Luan Gallery is delighted to present Affective Forms, a group exhibition featuring work by Tara Carroll, Sian Costello, Phelim Hoey, Áine O’Hara, Day Magee, and Rajinder Singh.

Affective Forms will open to the public on 10 February, with the official launch taking place on Friday 13 February at 6:00 pm. The launch event will feature a guest address by Dr Tina Kinsella, Head of Research at IADT, as well as a performance by exhibiting artist Day Magee. All are welcome to attend. The exhibition will run until 22 April.

Affective Forms is a multidisciplinary group exhibition that explores evolving representations of the human body in contemporary Irish art through painting, photography, sculpture, performance, installation, and film. Foregrounding the lived experiences of bodies often marginalised in mainstream visual culture, Affective Forms brings together works that rethink the human body not as an isolated or idealised figure, but as a relational, sensing, and meaning-making site, while examining the emotional and spatial connections between body and environment.

Phelim Hoey’s film MPQ investigates pain, embodiment, and identity through the lived experience of Multiple Sclerosis. Hoey examines the limits of clinical language and the silences pain imposes. This extends into the La Machine photographic series, reflecting bodily malfunction and alienation, and Therbligs, which reinterprets early twentieth-century motion studies to challenge productivity norms. Across film, photography, and 3D wire models mapping movement with a cane, walker, and wheelchair, Hoey questions standardised measurement systems while asserting agency over the body.

Tara Carroll’s interactive sculptural installation is part of the ongoing project Resonances Ripples. It is an expanding transdisciplinary body of work that explores haptics, bodily autonomy, gender, and disability, and uses accessibility as an integral part of the creative process. Resonances Ripples, a term coined by writer Ellis Light in their essay ‘Trans/Mystical Fluids’, refers to the reimaginings of historical texts and objects, revealing the multiplicities of trans/queer selves. Developed through collaboration and workshops, the installation challenges the fixed senses of community, instead creating asynchronous communities through ripples, touches, and interflows. It pivots on the transference of touch; we are in community with Others we might never meet. The tactile elements of the stone sculptures, textile and sculptural furnishing pieces invite the viewer to touch and experience the work with their bodies and their senses, and become an active participant in this intimate and engaging artwork.

The newly commissioned video installation BODY DOES BE by Day Magee frames performance as the body and mind moving through time and space under continuous acts of witnessing, by others and by the self. Through a “motion diagram” set to the artist’s voice, Magee maps being-in-the-world as one life among many, emphasising the habitual present and how one typically moves, thinks, and relates. The film functions as a speculative guide to how one “does be” within a shared, continuously unfolding life.

Sian Costello’s paintings use performative self-portraiture to explore figuration and art history. Using her body and camera obscura techniques, she collapses the roles of artist and model, reflecting on lived female experience and interrogating the figurative painting tradition. Private, domestic performances are translated through camera obscura, digital photography, and painting, with images shaped by digital residue, painterly mark-making, and muscle memory, allowing Costello to decide how much of reality remains visible.

Working through photography, sculpture and text, Áine O’Hara’s work is informed by queer and crip* theory, disability justice scholarship, and lived experience as a multiply disabled, chronically sick queer person. Produced during extended bed confinement, the work reflects fatigue, pain, isolation, and reduced capacity, yet asserts presence in public spaces where sick and disabled bodies are often excluded, challenging assumptions about access, visibility, and legitimacy.

Rajinder Singh’s Held Between Measures presents performed photographic and moving-image works along the River Liffey, where bodies negotiate tension with land, rope, gravity, and gesture. Performers are suspended and partially absorbed by the landscape, with rope mapping and extending the body while revealing its limits. Drawing on ritual and choreographic restraint, the work positions the body as an interface shaped by inherited systems of power, with gestures resisting collapse or release, presenting the Irish body as a site of continuous negotiation between constraint, resistance, presence, and erasure.

Information on the exhibition and accompanying upcoming events can be found at luangallery.ie and on Luan Gallery’s social channels @luangalleryathlone on Instagram and Luan Gallery on Facebook. Affective Forms will continue until Sunday 12th April. Admission to the gallery is free for groups and individuals. Tours for schools and groups can be arranged by contacting the gallery in advance. Luan Gallery is open to the public Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am – 5 pm and Sundays from 12 – 5 pm.