Artist-Initiated Projects 2026

Biographies of selected Artists:

Paddy Critchley is a painter working in Dublin, Ireland. Also a painter and decorator his approach to art making is symbiotic to his lived experiences.  He is interested in painting in its ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms; on canvas, painting and decorating, and in sign-painted lettering. His work traces people’s stories through oral traditions in Ireland such as the singing of ballads, telling of stories and the transmission of the Irish language. Paddy is interested in painting life as it unfolds around him. 

@paddycritchleyart / paddycritchley.com

Fiona Marron is a visual artist based in Co. Monaghan. Her research-based practice predominantly manifests as moving-image installation for exhibition, while her wider process often combines print, text, drawing and sculptural methods. Stemming from an interest in human behaviour, her work traverses interconnected social systems within various contexts of trade, industry and labour environments - with projects regularly unearthing the material and social infrastructures that underpin them. 

Previous solo exhibitions have been at Artbox, Dublin (2016); Flat Time House, London (2015); RUA RED South Dublin Arts Centre (2013); The Joinery, Dublin (2010 & 2011) and FOUR, Dublin (2009).  Her work has been presented in several group exhibitions and film screenings across Ireland, along with international venues including CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo of Torino, Italy. She has been awarded numerous residencies including the inaugural artist-in-residence program at the Irish Architectural Archive (2019), Askeaton Contemporary Arts (2016), UCD Art-in-Science (2015) and most recently at Cow House Studios, Wexford (2025). Her work has featured in publications including Art Monthly, MAP and Paper Visual Art. She holds a BA in Fine Art from DIT (2009) & an MA in Visual Arts Practices from IADT (2013). Her practice has been supported by Arts Council Bursary Awards (2017 & 2020) and Agility Awards (2021 & 2024).

fionamarron.net

Finn Nichol is a multimedia artist based between Dublin and Offaly. He uses a playful, DIY language, rooted in history and folklore to explore cultural value systems and economic time. Recent work has seen him embody spirits of neoliberal Ireland-  enacting strange, solitary rituals through homemade outfits, music and drawings. Characters and narratives reoccur across works, altered in each iteration, while conceptual elements are autobiographically integrated, grounding personal histories of chronic illness and economic instability within a broader Irish historical framework.

Nichol graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design in 2021 where he was awarded student of the year and won the Taylor Art prize at the RDS Visual Art Awards. His 2024 MFA work from Belfast was awarded the Catalyst Graduate Award and longlisted for the RDS Visual Art awards. Other grants/ awards include the D/deaf disabled artist support fund (2025) by the university of Atypical, the Offaly Arts Office Professional Artist Support Grant(2025) and the Agility Award (2025).  His work has been shown across Ireland as well as at festivals and exhibitions in Venice, Athens, Tokyo, and Barcelona.

@finnnichol_ / finichol.com

Emma Brennan is an interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in performative practices including multi-media installation, moving image and collaborative processes. Based in Belfast and originally from Dublin, her practice finds public outcomes in exhibitions and festivals locally, nationally and internationally. Brennan is a current board member of Bbeyond, Belfast and Live Art Ireland, Tipperary. She is also the founder of QRIT Belfast, a queer crit group. Brennan is a former Co-Director of Catalyst Arts Belfast. She is a current member of the 2025/26 cohort for the Freelands Foundation Syllabus programme. 

Brennan’s practice engages the multiplicities and nuances of Irish identity through a Queer Feminist lens. From our oral histories and the embedded presence of the grotesque in our mythology, to the current context of a post colonial Ireland under capitalism, Brennan challenges and dissects her position as an artist in relation to these contexts within her work. Recent works include Girls Who Like Beuys (2025) at Ulster Museum,  her solo exhibition It Is & I Am (2024) at Belfast Exposed Gallery, MANTLE (2024), Riddles Warehouse with Catalyst Arts.

@emma_breadman / emmabrennanartist.com

Thomas Wells is an independent Artist and Curator based in Belfast working in socially engaged performance practice that often utilises public events and social gatherings as vehicles for story telling that impact visibility and representation of LGBTQIA+ shared experience. Research and archive led, these performances, events and exhibitions often fixate on characters or objects from history that have impacted queer cultural life, reflecting social change through arts, culture and activism. Thomas is particularly interested in how these artefacts resonate through the social psyche and how these can be transferred through live performance. These actions are intimate modes of communication and learning and can help to shape/re-shape communities especially at times of social and political threat to LGBTQIA+ rights globally. Through archival research semi devised scores are created to use as a guide for performance with space for diversion and improvisation. 

In 2025 they began ‘A Queer Dander’ an LGBTQIA+ project documenting the history of Belfast Pride established in 1991, two years prior to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland. Other recent projects include, It Turned Out Nice Again (Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2024) a research project into queer working class nostalgia and biography.  Thomas is currently Artist in Residency at Platt Hall Manchester, and member of Array Collective who create large scale collaborative actions in response to sociopolitical issues affecting the north of Ireland.

@myspecialistsubject / thomaswells.me

Ciara Rodgers is a visual artist based between Cork and Waterford and works across drawing, installation, performance, and Polaroid photography. Her practice explores the entanglement of body and building, tracing how power, gender, and capitalism shape our physical and psychological experience of space. Through walking and material reconfiguration, she constructs fragile yet defiant assemblages and situations that expose the quiet contradictions and resistances embedded within urban environments. Looking between what shelters, confines or controls, Rodgers’ work occupies the threshold between the poetic and the political, the embodied and the architectural.

She holds a First-Class Honours MA in Art & Process from MTU CCAD (2018). A studio member of Backwater Artists Group and Cork Printmakers, she was awarded a Visual Art Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2020 and an Agility Award in 2021. Her work has been exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally, and often unfolds through collaboration and site-responsive research. Solo presentations include Folly | Façade at GOMA, Waterford (2024), Green Mouth at SIRIUS, Cork (2023), A City of Beautiful Nonsense at Studio 12, Cork (2022), Monuments II at Garter Lane, Waterford (2020) and Monuments of Abandoned Futures at LHQ Gallery, Cork County Council (2019). 

Rodgers has recently written for JAWS: Journal of Art & Writing and Source and is completing a practice-based Ph.D at SETU Waterford.

@ciaraarodgers / ciararodgers.com

Struàn Bell is a Scottish-Irish visual artist working across drawing, sculpture, painting, and art writing. He lives and works in Cork, where he is a studio member at Sample-Studios. A graduate of Limerick School of Art and Design (BFA, First Class Honours, 2023), Bell has received both the Arts Council of Ireland’s Agility Award (2024) and Visual Arts Bursary (2025), and was a member of The Douglas Hyde Student Forum in 2024. Alongside his studio practice, he is actively involved in exhibition production across Ireland, working as a technician with organisations including EVA International, Limerick City Gallery of Art, and The Glucksman.

Bell’s work has been exhibited widely across Ireland, with presentations at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, The Complex, Ormston House, and other artist-led and institutional contexts. His practice centres on the construction of symbolic and speculative forms, objects and scenes that inhabit a space between architecture, ritual, and abstraction. Through sculpture, drawing, painting, and writing, he explores how meaning is projected onto material, and how speculative objects and architectures can hold some form of meaning or belief without revealing their function. His works often recall the intimacy of mementoes or devotional artefacts, where the act of imbuing significance becomes central to their presence. Faceted gemstones, echoing the language of jewellery, serve as the focus of this projection, points where private sentiments meet public display. Grounded in symbolic form and spatial logic, Bell’s practice reflects an ongoing inquiry into the Sublime as a condition of awe, rupture, and metaphysical unease, constructing spaces and objects where meaning feels suspended, reverent, and charged with the unknown.

@struanbellartist / struanbell.com

Christopher Mahon is an artist

neonatus.exe: it's not about us

@neonatus.exe / neonatus.neocities.org