Luke Clancy
Luke Clancy is a radio producer and documentary maker who runs the independent radio production company, Soundsdoable. Work includes Culture File (RTE lyric fm), Sound Stories, Islands, Skelligs Calling, Words on a Wire (all RTE Radio 1), Paradise Blues (BBC World Service). Recent special editions of Culture File includes In C Irish, following the first Irish trad performance of Terry Riley’s minimalist key work. He is the author of award-winning audio dramas In Praise of Darkness and The Vision Service for RTE Drama on One, and co-writer of the award-winning short film, The Wednesdays. His writing has appeared in Art Review, Modern Painters, The Irish Times, The Guardian and The New York Times, among others.
Mary Cremin, Head of Programming, IMMA
Mary Cremin was formerly the Director of Void Gallery, Derry, where she supported artists to produce and present ground-breaking new works, including commissioning the artist Helen Cammock’s Turner Prize winning film The Long Note. Cremin was the Commissioner and Curator of the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with artist Eva Rothchild in 2019. Working with organisations such as the Afghan Visual Arts & History Collective and Beirut Art Residency, her programme focusses on revealing new narratives and histories that address and challenge the disparities that exist within Western culture, her programme acts as a curatorial corrective. Her areas of research are embedded in ecology, ethics and is informed by politically and socially engaged practice. She is a co-founder of the North South Visual Art network, an advocacy group for the visual arts sector encompassi. mng both North and South of Ireland. She is currently chair of Ormston House, Limerick.
Nina McGowan
Nina McGowan is a Dublin born visual artist practicing over 20 years, solo and in collaboration. Her work explores transcendence, and the primacy of the experiencing body. Earlier work investigated the 20TH Centuries’ obsession with ‘faith in the future’ and led her to recontextualise landmark objects from science fiction films in architectural scale. The film-work ‘Loitering Theatre’ shot on drones in 2011was shut down by the Gardai whilst simultaneously going viral and covered by Irish media, the New York Times and Wired magazine.
Upcoming work ‘House on a Beach’ with Trinity College, funded by the Creative Ireland Climate Action Fund, will see the charred remains of twin houses washed up concurrently on two shores, North and South of the border. This water-work follows from Ninas recent involvement in the sport of Freediving. In 2021 she spent several months in the Egyptian desert exploring what it means to live a life ‘beyond breath, in a body, seemingly beyond species’.
In October 2022 she represented Ireland at the Freediving World Championships, setting a new world record in the masters ‘no fins’ category and became a world champion with a gold medal in the ‘free immersion’ discipline. To date she has 9 National Records and is currently the deepest Irish woman with a NR at 58metres and a training depth of 63m.
Isabel Nolan
Isabel Nolan has an expansive practice that incorporates sculptures, paintings, textile works, photographs, writing and works on paper. Her subject matter is similarly comprehensive, taking in cosmological phenomena, religious reliquaries, Greco-Roman sculptures and literary/historical figures, examining the behaviour of humans and animals alike. These diverse artistic investigations are driven by intensive research, but the end result is always deeply personal and subjective. Exploring the “intimacy of materiality”, Nolan’s work ranges from the architectural – steel sculptures that frame or obstruct our path – to small handmade objects in clay, hand-tufted wool rugs illuminated with striking cosmic imagery, to drawings and paintings using humble gouache or colouring pencils. In late 2020, Launchpad and Kerlin Gallery published ‘Curling up with reality’, bringing together a decade of Nolan’s work including significant exhibitions and 20 of the artist’s writings. Isabel Nolan lives and works in Dublin.More details here
Ian Robertson
Professor Ian Robertson, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Co-Director Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College Dublin. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Previously a senior scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, where he was also a fellow at Hughes Hall, Ian Robertson continues to be a Visiting Professor at University College London, University of Wales at Bangor and is a Visiting Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute, University of Toronto. A graduate of Glasgow University, he gained his Masters and Doctoral degrees at the University of London. His research focusses on the neuropsychology of brain rehabilitation and attention: he has more than 200 published books and articles in this field. A former science writer for the London Times, his multiply-translated popular science books are Mind Sculpture and the Mind’s Eye. More details here