04/03/2024—09/11/2024
Artist-Initiated Projects 2024
Pallas Projects/Studios are delighted to announce the participating artists in our Arts Council funded programme of Artist-Initiated Projects 2024. The series of 8 x 3-week exhibitions between March–November 2024 will present exhibitions of new work by: Emily Waszak, Lee Welch, Namaco (Han Hogan & Donal Fullam), Karen Conway, Siobhán McGibbon, Neva Elliott, Luke van Gelderen & Conan McIvor.
Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 8 x 3-week exhibitions taking place between March and November 2024. This unique programme of funded, artist-initiated projects selected via open call is highly accessible to artists, with a focus on early career, emerging artists and recent graduates. Projects are supplemented with artists' talks, texts, workshops or performances, and gallery visits by colleges and local schools.
Artist-Initiated Projects aims to act as an incubator for early careers, and support artists' practices at crucial stages, providing a platform for artists to produce and exhibit challenging work across all art forms. The model of short-run exhibitions with a relatively short turnaround time of 3–6 months is an alternative to the normal institutional model, where the process of studio visit to exhibition can take several years. Shorter lead-in times allow the programme to be quick and responsive, reflect what artists are currently making, and encourage experimentation and risk-taking.
Opening times
Wed 12 - 5
Thur 12 - 6
Fri - Sun 12 - 5
Mon - Tue Closed
Biographies of selected Artists:
Emily Waszak is a Donegal-based visual artist. With a background in industrial weaving, her textile, sculpture and installation work has been exhibited in Ireland and internationally, including most recently at IMMA as part of the RDS Visual Art Awards. Recent solo exhibitions include: Grief Weaving, Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny; Shadow and Fold, Arts Itoya, Japan; To Guide Shadows, Old Church Grangegorman, Dublin. Waszak is the recipient of the Arts Council's Visual Arts Bursary in 2020, 2022, 2023 and the Donegal County Council's Artist Bursary in 2022 and 2023. In 2022 Waszak was Artist in Residence at DCU. She was awarded the Artist in the Community Award in 2016 and 2021 from the Arts Council and Create. Waszak also received the Arts Council's Agility Award in 2021. She is a member of Praxis artist union.
@emily.waszak.art | @grief.weaving
Namaco emerges from a decaying Dublin to unleash bizarre edutainment products on unsuspecting landlords. Headed by development team Han Hogan and Donal Fullam, NAMACO makes games that demystify housing precarity, cultural space scarcity and the effects of corporate landlordism in Dublin for a generation of renters unwillingly trapped in adolescence.
Dr. Dónal Fullam (he/him) is Assistant Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries, based in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. His research deals with music and art in contemporary algorithmic culture, focusing on the philosophical and technical foundations of algorithmic music composition, human-computer creative relationships and intersections between art and technology in general. He creates video games in Unreal Engine and Godot, primarily centered around musical interaction, individualism, and algorithmic culture. He has been involved in underground DIY punk for over 20 years, playing and recording with many different bands throughout Ireland and around the world in a variety of legal and extra-legal settings.
Han Hogan (she/they) is an artist with a background in science. Alongside collaborator audio producer Kit Callin (they/them), they co-created and design visuals for Mooar Residency, a radio show celebrating experiments in music and sounds by genderqueer and marginalised communities that has been running on London’s Resonance 104.4FM for the last 5 years. Han’s interest in audio and visual art extends to the DIY events they regularly put on in Dublin, which occur outside the boundaries of designated cultural institutions. Han runs a mobile screenprinting unit with friend Keilah Cass (she/her), which is used as a live installation at festivals and as a press for housing activist groups.
donalfullam.com | @han_hog | @donlf_
Siobhan McGibbon is a Visual Artist, Researcher and World-builder with a transdisciplinary, art, science and narrative practice. Her expression merges sculpture, animation, drawing, text, permaculture and participatory installations.
McGibbon created the world of Xenophon with writer Maeve O'Lynn to query post Anthropocene futures. The world unfolds with each body of work, collaborating and researching with practitioners in specific fields to build the narrative.
Xenophon is activated in multiple contexts; galleries, labs, gardens, site-specific and virtual interventions. Including; Galway Arts Centre (2023), Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2021), Sirius Arts Centre (2019), Triskel Arts Centre (2018), The Science Gallery(2017), TULCA (2017), The LAB (2017), Millennium Court Arts Centre (2016) and Galway City Museum(2015).
Recent Solo exhibition: Making Oddkin with Japanese Knotweed (2023), explored a multi species community approach to the problem of invasive species and pesticides, through a large body of sculptural work and material gestures inspired by ecology, entomology & plant spirit-shamanism
Research residencies: The Material Way(2024), REMEDI, Regenerative Medicine Institute(2016), CÚRAM, Centre for Research in Medical Devices(2015), Histology, Radiology and Pathology departments, Galway University Hospital(2014), Mutter Museum and Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians, Philadelphia,(2014).
Academic qualifications: PhD,TUS,(2020) and BA(Fine Art), GMIT(2009)
siobhanmcgibbon.com | @siobhan_mcgibbon
Luke van Gelderen is a visual artist based in Dublin. His interdisciplinary practice examines the performance and mediation of contemporary identities through technology. Converging celebrity culture, alienation, masculinity and violence, he creates immersive installations grounded in his own experience of recurring intrusive thoughts and images amplified by the internet. Recent exhibitions have included: ‘this is perfect, perfect, perfect’, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Transmediale, Berlin, 2024; ‘CRUX’, B63, Witten, Germany, 2024; ‘LOCKJAW’, Ranelagh Arts Centre, Angelica Network, Dublin, 2023;
‘FAKE BODY’, Platform Arts, Belfast 2023; ‘you breathe differently down here’, Draíocht
Gallery 2022; ‘Rendering New Realities - Access and Alterity’, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, 2021; ‘unrecognisable (spillway)’, a solo show at Ormond Art Studios, 2020; ‘My Activity’, a solo show at Rua Red, Dublin, 2019; ‘Chatroullete’, a solo show at K4 Galleri, Oslo Art Weekend, 2019. He was awarded and Arts Council of Ireland Visual Arts Bursary (2022,
2023); Zeitgeist Irland 24, Culture Ireland & Embassy of Ireland in Germany Funding
(2023),Three Year Studio, TBG+S (2023-26) Recent Graduate Residency, TBG+S (2022);
Studio Residency, SÍM, Reykjavík (2022); Studio Residency, BEK, Bergen (2022); DLRCOCO Emerging Artist Bursary (2022,2024); Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award (2021); Ormond Art Studios Graduate Award (2020).
Lee 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 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. Born in Kentucky and based in Dublin, Welch’s work has been featured in numerous institutions including the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University; The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.
Karen Conway is an Irish artist and educator based in Galway. She studied in IADT, Dublin and completed postgraduate study in Limerick School of Art & Design and The Crawford College of Art, Cork. She works through drawing, usually pencil on paper. In 2023, she was awarded an international residency with ARE Holland, where she showcased her drawings at B93 Atelier Stichting en Kunstenaarsinitiatie in Enschede, The Netherlands. During the same year, she received the Tyrone Guthrie Centre bursary from Galway City Council, leading to a residency at the centre. Conway was also a featured artist in a recently published book by Thames and Hudson, released in September 2023, focusing on contemporary drawing. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the Derwent Drawing Prize, London.
In 2019, she completed a residency supported by the Science Foundation of Ireland with CÚRAM in the National University of Ireland. She was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, London in 2021 and also had drawings acquired that year by Aerogen Pharma and Novartis, Ireland. Her work is also held in the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery collection and Microsoft Ireland and is kindly supported by The Irish Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
karenconway.work | @karenconway__
Neva Elliott is a Dublin-based artist and writer with an MA from Central Saint Martin’s, London. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and internationally, including the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, The National Gallery of Ireland, and The South African National Gallery. After a decade as CEO of Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s leading contemporary music group, Elliott returned to her practice full-time in 2021.
Highlights from 2023 include her solo exhibition, How to create a fallstreak, at Linenhall Arts Centre, showing as an invited artist at the 193rd RHA Annual Exhibition and showing at ARTWORKS 2023 Remembering The Future at VISUAL Carlow, where she secured an award for ‘outstanding work’.
VISUAL Carlow also commissioned an excerpt from her ongoing memoir, which can be read at visualcarlow.ie/art-ideas. Other writing has been featured in literary journals, art and photography publications, and as exhibition texts, including Banshee, Unapologetic Magazine, Visual Artists Newsheet and Source Photographic Review, where it earned runner-up in Source's New Writing Prize for 2023.
Elliott is an Irish Hospice Foundation signature artist.
nevaelliott.com | @nevaelliottartist
Conan McIvor is a Multidisciplinary Artist & Director who tells stories across Cinema, Theatre and Visual Art. He creates fiction, documentary and experimental films, video installations, immersive environments and live performance. His work has been exhibited in galleries, festivals, national theatres, cinemas, broadcast on national television and held in the Arts Council Northern Ireland collection.
Conan studied Interactive Multimedia Design at Ulster University before receiving an MA in Film and Visual Studies from Queen’s University Belfast during which he was awarded NI Screen’s Bill Miskelly Award. Most recently, Conan received a certificate in Storytelling for the Metaverse from the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
Since 2007, collaborating with local groups and communities to tell their stories has been at the heart of Conan’s artistic practice. His documentary “Across and In-Between” (2021), made in collaboration with the renowned socially engaged artist Suzanne Lacy, premiered at Kunstsammlung, Dusseldorf, and screened more recently at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast before travelling to The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester. The film explores the profound impact of the land border in Ireland on the lives of the people who call the area ‘home’.
In 2022, Conan was nominated for Best Video Design at The Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, received the Visual Artists Ireland Experience Award with Vivienne Dick, received D-Light Studios Dublin Creative Residency Award, and was the British Council’s Filmmaker-in- Residence at Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris. Conan will be the AUGE NEXT Artist in Residence at the Athens Digital Arts Festival Summer 2024.
ID: Black backgroung. Read on the top: Artist-Initiated Projects. Read on the bottom: Pallas Projects/Studios. Black font highlighted in dark pink.
ID: Portraits of the artists selected for the Artist Initiated Projects 2024: Emily Waszak, Lee Welch, Namaco (Han Hogan & Donal Fullam), Karen Conway, Siobhán McGibbon, Neva Elliott, Luke van Gelderen & Conan McIvor.
Audio description: soundbite.speechify