Bríd Murphy, Con: temporary Quarters, Hannah Jones, Inter_site Collective, Mel Galley and Namaco

The LAB Gallery is pleased to present its latest exhibition Liquid Urbanisms curated by ARC – LAB Scholar Clara McSweeney.

Liquid Urbanisms is a group show featuring projects by Bríd Murphy, Con: temporary Quarters (Aoife Ward and Eve Woods), Hannah Jones, Inter_site Collective (Pádraic Barrett, Aoife Claffey, Kate McElroy), Mel Galley and Namaco (Han Hogan and Dónal Fullam) This group exhibition focuses on the speculative futures of buildings and dwellings in Ireland in the context of the ongoing housing crisis.

Related Free Events: 

29th March: 3pm – 4.30pm 

Walkthrough event with the artists and the curator.

13th, 20th, 27th March: 6:45pm to 8:45pm.

Three public viewings of Bríd Murphy’s Semi / Detached II displayed from a window pane on James Joyce Street

Brid Murphy 

Bríd Murphy is a Dublin-based visual artist and a graduate of Limerick School of Art & Design. Her practice explores themes of anxiety, identity, and Ireland’s ongoing housing crisis through site-specific video interventions. She was awarded a graduate residency at the National Sculpture Factory and was shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait Prize at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2019. Her work has been exhibited at the National Museum of Ireland, the Cork Film Festival, and GRAFT, a collaborative project by the Glucksman and the National Sculpture Factory.

Semi / Detached II projects two videos onto the upstairs windows of the LAB Gallery. From the street below, viewers witness life-sized figures, cramped together, shifting uncomfortably within the confined space. These projections create a ghostly presence, hinting at lives that could be housed, spaces that could be filled, and the unsettling disconnect between housing need and property neglect in Dublin. The work highlights the absurdity of a city where thousands struggle to afford rent while vacant properties are left to rot.

This installation reflects the reality of many younger generations in Ireland—trapped in a housing system where security and affordability are out of reach. It is a stark reminder of the failures of Irish housing policy and its impact on daily life. Semi / Detached II amplifies this crisis, urging reflection on how space, or the lack of it, shapes identity, well-being, and community.

Con: temporary Quarters

Con: temporary Quarters led by Aoife Ward and Eve Woods brings attention to the use and misuse of space. Your Welcome embodies the infantilisation inherent in housing degradation. With the rentier class subservient to technocratic policies the claustrophobic body horror is communicated through an affronting artifice of intelligence smothering its occupant as it tells a tale of lotteries for coffin homes, the relinquishing of cityspace to corporations and their cooling towers, and compulsory wellness protocols. Utilising sci-fi tropes, housing and policy jargon Con: temporary Quarters continue their scathing critique of the substandard design of our built environment through satirical performance; this time with the help of the patriarchal man-bot who wants you to live with(in) him!

Select actions include: An Couch Pleanala in The Irish Times, WAKE with Arthology Collective, DABF: Fictions – The Makings of Other Worlds, NIVAL Art & Property, Space Now with Outlandish Theatre, The Perennial Affair: An Exploration Between Art and Politics, TCD, 2024, Create Summer School for COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE & SOCIAL CHANGE Practice & Social Change, Des Kelly MOMA, That Social Centre, DABF Polyphonic, CtQ The Exhibition at the demolished Tivoli Theatre, Who is this city built for? Culture Night, Banned as an Ti @ FanVid Dublin, Open House, Derelict site on N. Brunswick St, Softening Corners, Creative Futures Academy, A Culture of Care for The Liberties, RENT, Housing Unlocked Irish Architecture Foundation, Reboot Republic, Generation Locked Out of Home with Rory Hearne, City of Care Roundtable 2023, A Cultural Tour of Hotels in the Liberties, How to Exist in a Public Space 2022.

Hannah Jones 

Hannah Jones is a visual artist based in Dublin, Ireland. Her practice uses sculptural installations to explore questions around heritage, placement, and sentiment, focusing on ideas of dwelling and the body’s placement within it. She builds using natural materials, with a focus on cob. Her work also includes seaweed building, copper printing, sound and video projection alongside other digital means.

Under the Rafters looks at our connection to place, using the installation space to question how we affect a space and how a space can influence us, allowing viewers to consider the symbiotic relationship between the emotional being and place.

The forms used within this work, inspired by natural and architectural formations, create a tactile and atmospheric quality to the space they inhabit, inviting viewers to contemplate the connection between place and sensory perception—be it smell, sound, feel, or air quality.

This project uses cob, a traditional building material made of topsoil, clay, sand and hay. The labour needed to create cob is key to the work. It must be mixed by hand as the weight of the material would break machinery. The roof and bricks of this work have been plastered and shaped by hand.

Through her research, she explores how culture, traditional skills and environment contribute to belonging.

She has exhibited in, The Place Project, IMMA Studios, Dublin (2021), Open Studios, Bard College Berlin (2022), Open studios, Monopol, Berlin (2023), In the making: Aorta, Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin (2024), On Show, Institute of Art Design + Technology Dún Laoghaire, Dublin, (2024), Silver Apples of the Moon / Golden Apples of the Sun, CQS+S, (2025)

She has received awards from, IADT Summer Studios (2024), RDS Visual Art Awards long listing (2024), IADT/ Pallas Projects Mentorship Award, (2024), Fire Station Artists’ Studios Graduate Sculpture Residency Award (2024), Superprojects/Clancy Quay Studios Professional Development Programme (2024-25)

Inter_site

inter_site is a multidisciplinary Cork based artist collective established by Pádraic Barrett, Aoife Claffey, Deirdre Breen and Kate McElroy. They graduated together from the MA in Art and Process, Crawford College of Art and Design, MTU, 2021. Since forming they have created seven site responsive exhibitions in Cork, taken part in three international exhibitions and together have undertaken a residency in PADA, Portugal. Their most recent shows include ⌥ertigo, A Crescendo at Cork County Hall and Error: /Undefined, Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2023 which coincided with the launch of a publication documenting their six site responsive exhibitions in Cork.

Pádraic Barrett

Auto-Cannibalism is a provocative exploration of self-exploitation within contemporary capitalist systems, where the body becomes both a site of production and consumption. Barrett examines the psychological and physical toll of neoliberalism, using cannibalistic imagery as a metaphor for self-sacrifice in pursuit of personal or societal goals. Visceral, grotesque imagery in the film depicts self-devouring, embodying a system that perpetuates self-consumption. The installation frames the film with two rows of spikes, evoking a mouth and mirroring the devouring nature of hostile architecture. A reimagined gallery bench, both functional and sculptural, incorporates the same motifs, confronting viewers with discomfort and questioning how urban spaces regulate bodies.

Kate McElroy 

Precipice, potentialities is a dynamic constellation of glass sculpture, light, expanded photography, installation and spoken word. This altering environment interrogates the unsustainable nature of our current systems and our place within them. Boundaries between self, surroundings, and structures blur, as the solid becomes liquid and dichotomies dissolve. Challenging static notions of form, the work fosters fluidity and disrupts fixed patterns, opening new possibilities for transformation. Existing in a space between construction and destruction, it highlights a moment of precarity while gesturing towards reconfiguration. At this societal and environmental precipice, this interstitial space exists as a site of criticality and potentiality.

Mel Galley 

Adrift, Frances haunts a future city, five years out of time. The fabric of the streets flickers around her as proposed building plans fall in and out of existence, disputed and discarded back in the present. As places suspended between being-and-not waver, it is the loss of a favourite street (where the cathedral tower aligns between the rows of terraces) that shakes her. Where do these places go to when they cease to exist? There is no ruin, just a new site, blanketing over memory. The first model she builds, of this street, is the unintentional centre of her city; a series of places that once were, or almost were, or will be in the future. Lost in time, she asks; how do we choose which places to remember?

‘Valerian’ and ‘Holdings’ were created as part of Data Stories, a four year project mapping the property and planning data ecosystem in Ireland. Over two case studies, Mel worked with researchers Dr Juliette Davret, Dr Danielle Hynes and Dr Sam Mutter to create these ‘data stories’, questioning how data is being created, held and instrumentalised to shape the places we inhabit. The ERC funded project is based at Maynooth University Social Science Institute, led by Professor Rob Kitchin.

Mel is an artist and writer who looks (mostly) at place, memory and speculative futures. Through narrative and modelmaking, she builds speculative landscapes which hinge on the concept of palimpsests. In 2023, she completed an MA in Art and Research Collaboration at IADT. Her work has been shown across Ireland and the UK, including the LAB Gallery, Barnavave, UCC, and Signal Film & Media. In 2020, she was awarded  Young Cumbrian Artist of the Year and won second place in the RIBA Eyeline Awards 2021. Her artworks are held in the collections of the Bodleian Library (Oxford) and, more importantly, on the walls and bookshelves of strangers and friends.

Namaco

“Welcome to GRAND CANAL DEMOLITION DERBY, home to the Free State’s Glittering Silicon Docks.  Here you’ll meet your Tech Overlords Meta, Amazon, Apple, X and Google who thrive on profit HYPER-EXTRACTION and the TOTAL OBLITERATION of our communities.”

Grand Canal Demolition Derby, is a PS1-style game set between the spectral netherworld of Saol Eile and the high-stakes arena of Dublin’s Grand Canal Dock.

In Saol Eile we journey through a millennium of economic history, learning the background to Ireland’s dependence on foreign direct investment: From centuries of colonial limitations imposed by Britain, to the wholesale substitution of indigenous Irish industry with US investment from the 1950s onwards.

In Grand Canal Dock Arena we drive between glistening towers of US capital, which cast a shadow over the remnants of working class Dublin. Easter eggs hidden throughout the city— the Eircom phonebox, the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, and Charles Haughey’s yacht, The Celtic Mist— tell a story of tax avoidance and privatisation. Meanwhile a heated debate crackles on Joe Duffy’s Liveline concerning the 13 billion Euro windfall tax owed to the Irish government by Apple Inc.

The player is prompted to consider the outcome of their actions within or in opposition to tech-billionaire industry. Press ‘X’ to act as an individual – fuelling the free market with deference or loyalty. Press ‘O’ to join the resistance – smashing the mainframes of US capital to build anew.

GCDD was created by NAMACO, headed by Donal Fullam and Han Hogan, in collaboration with 3D artist Peter Jessiman. Featuring the voices of Elaina Murphy Cerrone, Ro Barret and Sean Fitzgerald, artwork by Kerry Trevaskis Hoskin, and music by Rising Damp, the Deadlians, One Leg One Eye and Rats Blood.

Clara McSweeney, is a curator, producer and artist from County Cork, now based in Dublin. She holds a BA in Fine Art Painting and Contemporary Practice from Limerick School of Art and Design and a Postgraduate Diploma in Cultural Event Management from IADT Dun Laoghaire.

She recently completed the ARC-LAB Curatorial Scholarship, which spanned 18 months and concluded in January 2025. This scholarship involved working part-time with the Dublin City Arts Office and The LAB Gallery under the guidance of curators  Dr. Margarita Cappock, Julia Moustacchi and Arts Officer Liz Coman. Additionally, as part of the scholarship, she was a fully funded student in the IADT Art Research Collaboration Master’s program.

Her current research interest lies in the peculiarities of certain vacant spaces in Dublin City, the potential dystopian future stemming from the housing crisis and flooding as a result of climate change. She currently presents her research through a variety of mediums, including writing, sound, curation, and performance.

Over the past four years, Clara has been developing an independent curatorial and producing practice. She has also curated several exhibitions at The LAB Gallery, such as Living but A Day: Encounters by Chloe Austin, Same but Different by Bernadette Doolan, and RETROFUTURE by Hazel O’Sullivan. Other curatorial projects include Oneiric, a group exhibition featuring Ten Bó Studios artists at An Táin Arts Centre, Semi-Detached by Bríd Murphy at 6 Seville Place, Images of India by Maria McSweeney at Asna Gallery in Clonakilty, A Bloody Good Thing at The People’s Museum in Limerick, Women from the Inside at The Belltable in Limerick, and 22 Blue, a student response to the EIB Belonging exhibition at The Hunt Museum in Limerick.

In July 2025, she will curate FSAS Presents, a group exhibition featuring Fire Station Studio residents.