Luke Brabazon, Eileen Coll, Myfanwy Frost-Jones, Emma Hurson, Thomas Marciano, Dámhín McKeown, Clara McSweeney, Thaís Muniz, Katie O’Hara, Ariadna Quintanar and Van Tran.

An exhibition of new works and projects by Art Research and Collaboration Master students from Dun Laoghaire Institute Of Art Design + Technology.

Maeve Connolly will lead an exhibition walkthrough with the artists at 3pm on Friday 13 December. 

In a speculative narrative written by Clara McSweeney, an empty structure stands at the water’s edge. Monitoring the ebb and flow of gradually rising tides, this building waits to be occupied while it ruminates on impending floods.  Elsewhere in the exhibition, titled after Fela Kuti’s 1975 Water No Get Enemy, waves break softly on a shore piled high with colonies of invasive oysters. This shore is one edge of a peninsula inhabited and farmed by Myfanwy Frost-Jones, the site of her ongoing research into the entangled histories and ecologies of a place surrounded by the sea. Water is less visible in some of the exhibition’s other realms. Yet even in the invented world of Katie O’Hara’s Rosewood, there is nothing without water. It is present underground, sustaining the fungi and micro-organisms that animate her imagination. Luke Brabazon’s Experiments in Self-Building explores the infrastructural and material challenges of renovating a semi-derelict railway cottage. This project is also a work of imagination, a test-case for the revitalisation of the meitheal, a tradition of shared skill and knowledge held within families and communities, ensuring survival in moments and seasons of need. Emma Hurson’s ongoing project magpie is similarly rooted in practices of collective labour, involving the peer-based creation of an Irish queer archive. It privileges material artefacts of ephemeral experience along with independently-produced and community-based media.

New Atlantic Triangulations, a long-term project by Thaís Muniz, centres on the relationship between inherited and acquired identities. Responding to ongoing ecological displacements, Muniz works with knowledges and practices drawn from Brazil, West and Central Africa, and Ireland, evolving anti-colonial mechanisms for personal and collective healing. In Thomas Marciano’s work, water is a medium of both transit and illusion, capable of carrying an image that becomes fully legible only in moments of stillness. Water’s capacity to distort and deflect is also apparent in Dámhín McKeown’s exploration of the swimming pool, an emblem of leisure, privilege and artifice, perhaps most obviously in its privatized form. The boundaries between public and private realms are called into questions by Ariadna Quintanar’s investigation of vulnerability, which focuses on the reduced sensory capacities of medicated human bodies, and the processes through which they become both socially and physiologically disconnected. The animals and plants that constitute Eileen Coll’s raw materials were once living things, composed partly of water. Now desiccated, these organic entities form part of new assemblages, merging the domestic and the wild. Finally, the more traditional medium of water colour is used by Van Tran to portray a very different art form – the production of lacquer paintings in his family’s studio. Growing up between Vietnam and Ireland, he envisions himself as a distant observer of change, both here and overseas.

Luke Brabazon is a Dublin-based documentary videographer and artist interested in how art can be used to bring communities together. His project Experiments in Self-Building continues from his efforts to renovate a building into a home and community arts space. In 2020, he inherited a railway cottage in Westmeath, and over the following years hosted gatherings, or meitheals, where small groups would come together to aid in bringing life back to the semi-derelict structure. Mentoring during this process was supported by the Arts Council Agility Award. The structure exhibited in the LAB was originally designed to be a temporary shelter during renovation. While much was learned during the planning process, the renovation project had to be put on hold in 2024. The timeline of the project forms part of the exhibited structure, extending from the dream of the cottage as an arts residency and event space, to the lessons learned during the development. Many of the manual and social skills needed to build homes were once held within communities and families, but this shared knowledge has been lost in recent generations. By working and learning together, it is possible to recover this knowledge and empower communities to build the spaces needed to live, create and gather.

Eileen Coll is based in Gorey, County Wexford and she often uses natural and sustainable materials gathered locally. Eileen is drawn to craft practices and she also values dynamic storytelling. She has a background in furniture renovation, which she utilises in the construction of her work. The sculptural works in the LAB, collectively titled Abandoned, investigate the concept of anti-portraiture. Many of these works incorporate materials such as deerskin, kelp and hawthorn that either have medical properties or are associated with superstition and folklore traditions. These materials have been subjected to intensive processes of labour, so they can be manipulated and moulded into new forms. Through her sculptures, Coll explores the experience of human vulnerability. Her works are a testament to spiritual unrest, often undershot with dark wit, playfulness, and a devotion to physical objects as transmitters of empathy and emotion.

Emma Hurson is a Monaghan-born writer and artist, currently based in Dublin, with a Degree in Sociology and Social Policy from Trinity College Dublin. Their practice involves print and event projects, working for the past five years under the pseudonym ‘babyface’. They are the guide and artist-facilitator of magpie, an Irish queer archive, an ongoing project. magpie is an active mobile library, which lives and grows among their friends and peers. It has so far gathered ephemeral, independently-produced, and community-based print materials, including zines, journals, maps, articles and event memorabilia. Their contribution to the LAB exhibition is an interactive and multi-sensory investigation into community-based and ephemeral archiving.

Myfanwy Frost-Jones has a research-based practice in the West of Ireland. She is the recipient of several awards, including the RDS Mason, Hayes & Curran Visual Arts Prize 2022, the 2023 Parallax Award at Cork International Film Festival, with Sample Studios and the NSF, and a 2024 Kerry County Council Creative Work Bursary. Átha is a new work, filmed on the Beara Peninsula. Átha (the Irish word for ford) forms part of the name of the rural townland featured, Cill Átha. Drawn to the concept of the ford as a liminal space, traversing the gap between past and present, this work looks at this geographical space through the lens of the past. Hannah Arendt wrote ‘the world we live in at any moment is the world of the past; it consists of the monuments and the relics of what has been done […] the past haunts us; it is the past’s function to haunt us who are present and wish to live in the world as it really is.’ Examining the complicated relationships between land use and the politics of belonging and using family footage of visiting Ugandan royalty, Átha considers how the stories, images and fictions of the past help (de)construct the realities of the present.

Thomas Marciano is a film director and artist based in South Tyrol, Italy. He graduated from Vienna Film Academy (Filmakademie Wien) in 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in directing and production sound. In spring 2024, Thomas participated in the ARC programme as an Erasmus student. His project involved researching experimental film techniques, focusing on live-editing technology for an upcoming short film performance in 2026. His contribution to the LAB exhibition builds upon the ARC research event Build Again, Test Again, which took place in April 2024 at IMMA Studios in Dublin. The work in the exhibition explores the volatility of the current moment. The installation makes use of UV light, shining through a disassembled old slide projector, to transpose an image into a transparent chemical solution based on water, which colours itself when activated through the UV-rays in defined spots. The projected ‘moment’ appears clear inside the liquid when the water is calm, and disappears with the slightest movement, reminding us of the instability of every single instant, but at the same time, letting us appreciate its preciousness.

Dámhín McKeown’s Shallow Water is a deep dive into the aesthetic and cultural history of the Swimming Pool, examining the interplay of flatness, weight, and lightness through reflections in water and their distortion. Classical Roman sculptures, once heavy with power in marble, are reimagined in pool décor as hollow plastic reproductions —cheap, light, and buoyant. Swimming pools, as artificial bodies of water, become spaces where the authentic and fake blur. Historically tied to power, wealth, and colonialism, pools continue to reinforce societal ideals of luxury and the body. Shallow Water references Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus through a double-sided foamboard cut-out, transforming the painting into a flat sculpture that remains thin and light. Her reflection, distorted by mirrors, evokes the tension between classical ideals and their mass-produced reproductions in modern times. You are invited to save a spot on a sun chair with a towel and get swept up in the current while you contemplate fluidity in all forms. Shallow Water is a place to reflect, like sunburnt Narcissus gazing at something beautiful. For when you look into the pool the pool looks back. Be like water.

Clara McSweeney is a curator and artist originally from Cork, currently based in Dublin. She is the ARC-LAB Curatorial Scholar for 2023-2025 and will curate a group exhibition, Liquid Urbanisms, which opens at The LAB Gallery in March 2025. Clara’s research focuses on the speculative future of dwellings in Ireland, exploring the potential dystopian future stemming from the housing crisis. She conducts research through a variety of mediums, including writing, sound, curation, and performance. Her current project, Now listen closely, fellow humans, responds to the peculiarities of three distinct buildings located with Dublin City. She imagines the experience of vacancy from the perspective of these buildings. They have each confided to Clara their deepest fears, anxieties and confusions. Using these confessions she has scripted monologues and, with the help of voice actors recorded them for a human audience. You are now invited to eavesdrop on these confessions.

Thaís Muniz is a Brazilian-Irish artist based in North Dublin. Her long-term project New Atlantic Triangulations explores the connections between inherited and acquired identities, mental health, movement, joy and the land, drawing on ancient knowledge from Brazil, West and Central Africa, and Ireland. Since 2022, Muniz has been exploring anti-colonial mechanisms for personal and collective healing, and creating a group of distinct yet related works in print, sculptures, installation, performance, film and photography. In this exhibition, Muniz presents a short film and textile banners as part of The Kite Ballet series, interwoven with poetic and mythical elements, with political, historical, and symbolic themes. The film depicts a group of local kite runners in a dream-like realm, moving in choreographed yet natural, relaxed and obsessed rhythms. Through this weekly communal ritual, Muniz highlights the threat of private development and ecological displacement to another Afro-Indigenous sacred territory, where joy and spiritual practices have thrived for centuries. As part of the New Atlantic Triangulations research, The Kite Ballet advocates for play and negotiation with nature as revolutionary acts, amplifying the voices of local activists from the Itapuã area in Salvador, Brazil.

Katie O’Hara is a Dublin based artist whose practice primarily focuses on fantasy and imaginative world building, but is also shaped by exploration of nature and non-human entities, including fungi and micro-organisms. Whilst the process of developing an imaginary world can provide a comforting dose of escapism, the allure of narrative possibilities is the true key driving factor in her work, as she seeks to develop stories to fill this world of hers. In her large-scale scrolls, Katie invites outsiders to step out of their own reality and into her fantasy, losing themselves in the narratives these vibrant scenes may invoke for them. Through watercolour and gouache on paper, Katie takes us into a giant rose forest, named ‘Rosewood’, a place that embodies contrast through lush and beautiful velvet petals and dangerous jagged thorns. The inclusion of found object props adds to the sense of the painting as a portal to another land, with fantasy leaking into the real world.

Ariadna Quintanar is a Mexican artist and industrial designer currently living in Dublin. She is developing a long-term project focusing on vulnerability, in which she differentiates between primal and cultural forms. Primal Vulnerability is a condition shared with animals that is most pronounced when sleeping, eating, having sex. It is also experienced in new environments, or in situations of illness or injury. Cultural Vulnerability, which can have positive or negative aspects, is more closely related to social and economic circumstances, and to connections with others. These two concepts constantly overlap. The works presented in the LAB, Vulnerability Part One: Being Sick and Having Sex, include Risograph prints and installations, exploring how vulnerability is experienced in different scenarios. For this chapter of the project, Ariadna focused on the Primal and Cultural Vulnerability of ´having sex´ and ‘being sick’, using the example of how SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) affect physical sensations in the female body.

Van Tran was born in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2000. He is a multimedia artist deeply intrigued by human interconnectivity. Growing up between Vietnam and Ireland, Van has sometimes experienced a sense of detachment from both cultures. As a distant observer of change, he only perceives things after they have happened, leaving him to ponder what has transpired in the interim. While this can be disheartening, it can also be fascinating to witness the decay, destruction, and metamorphosis of things. He utilises a range of mediums, such as watercolours, oil paintings, and lacquer paintings, to create a distinctive visual interpretation that showcases his understanding of various mediums and their strengths. Van Tran’s appreciation for the medium of lacquer stems from his parents’ three decades of experience with it in Vietnam, which has helped him understand its cultural and historical significance. His work in the LAB exhibition includes lacquer paintings, watercolours depicting the lacquer process, and examples of tools and materials used in his family studio.

ARC and the LAB 

The Masters in Art and Research Collaboration (ARC) was launched in 2014 as a full time practical taught masters programme, offered by Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology. ARC was devised for artists, critics, curators and those engaging with art in other roles, and developed in close collaboration with Dublin City Arts Office and the LAB Gallery. In March 2025 the LAB Gallery will host an exhibition developed by Clara McSweeney as the culmination of the ARC-LAB Gallery Curatorial Scholarship, a unique initiative in curatorial education at postgraduate level developed with Sheena Barrett.

Acknowledgements

This year’s exhibition has been curated by the ARC lecturing team, David Beattie, Maeve Connolly, Sinead Hogan and Maria McKinney, in collaboration with Dr Margarita Cappock. ARC would also like to thank Sheena Barrett, AlanJames Burns, Eileen Cahill, Liz Coman, Padraig Cunningham (Pure Designs), David Halpin, Mel Galley, Sonya Hogan, Mairead McClean, Fiona McKenna-Fahy, Kathleen Moroney, Siobhán O’Gorman, Rónán O’Muirthile, Eoin O’Neill, Danny O’Sullivan, Sean O’Sullivan, Matt Packer, Alison Skelly, Fiona Snow, Ray Yeates and Kathleen Walsh.