For nearly 30 years Patricia Cronin has developed a feminist, conceptual art practice that interrogates the intersection of gender, representation, and power. She repurposes the traditional forms, such as Neo-Classical marble sculpture and found-object installations, to subvert historical narratives and amplify female subjectivity. Patricia’s work addresses issues of sexuality, marriage equality, and the erasure of women from public monuments and art history. Research and storytelling are foundational to her practice as she uncovers marginalized figures, such as 19th-century sculptor Harriet Hosmer, and reinsert them into historical discourse through hybrid works combining visual art, scholarship, and institutional critique.
Patricia’s site-specific projects, including Memorial to a Marriage and Shrine for Girls, reinterpret historical settings to confront contemporary issues like LGBTQ rights and gender-based violence. She often collaborates with pre-21st-century art and architecture to reimagine cultural icons, such as in Aphrodite Re-Imagined, while exploring shifting perceptions of truth, history, and female authority. Through these projects, she aims to balance formal sophistication with political urgency, using beauty and familiarity to provoke empathy and critical reflection. Her commitment is to question who is remembered and why, while forging new pathways for the visibility and dignity of women across time and cultures.
Visit Patricia Cronin’s website here
Spring 2026
Practice: Painting / Sculpture / Visual Arts / Installation / Drawing
Research Focus
Using the museum’s collections, architecture, and histories Patricia Cronin proposes to examine how empire and patriarchy have shaped what is collected, conserved, and celebrated, and what is silenced. Patricia will explore how the museum can become a site of vibration: a living structure that reveals shifting values, hidden labour, and suppressed lives. Her goal is to pursue research that is formally rigorous, emotionally resonant, and intellectually challenging, art that embodies the museum’s shift from monument to movement. At this moment of global reckoning with colonial and patriarchal legacies, the museum’s role is more critical than ever.
More about the Dwell Here Residency
Dwell Here offers participants a simple proposition: to commit to this time and place while thinking deeply about its urgencies. Together we are curious to learn what can be activated or challenged through the process of dwelling. IMMA encourages reflection across the following themes to consider geographical, historical, political and cultural concepts of Ireland as a starting point to expand and connect international contexts through similarities and differences:
Technologies of Peace – to consider commemorative landscapes and memories of peace (as a dream, movement, or value) while generating perspectives on sustainable coexistence.
The Irish Paradigm – Welcomes artistic research that creates intimacy and connections, while celebrating the perceived agility and freedoms of operating on the periphery. As a small island on the edge of Europe, Ireland often has a challenging relationship with ‘the centre’.
The Museum as a Site of Vibration – consider how the museum and site can create new vibrations and rhythms within the built legacy of empire. How can museums make visible cultural shifts, including erased, censored or marginalised histories, as well as sustainability, planetary care, sharing and hospitality.