The construction of images has been a long-standing preoccupation of artist Sian Costello. Hymn to Him is a guilty pleasure, a sustained glance at the relationship between the unstable and convoluted lives of artists and the composed stillness of the characters they create. In her painting and photographic work, she lingers on the surfaces of things – bellies, primroses, house keys, vegetables. Costello inserts herself into her compositions and as her own model she remains in control of both sides of the canvas. Her paintings are less representative of their classical subjects, portraiture, nudes, and still life, but more about grappling with the dichotomy of fact and fiction within the artist’s desire to create new realities and the desperation to represent her own.

Methods of photography are present in Costello’s practice through her regular use of camera obscura to create her images for painting. For this new body of work, Costello takes a specific moment at the birth of photography as her jumping off point, a moment in which the history of contemporary art was at a crossroads. Costello’s interest in this period lies in the ways that practitioners were split in two camps; those who believed that photography’s realism was the key to legitimacy, and those who saw it as an opportunity to enhance the artist’s hand. The former documented real-life people and events to fill a gap in accurate representation, while the latter staged their subjects in the language of academic painting where the viewer is left wondering what is a brushstroke and what is light upon a sheet of film.

Sian Costello (b. 1998) is an artist based in Limerick City, Ireland. Since graduating from Fine Art Painting in Limerick School of Art and Design in 2020, Costello has exhibited nationally and internationally, recent solo exhibitions include The Crush at PS2, Belfast and Hot Child at Ormston House, Limerick. She has been the recipient of the Visual Art Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and project funding from Culture Ireland. Her work has been profiled in The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, British Vogue, Another Magazine, The Visual Artist’s Newsletter, and The Irish Arts Review.

Niamh Brown is a curator and producer based in Limerick city, Ireland. She currently works as Curator of Strategy & Development at Ormston House. She holds a B.A. in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art & Design and was Creative Producer for the 39th edition of EVA International. In 2024, she received the Arts Council’s Bursary Award and was selected for the inaugural Backwater Artists Group Emerging Curator Award. Outside of visual art, Brown sits on the Board of Directors for Women’s Collective Ireland.

Independent projects include Community Spirits with Laura Fitzgerald, Inch, Co. Kerry (forthcoming) and At first / I was land, featuring Paul Gaffney, Debbie Godsell, Fiona Kelly, Róisín O’Sullivan, and Sarah Long, Backwater Artists Studios, Cork. Recent exhibitions at Ormston House include Hot Child by Sian Costello, co-curated with Pádraic E. Moore; Strange Weather by Laura Fitzgerald; Other Ghosts featuring Ursula Burke, Joy Gerrard, and Jennifer Trouton.