STAC Podcast Eimear King

New Neighbours brings together the work of Olivia O’Dwyer and Fergal Styles for the first time.
Both artists work come from places of imagination and memory, of things half-remembered or dreamt, with playfulness and experimentation at the heart of each of their practices.  Accompanying the exhibition will be a newly commissioned text by Neva Elliot. (You can download the essay HERE

Olivia O’Dwyer’s work is influenced by 'Bad Painting' which refers to a deliberately raw style of figurative painting, rejecting traditional ideas of draughtsmanship, mixing art historical, popular, and personal sources. She examines ideas around quotidian experience, observations drawn from the world around her and more intimate or personal themes and looks to contemporary culture and ideologies drawn from a female perspective and the ‘female gaze’ feminist theory.

For Fergal Styles the image represents “an irrational, compact impression of sensory and emotional information” made up of feelings and imagination. He approaches painting in a very egalitarian way, no medium is ruled out even those usually not associated with painting, for him mediums/materials have their own cultural references or weight and he values the associations these bring to the work.

In this episode, the pair chat about the experience of becoming New Neighbours for this two person show at STAC.  New Neighbours opened on March 8th and continues until Friday 26th April.  The gallery is open from 10am to 5pm Tuesday to Saturday.  Visit the STAC Website for more.

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produced & presented by Eimear King

Threadsuns - Sophie Béhal

Threadsuns, a new body of work from Sophie Béhal, comes as the result of the Tipperary Artist Residency Award with STAC, supported by Tipperary Arts Office. This body of work comes from a period of engagement with new materials in a new place. Situated in a rural landscape in County Tipperary, it searches for a new way of being in this world and uses repetition, ritual and process to investigate this. The sun and circles are used as a rhythmic refrain and repeated throughout.

The most reassuring of shapes, the circle, and its transcendental properties associated with infinity and certainty are questioned. The turmeric-dyed cotton sunprints hanging throughout the gallery will act as a balm in a dark winter, but like the shifting cycles of the sun, they will not last. Created by sunlight, they are a measure of light and time and space. In the gallery the weak winter light will cause them to fade and change over the duration of the exhibition, and as spring arrives they will leave.

This exhibition is the result of a sustained period of research, experimentation and learning for the artist in new sculptural materials : glass, slip cast ceramics, large-scale natural dyeing and printing, and welded steel. The different timescales of these materials and their sometimes contradictory properties of heaviness and lightness, movement and stillness, permanency and ephemerality are explored. This exhibition offers the viewer moments of hope and transformation whilst acknowledging the darkness of our time. It reflects on a human need for ritual, repetition and communication and strives to find these things in our everyday life.

Sophie Béhal is a visual artist, from Kilkenny and living in Co. Tipperary. Her work usually manifests itself as sculptural installation, often combining traditional sculptural materials of steel, clay and plaster with more ephemeral aspects of light and sound. Recent exhibitions: Awards Show, 2023, MART Dublin, With a View, Chocolate Factory, Dublin 2022, Dublin Art Book Fair, TBG+S, 2022 +2021; Projects: The Postal Project,Carlow Arts Festival 2021, Firestation Artists Sculpture Awardee 2022; Publications: Firestation FileNotes 2023. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Crawford, Cork, 2012 and an MA in Art, Research and Collaboration from IADT,Dublin, 2018 with a term spent in Taideyliopisto, Helsinki.

Threadsuns - Sophie Béhal 13th January – 24th February 2024
Visit our website: www.southtippartscentre.ie

If you'd like to get in touch with the podcast: southtippartspodcast@gmail.com

Thanks for listening:)

Welcome to the latest episode of the South Tipp Arts Podcast!
This time I sit down with artist Moran Been-noon to chat about her exhibition 'Here Nor There' which is currently running in the gallery here at STAC until December 2nd. 'Here Nor There' invites us to consider the connection between ethnicity and one's ability to belong.

Mixing moving image and audio pieces with objects that symbolise fragments of the artist's ethnic identity, the artwork encourages us to perceive ethnicity as a multi-layered and intricate theme, and within this, consider the complexities of contemporary Irish identity.

As part of the project, Moran is running a series of FREE drop-in art lab sessions at STAC Chapel on the plaza, from 16th - 18th November (2:30 to 5:00pm) where participants can explore Moran's working process and make a piece of their own to take home - all materials provided.

If you'd like to learn more about the exhibition visit: https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/moran-been-noon
Or the workshops at STAC Chapel:
https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/here-nor-there-art-labs-with-artist-moran-been-noon

If you'd like to take a virtual tour of the exhibition: https://tinyurl.com/yc4rt5ev

Get in touch: southtippartspodcast@gmail.com

In this latest Ep, I chat with artist Kate O'Shea from Broken Fields, a multi-disciplinary collective made up of individual practitioners Louise Harrington, Enya Moore, Aideen O’ Donovan and Kate O’ Shea.

Broken Fields brings together experience, knowledge, and practice from the fields of socially engaged art, architecture, community work, activism, research, and writing. The name Broken Fields refers to the breaking down of disciplines, siloes, and fields. In the breaking down of these constructed boundaries, Broken Fields brings together the strengths of diverse practices in processes, projects and spaces that are deeply place-based.

In partnership with Clonmel Junction Arts Festival, Broken Fields 'Art, What is it good for?' is a social space guided by the question: ‘How can we co-create a space with the public in Clonmel?’ Festival Activities included collective canopy making, printmaking and conversations with a series of invited artists, printmakers, community workers, architects, writers, musicians, and activists, culminating in a very busy day at STAC on Saturday 8th July!

The exhibition continues until August 5th, and features a working space where visitors can add a piece to the collective art wall, browse the large Broken Fields archive, or just take a break from the world outside. Gallery open Tuesday - Saturday from 10am-5pm.

Visit https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/broken-fields-art-what-is-it-good-for
to learn more about the artists involved in this project.

'The Ballad of Clonmel' by Padraig Stevens & Siobhán Kavanagh was composed especially for Broken Fields in response to the work. (lyrics & music copyright Padraig Stevens and Siobhán Kavanagh, 2023, Clonmel, South Tipperary Arts Centre)

If you'd like to get in touch the email address is southtippartspodcast@gmail.com

In this episoed, I chat with Dorje de Burgh about his exhibition 'Under the Same Sky', currently on show at STAC.. Following the artist's move to Carrick-on-Suir in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic due to his high-risk status, Under the Same Sky is a photographic documentation of the town and its surrounds. Representing an outsiders view, this work reflects the particular atmosphere of unease and alienation of that time, as well as being an observation on community, home and belonging. Dorje also strives to subvert familiar representations of the Irish landscape, and in doing so reflect the tensions inherent in both the urban-rural space and the artist’s own conflicting positions around closeness and distance.


Dorje de Burgh lives and works between Killarney, Dublin & Berlin. Following nomination as a member of the FUTURES European mentorship program, Dorje received the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation award 2020 and The Darkroom moving image residency 2020/21, producing his second solo exhibition How To Kill Something That Doesn’t Exist in association with PhotoIreland Festival 2021.

Dorje de Burgh Website
Find Dorje on Instagram @dum_studio

Get in touch with the podcast: southtippartspodcast@gmail.com

Learn more by visiting our website: www.southtippartscentre.ie

Austin McQuinn ‘Some signs are secret, some manifest’ 31st March – 13th May 2023

A Solo Exhibition of new paintings, sculpture, and live art performance, curated by Helena Tobin.

‘Some signs are secret, some manifest’ is an exhibition of new work specifically created for the double-height atrium and gallery @STAC. Austin’s new paintings on ash wood panels and found antique prints are intensely gesso-ed, collaged and inked to psychedelic effect. The 17 foot ‘Tower’ of discarded Aran sweaters in the Atrium signals the unique Norman architecture of tower houses in South Tipperary, and echoes an earlier installation McQuinn created in Kilmainham Gaol, presenting sweaters as totems to make a new tribal or fetish power-object for the Gallery.

https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/austin-mcquinn-some-signs-are-secret-some-manifest

In a challenging exploration of the traditional and the discarded, of biopower and queer energy, McQuinn will be artist-in-residence at the STAC Chapel in the former Kickham Army Barracks. He will create a twenty-four hour live-streamed live-art performance event, titled ‘Imperial Lunatic’. Following the cycle of the new moon rising, ‘Imperial Lunatic’ will incorporate the artists’ body in series of repeating actions, video clips of volcanoes and processions, percussion, medals, zigzags, tongues and talc.

https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/events/austin-mcquinn-imperial-lunatic

Get in touch with the podcast: southtippartspodcast@gmail.com

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