual Art Awards Longlist 2023. Her work is part of the OPW State Art Collection, and she holds a BA in Fine Art from Technological University Dublin 2023.
Paul Hallahan – “In my work, I aim to create a space for contemplation and reflection on our (humans) relationship with the natural world. I believe that art has the power to connect us to the present moment and to challenge our perceptions of ourselves and our place in the world. I use a variety of mediums, including painting, moving image, and sculpture, to explore these themes and to create works that are both visually striking and thought-provoking. My process begins with research and material exploration, as I collect source images from wild, non-urban locations in Ireland. I then abstract these images through a process of layering, manipulation, and subtraction, creating works that are both familiar and strange. I am particularly interested in the un-focussed image, as I believe it connects more closely to the concerns I have about the world around me and can convey ideas about the power of art in a world driven by the digital screen. In my paintings, I often use light layers of paint, allowing light to move through the work and change depending on the distance of the viewer. I am interested in the connection between material and craft in painting, and how this can be used to reflect on our relationship with the environment. In contrast, my moving image work explores the ephemeral nature of digital and film-based images, and how they present to the viewer in contrast to the invitation of painting. Overall, my art practice seeks to question the position we have found ourselves in as human beings, and how we can live in harmony with the natural world to protect our future survival. I believe that art has the power to connect us to the present moment and to challenge our perceptions of ourselves and our place in the world. Through my work, I hope to create a space for contemplation and reflection on our relationship with the natural world, and to inspire others to engage with these important issues”.
Paul Hallahan is based at Fire Station Studios in Dublin. His work circles back to the same questions, always: nature and our place within it, the struggle to see clearly, to hold steady. He paints, mostly, though sometimes he sculpts, and every so often, he turns to video. In 2009, with Waterford City Council, he co-founded Soma Contemporary, a gallery that gave space to artists and ideas, holding steady until 2012. Since then, his work has travelled, appearing in galleries and shows across Ireland - Hang Tough Contemporary, The Complex, The Lab, and the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin; Berlin Opticians Gallery and Roscommon Arts Centre; and a two-person exhibition that moved from Municipal Gallery dlr Lexicon Gallery, Dublin to Garter Lane in Waterford, Sternview in Cork, and Platform Arts in Belfast. Hallahan’s efforts have been recognised. In 2018, he won the Golden Fleece Award, a quiet testament to the care and patience in his practice. His paintings have found homes in public and private collections-The Arts Council, Trinity College Dublin, and the Office of Public Works among them.
Elizabeth Magill – ‘Landscape painting for me evokes an illusional space. An area in which I attempt to create a sense of place. Perhaps it comes from recurring thoughts connected to the rural landscape of my youth. A scenic location in the far north of Ireland, a region I’m still drawn to, but nevertheless a terrain which has been marked by a history of division and conflict’. Magill quotes John Berger ‘Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place….landscapes are no longer only geographical but also biographical and personal’. , and
Born in Canada, Magill grew up in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in London. Magill received a BA Fine Art Painting, Belfast College of Art, 1982; and MA, Slade School of Art, UCL, London 1984. Recent solo exhibitions include Sometimes a landscape, Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London, 2024; by this river, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 2023; Flag- Iris, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, 2022; Red Stars and Variations, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 2021; Her Nature; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 2020; In two Parts, 12 Star Gallery, Europe House, London, 2019; Still (dark), Matts Gallery, London, 2019; Headland, Touring exhibition, Limerick City Art Gallery and Museum, Limerick, The RHA, Galleries, Dublin, The New Art Gallery, Walsall, Ulster Museum, Belfast, 2017-18.
Colin Martin is an artist and lecturer based in Dublin. He is currently the Head of School at the Royal Hibernian Academy. His most recent exhibition Empathy Lab was held in the Centre Culturel Irlandaise in Paris and toured to the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda earlier this year. Martin is the curator for the RDS Visual Arts Awards 2024 which showcases the work of leading visual arts graduates held in the RHA. He works primarily in painting and his practice explores the role of technology and digital cultures in our lives. Martin’s current practice is concerned with the intersection of analogue painting with digital and technological cultures. The practice explores spaces that blur boundaries between the real and virtual and where technology, culture and politics have become synthesized. For Moments of Being, he exhibits a number of works from the Empathy Lab series in addition to new painting exploring futuristic procedural cities that are generated through CGI and hand rendered in paint through means of the Zorn palette.
Ciarraí MacCormac born in Antrim, she currently lives and works in Belfast. MacCormac is a Fine Art graduate from Bath School of Art and Design (2014) and she was the inaugural Freelands Studio Fellow for Belfast School of Art (2023-2024). MacCormac has been the recipient of awards; BEEP Painting Biennial (2024) Shortlisted, AIR Open (2024) Shortlisted, British Contemporary Painting Prize (2024) Long-listed. MacCormac has exhibited both Nationally and Internationally, upcoming shows include; Solo Exhibition CCA Derry/Londonderry autumn 2025.
Ciarraí MacCormac’s work centers on a highly attuned bearing toward the materiality of paint, engaging specifically with what she calls ‘paint skins’. Her paintings challenge the perceptions of materiality, function and how painting can exist. The paint skins have a shapeshifting quality, they are always in a transitory state and never quite caught. The operations of reconfiguration and chance are at the forefront of making. Recurring themes in MacCormac’s work are: care, intervention and renewal.
Eleanor McCaughey’s practice explores thematic threads surrounding the body, identity and place, using symbols and metaphors that best express personal narratives. Watery hybrids, drowning dames, flailing females, peace offerings, magnetic moons, brain fog on the horizons and empathic monsters emerge in the work. McCaughey's work is continually evolving through research, studio-based experimentation and current reflections on the body through lived experiences of endometriosis and infertility, out of which her conceptual concerns take shape.
Born in Dublin, McCaughey studied at TU, Dublin. Selected exhibitions include Whispers of rhythm balance on my hands, Draiocht, Dublin 24, A sea change into something rich and strange, RHA, Dublin, 24, Swallowing Mist to Lick Your Mouth, Margate, UK, 23, Forget Your Cares, Sow Your Wild Oats, sin is a Wonderful Disease, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, 23, Bones in the Attic, Hugh Lane Gallery,Dublin,22, SuperMarket Art Fair, Stockholm,21, Vignettes, Richard Heller Gallery, LA USA,19
Eleanor McCaughey is a recipient of the Fingal County Council Bursary 2020-24, Arts Council Ireland Bursary Award 2019-23, RHA Residency Award 2022, The Temple Bar Project Award 2021, and the Next Generation Award 2018. Her work is represented in the OPW, Fingal County Council, Arts Council of Ireland art collection, and private collections nationally and internationally.
Eve O’Callaghan’s recent work combines stainless steel frames with traditional painting processes to create minimal, abstract works. O’Callaghan’s paintings are selected from two series - Mirror Series and Shadow Paintings. These paintings search for beauty and purpose in the act of repetition. In each series, a single rule of shape and process has produced several unique outcomes, with the subtle differences from one piece to the next being at the core of the work. Drawing from Minimalism and Zen, O’Callaghan’s paintings relate both to each other and to their surroundings, simultaneously framing both a carefully set and painted surface and the wall that lies next to it. There is only a slight difference between the painted surface and the wall, visible in the shifting tones of colour and shadows cast within the frames as the light changes within the work. These paintings question the certainty of what we see whilst relying solely on the most basic functions of the materials of a painting: frame, surface and light. In this, the work speaks to simplicity and the potential for peace and beauty in paying acute attention to our surroundings.
Eve O’Callaghan was born in Dundalk in 1996 and now lives and works in London. She gained an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2023 and a BA in Fine Art and Visual Culture from NCAD in 2017. Her work has been shown widely across Ireland; in the RHA, The Complex, The Dock and Pallas Projects. Her solo exhibitions include Low Light at Ballina Arts Centre in 2024 and Allotment at The Complex in 2021. She held the Temple Bar Gallery & Studios Recent Graduate Residency in 2019 and won the Adams Award at the RHA annual in 2018.
Lesley-Ann O’Connell has a varied painting practice. She creates paintings that each have their own individual quality or aspect. She embraces the differences between them as well as their similarities. Her work encompasses abstraction and figuration, diverse paint applications, attention to colour, line, composition and surface to create movement and feeling within the work. Recurring themes include views, casual still-life, flower arrangements, seascapes and more recently ducks. Stemming from her interest in views through windows, she regularly employs framing devices in her work. Frames give an opportunity to contain the pictorial space but also push against it depending on how they are used, creating movement and dynamism.
For most of this new work, she has incorporated collage and stitching. With the arrival of her son her studio time has become more limited. Before, she could spend long periods in the studio exploring and experimenting with paint, using chance moments as well as working through layers to develop works. Now with shorter time on her hands, working in collage has been a way to keep the process fresh and exciting. Strips of paintings are ripped up and rearranged to create new compositions. These works are tacked together using stitching, pins or staples. This process draws on her family tradition of craft and needlework. It also allows her to complete works at home with her son when she can’t use the studio. Working in this way has allowed for different considerations and new exploration in her practice.
Lesley-Ann O’Connell is an artist living and working in County Meath. She graduated with a Bachelors and a Masters in Fine Art Painting from NCAD in 2008 and 2014. Solo-exhibitions include Yellow, Pink and Blue Horizon (2022) and Midnight Swim (2019) with Kevin Kavanagh Gallery; Surface in Motion (2015) with Pallas Projects/Studios. Between 2008 and 2024 she has participated in group shows in Dublin and countrywide including Taylor Galleries, Monstertruck Gallery, The Complex, Pallas Projects/Studios, The Model, Custom House Studios, Visual, Dunamaise Arts Centre and Solstice Arts Centre. Past online collaborations include Outside In Instagram Takeover, Lockdown Series with Solstice Arts Centre (2020) and CSR Artist Initiative with DHR Communications on YouTube (2019). Prizes include Painting Prize at Claremorris Open Exhibition (2017); AXA Ireland Purchase Award (2008). In 2009 NCAD Gallery awarded her a two-person show with Sanja Todorović. Public collections include, AXA, IMACT (FORSA) and OPW. She completed her first residency with Joya: arte + ecología / AiR, Almeria, Spain (2023). O’Connell is represented by Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.
William O’Neill’s paintings are process driven. He meticulously creates still-life scenes, which he photographs and works from. He’s interested in these still-life arrangements for their angles, shapes, the positive/negative space they create, how the objects interact with each other and their potential as subject matter. For this body of work O’Neill has focused on handbags and clutches. He sees their creative possibility within the limits of their simple rectangular forms. There has been a shift in composition from the full object view to close-ups. This allows the objects to become obscured from their identity and take on a more abstract appearance where colour, lines and marks converge to intriguing effect.
William O’Neill is a visual artist living and working in Meath. He graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Art Painting from the National College of Art and Design in 2009. In 2023 he undertook an artist residency at Joya: arte + ecología / AiR, Almeria, Spain, 2023. ‘Luminous Gatherings’ his first solo exhibition took place at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in 2022. He was the recipient of the Solstice Visual Arts Award at Solstice Arts Centre, 2021. In 2019, he was shortlisted for the RHA Hennessy Craig Award. His first artist book, William O’Neill Paintings, was published in 2023 by Kevin Kavanagh. Recent group exhibitions include; Bucolica Open Call Exhibition, Artform, Mount Congreve Gardens 2024; Surveyor 2024, Solstice Arts Centre; 194th RHA Annual Exhibition, RHA; Open Submission Group Show 2023, Dunamaise Arts Centre, 2023; Connections, Boyle Arts Festival, 2023.
Ciara Roche makes paintings which are often small scale and sometimes very large scale. These paintings are derived from her own photography, film stills and found imagery and are made wet on wet with paint pushed around edge to edge creating lines and forms bringing a seductive, lush quality to the surface of the works. Through use of colour and its application light becomes an almost tangible thing, daubs of bright paint are flicked around to create this uncanny, too shiny world. These paintings are framed for occupancy, the viewer is invited to enter and insert themselves into the scene, to imagine themselves getting into the car or sitting around the glass table - but to do so at their own peril.
Ciara Roche received her MA Art Research and Collaboration (2019) and a BA in Visual Arts Practice (2015) from the Institute of Art Design and Technology/IADT. Recent solo exhibitions include honeymoon at Butler Gallery Kilkenny (2024), nightcall at the Ashford Gallery, RHA (2022); of late… mother’s tankstation, Dublin (2021); Here and Away, The LAB, Dublin (2019); and St Carthage Hall, Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford (2016). She has exhibited widely in two-person and group exhibitions including in Purdy Hicks Gallery, London; The Glucksman, Cork, Greystone Industries, UK, Wexford Arts Centre. Roche is a recipient of the 2022 Next Generation Award, numerous Arts Council & ArtLinks Bursaries and won the Éigse Graduate Prize for outstanding work in VISUAL with Carlow Arts Festival in 2020. Her work is represented in many private and public collections throughout Europe, America and China.
Annette Smyth, a Navan based painter explores ideas about the temporary and ‘Work in Progress’ in a new body of paintings. Working in acrylic paint, Smyth’s paintings often look realistic and are invariably an exact copy of the artist’s source photographic image from which she works, seeking the truth of the image. Smyth’s paintings included in the exhibition are upright, frontal views of building renovations or new builds which show the protective netting that covers the buildings. Sometimes some of the building is visible and this gives a sense of scale. This is something that Smyth is interested in playing within the image. ‘Very often the scale is not obvious. It is something that comes as a secondary element on first inspection. What interests me most is the way light acts on the netting and how the netting obscures the building underneath. This takes the real into abstraction without changing the image in any way. I am still painting what is real but the image straddles the real and abstraction. This, for me is where the beauty lies.
"I am also interested in the mathematical makeup of the images and how a man-made source plays out as an artistic endeavour. There is no room for error in the lines, angles and shapes. This appeals to my sense of order and completion. I am meticulous about working out the drawing and pay homage to the detail and math in the process. This same meticulous attention to detail carries forward into colour matching and tonal values. I don’t consider my paintings ‘photographic’ as they are produced in acrylic paint, using layers rather than blending, but they do have a very close relationship to the photographic image. It is only in the painting do I really understand the image I have taken. Tension is built into the painting through the complex relationship with the light on the curtain or covering and the building underneath, especially if the curtain is transparent. You can tell the building is one way, however, the light suggests something different. Connecting these two visual elements can often take time and sitting with these paintings is important to me’. Annette Smyth studied fine art at GMIT and University of Ulster, Belfast. Smyth made a series of lens based and performance work in the late nineties and early 2000, and began to paint in 2020. These new paintings mark a pivotal point in Smyth’s artistic practice.
Mark Swords (b.1978, Dublin) is an artist who lives with his family in County Wicklow, Ireland. Although principally a painter, Swords’ work also includes sculpture, collage and text. His work is best described as open and unrestricted, incorporating numerous influences and a diversity of interests such as crafts, history and literature. In recent years installation has become a notable aspect of Swords’ work such that it often involves the elaborate construction of spaces in which to exhibit his paintings. His artworks and exhibitions include multiple, and often contradictory references, both personal and historical in an attempt to reflect the inherent confusion of contemporary culture.
Swords has had significant solo exhibitions at The Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, Dublin (Tribuna, 2021) and Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin (The living and the dead, 2017). His recent exhibitions include The List and the Line with Alan Phelan at The Casino, Marino, Dublin, I must walk toward Oregon at Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, Portico, 2021, with Tanad Aaron at The Complex, Dublin and TAUCHGANG, 2019, a group exhibition at Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne. Lost Highway Guy, 2018, was Swords’ fourth solo show at Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin. Other notable exhibitions include, VOLTA Basel, 2014 and I won’t say I will see you tomorrow, 2013, a group project and multi-venue exhibition based on the writings and architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Swords was the recipient of the AIB Art Prize in 2011 which resulted in a solo exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre titled Mosaic. He has had two books published on his work, Tribuna (2022) and Mosaic (2012).
Lee Welch was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1975 and currently lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Welch creates gestural, atmospheric paintings that attest to the psychical and emotional depths of his chosen subjects and map out delicate negotiations between beauty, desire, and the painted image. Depicting figures from his own milieu, as well as from history, literature, music, and tennis, Welch finds feeling in that which he depicts, always rendered with the intensity of his particular humanism; a close looking akin to love. In each subject’s specificity, the artist reveals the universal feelings that connect us to each other, and that stretch from our present moment back through time.
Welch received his BFA from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in 2009 and his MFA from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam in 2011. He has since been widely exhibited internationally and received numerous awards. Recent exhibitions have taken place at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain; Glucksman Gallery, Cork; Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. His paintings are in private and public collections such as the Arts Council, Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane and the OPW - State Art Collection.