Join us at GOMA Waterford for the launch of Shapeshifting: GOMA Waterford Graduate Award Exhibition 2026 on Thursday 29 January, 6-8pm. All welcome!

About the artists

Tanja Novacic

Working across sculpture, textiles, embroidery, and mixed media, Tanja Novacic explores folklore, memory, and the intersection of myth and lived experience. Working with light, shadow, and architectural forms, she draws from storytelling, ritual, and symbolism, merging these sources with familial history and personal narratives.

Patrick Penney

Patrick Penney’s focus at present is on the ideas of perception, inclusion, omission, and layers of history – how omission creates a narrative of history that is incomplete. In broader historical terms, but also personal familial terms, he has been examining atomic and nuclear history with a focus on William Penney. He works with archival materials that exist only in copies, as the originals no longer exist. Classification and declassification obscure and reveal information and imagery, changing the perception of the historical narrative. All of this adds to the historical context of the world we now occupy, and his intention is to establish a body of work that serves to warn and contribute to these things never being allowed to happen again.

Danny Foley

Through an intuitive and experimental approach to drawing, painting, and animation, Danny Foley’s work explores the shapeshifter as both a concept and creative strategy within his artistic processes. Within his art practice, shapeshifting is considered an active, curious, and playful means of making art – where the edges of the self-dissolve and the human is reimagined. Mixed-media works and stop-motion animations unfold as metamorphic journeys within shared spaces, where creatures shift in and out of form, mirroring changes in state and being.