About Speakers
Mary Cremin is Head of Programming at IMMA and was previously Director of Void Gallery, Derry since 2017, where she has 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 program focuses on revealing new narratives and histories that address and challenge the disparities that exist within Western culture, her program acts as a curatorial corrective. Her areas of research are embedded in ecology, ethics and is informed by politically and socially engaged practice.
Eoghan Ryan works across moving image, installation, performance, puppetry and collage. Selected shows, performances and screenings have taken place at Rencontres, Internationales (FR/DE) Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (IT), The Complex (IE), Edith Russ Haus(DE), Centrale Fies (IT), BFI LFF and ICA London (UK), Busan Biennale 2022 (KR) IFFR, Rotterdam (NL), Visio (IT) Kunstverein Freiburg (DE) South London Gallery (UK) and Serralves Museum (PR). Ryan completed his MFA at Goldsmiths in 2013, attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2019–2021), and participated in the Visio program for moving image (2021). He is currently in residence at IMMA as part of the Dwell Here programme and is developing a guest project for EVA 2025 (IE). More details here
Laura Fitzgerald is a visual artist working in drawing, painting, installation, video, text and audio. She is graduate of both the National College of Art & Design, Dublin and Royal College of Art, London. She received a 2024 Markievicz award to work with the archive of experimental filmmaker, animator and poet, Flora Kerrigan. Laura will present a new body of work at Lismore Castle Arts in June 2025. Recent exhibitions include: Strange Weather at Ormston House Right-of-way at Wexford Art Centre, 2022; A Growing Enquiry: Art, Agriculture, reconciling values at the RHA, 2022; An Animate Land at Roscommon Art Centre, 2022 with artists Miriam O’Connor and Marian Balfe; I have made a place at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, 2021; the 39th EVA International with Fantasy Farming, 2020 at Limerick City Gallery of Art; and the site-specific, mountain-based artwork Cosmic Granny, 2019 in Inch, Co. Kerry. More details here
Jacqui Shelton is an artist and curator born on Barada Barna land (Central Queensland), and based in Naarm (Melbourne). Shelton’s practice is grounded in reading and writing, manifesting as short films, sound, performance, and installation. They are interested in continually testing how text, language and images work together or undermine each other. Shelton’s work plays with voice and language to relationally implicate the relations, histories, epistemologies, cultures and mythology bound up in practices of speaking and song. Recent projects investigates voicing colonised languages to unsettle white-settler positionality in Australia, through work with Irish-language communities in Australia and overseas. More details see here
Marie Foley was born in 1959 Marie Foley studied Fine Art in The Crawford College of Art, Cork, Goldsmiths, University of London, Cardiff College of Art and was awarded an MA in 1987. Her sculptures are composed of elements which are carved in yew, bog oak, ash, sycamore, beech, holly… elements modeled in porcelain and hand-worked or salvaged elements in metal, glass or stone. Her artistic practice is inspired by her love of nature. Her language is one of symbolic form – form which becomes a vehicle for the spiritual in nature. Her work has been exhibited in Ireland, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland, Hungary, Poland, Finland, Canada, USA and Japan. She was the first Irish Artist to have a solo Exhibition in the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Public commissions include Kilkenny Castle, The Office of Public Works, National Universities of Ireland Presentation to President Mary Robinson, Business to arts Awards, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdrum County Council and Wilton Library, Cork. She has received several Irish Arts Council awards. Other awards include International Ceramic Award, Canada Council award and The New Horizons Award from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. She is a member of Aosdána since 1996. More details here
Atsushi Kaga is originally from Tokyo, and now living and working between Ireland and Kyoto, Japan, Atsushi Kaga studied Fine Art at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin, graduating in 2005, and made a critically acclaimed first solo museum exhibition at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny in 2008. Kaga collaborated with his mother on a process show, Nerd bag, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2010) and re-iterated in a solo Positions, Art Basel Miami Beach, (2011). Most recently Kaga presented his fourth solo exhibition at mother’s tankstation Dublin; Melancholy with vegetables surrounded by miracles (2020), which introduced and developed his recent, highly detailed large-format paintings, influenced by both Dutch Vanitas and the 17-18th century Kyoto schools, fused to his characteristic style and subject matter. Atsushi Kaga has also made notable solo exhibitions with Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, Galeria Leme, São Paolo, Galerie Nicolas Krupp, Basel, and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin, amongst others. More details here