Niamh Coffey—Siúnta

Pallas Projects/Studios are pleased to present Niamh Coffey—Siúnta, the third exhibition of our 2025 Artist-Initiated Projects programme.

.............Enter under intertwined necks of birds in love. Please don't let the PDA make you queasy. A hungry and disembodied mouth looms over you, spitting frantic toads and teeth out onto the floor. You step back to avoid them and bump into a small and ugly spiked creature. It scuttles past, leaving a trail of juicy, spit-covered blackberries behind. Please do not be tempted to snack right now. A ladder tumbles down from the moon, droplets of milk following. Two conjoined eggs whisper as you pass by. You didn't catch the words but the tone seemed ominous, especially in this duplicitous Gemini season. You go to leave and a sweaty hand presses something conspiratorially into your palm. You look down, a wriggling worm. Nice....................

Taking its name from the Irish for a seam or joint, Siúnta weaves together disparate narratives into imagined ecological relationships. Forms of flesh, fur, flower and feather mingle and merge. Subjects develop symbiotic relationships, exhibit unfamiliar actions and establish neoteric habits together.

In 1937-39, the Irish Folklore Commission asked primary school children to collect local history from their relatives and neighbours. Nestled in exercise copies, between thousands of stories detailed in meticulous handwriting, lie tales of metamorphosis and binary-blurring. Hares become milk-hungry witches, needy children are turned to stone, gooseberries transform sore eyes, tadpoles swirl in boggy bellies. Siúnta uses these instances of metamorphosis as departure points to wriggle further into absurd and imaginary realms. These archives show that in an earlier Irish imaginary world, the boundaries that separate us from nature and other entities were not so separate and fixed, but porous and blurred.

The exhibition was made by gathering these stories of binary-blurring between humans and non-humans and making drawings based on them. These drawings then played together, created links and found connections, they were collaged together, their elements were extended and emphasised, their actions sped up and slowed down, their beginnings swapped with their ends, subjects up and left one story for another. Narratives eventually emerged from this process and were brought into a textile world, a medium used because of its rich history with collaborative story-telling, connotations to gender and queerness and ability to physically join separate elements together.

These collaged narratives offer a humourous invitation to envisage new ways of interacting with and existing within the larger matrix of nature and the earth. This work is guided by the concept of queer ecology, which asks us to abandon ideas of human exceptionalism and anthropomorphism and instead asks us to see humans as part of a complex and interwoven system, whose patterns and processes are different from our own.

Event

Biography:

Niamh Coffey is a Dublin-based artist from Laois, working through textiles and sculpture. Their work experiments and collages ideas from ecology, queer theory and Irish folklore to create imagined ecological relationships. Their debut solo exhibition was held in Cultúrlann, Belfast in March 2025. Niamh graduated from NCAD in 2016 with an honours degree in Sculpture and Expanded Practices.

Previous exhibitions in which their work has featured include: Borders at Rua Red; Work/Force/Field/ at A4 Sounds and; Atelier Páipéar at Workhouse Union. Upcoming shows in 2026 include solo exhibitions at Custom House Gallery, Westport and GOMA, Waterford. In 2023, Niamh took part in peripheriesPOST, an experimental art school and mentorship programme in Gorey School of Art. In 2022, Niamh received an Agility Award from the Arts Council. In 2024, they were awarded Laois County Council's Tyrone Guthrie Centre Residency Bursary and an Arts Act Grant in 2025.

Instagram: @niamhnomilktwosugars

Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 8 x 3-week exhibitions taking place from March-November 2025. 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.