False Start is an exhibition bringing together two early career Irish artists, Léann Herlihy and Lauren Conway. Spanning installation, sculpture, drawing, painting and performance, it invites its audience to reflect on the meaning of winning or losing, inclusion and exclusion.

Probing at ideas of access, both Herlihy and Conway are concerned with those who fall through gaps in the system, those that frameworks fail to serve. The exhibition questions linear progress, the binary of success and failure in contexts like education and sport, and explores how people, ideas and knowledge can exist in spite of, around and through restrictive structures.

Léann Herlihy grew up in rural Waterford and has exhibited across Ireland and internationally. This exhibition at GOMA will see Herlihy return home to present work in county Waterford for the first time. The pedagogical dimension of Herlihy’s practice is in part informed by their role as an educator at the National College of Art and Design. Lauren Conway’s mark-making lends an empathetic and perceptive eye in carrying out detailed studies of individuals in state education, taking close family members as her subjects. Though playful and humorous, Conway’s work often interrogates troubling paradigms.

False Start is curated by Aisling Clark, GOMA’s Emerging Curator 2025.

Lauren Conway has recently completed an artist residency at Studio Voltaire, London (2024), and a solo exhibition, Draw a Card (2025) at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. Other exhibitions include All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun, Dublin Castle, Dublin, (2025), Things Changed, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, (2024), Remembering the Future, VISUAL Carlow, Carlow, (2023), A Great Public Meeting, The Dock, Leitrim, (2022).

In 2024, Léann Herlihy was part of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, In Pieces: Navigating the Body in Contemporary Irish Art, at The Glucksman, UCC, and the Toronto Biennial, Canada. They are the recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Next Generation Artist Award (2022), Visual Arts Bursary (2024; 2023; 2021) as well as being awarded a Member Studio (2024-27) at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.

Aisling Clark has worked on exhibitions at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2022–23), Fruitmarket, Edinburgh (2022), Gay Health Network, Dublin (2024–25), and the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2021–22). Her writing has appeared in Mirror Lamp Press (2024) and is forthcoming in a monograph on arts and culture in Modern Ireland with University College Dublin.