Biographies
Exploring topics such as image politics, the moving body, and queer identity, Rob O’Shea (they/them) is an artist who makes multi-media performance work, and experimental artist film. Their work is often a response to the homogenization of queer bodies and subjectivities that occurs through the structures of mass media, institutional practices and group consensus. Performative interrogations of objects, images and queer theory bring a critical curiosity to bear on our fluid digital relationship to one another.
Rob O’Shea (b. 1980, Ireland) holds a BA Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design, Ireland (2016) and is a graduate of the New York Fine Arts Artist Mentorship Programme (2019). In 2019 they premiered their multi-media work To Separate Photography From Your Life at New York Live Arts. Exhibitions include: Now Light, Now Shadowed (2021) with Commonage Projects, London and The Subject & the Object (2019), a collaboration with Julia Brandao, Arte Passagem, Brazil.
Ronan Smyth (he/him) is an artist and researcher based in Belfast who is concluding a practice-based PhD with Belfast School of Art. Exploring themes of displacement and material consumption, his work combines clay, fibre, woodwork and drawing that investigate countercultural relationships between the amateur maker and the decorated surface. He is a studio holder with Flax Studios and is the recipient of funding awards and grants from Royal Dublin Society, A-N, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council. He is one half of the collaborative duo SmythStasinaki.
Francis Whorrall-Campbell (they/he) is a writer and artist from the UK. Working across text, sculpture, and digital formats, their work advances a trans poetics, probing the link between making an artwork and making a (gendered) self – or, how art and writing can be tools for transition. This practice is guided by research into materialist histories of becoming, including DIY transition, mutual aid, internet communities, and other conditions which promote or inhibit trans survival. His work could be described as spinning gold from straw: trying (sometimes successfully) to fulfil the creative promise of transformation.
Francis has presented projects at Modern Art Oxford (2024); Nottingham Contemporary (2023); Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo de Castellón (2023); National Sculpture Factory, Cork (2023); Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien (2022); Auto Italia, London (2022); VISUAL Carlow (2022); Wysing Arts Centre (2021); and CCA Derry~Londonderry (2021, 2022). From September – November 2024, he will be a Laureate of the Principal Residency Programme at La Becque, Switzerland.
Cóilín O’Connell (he/him) is an artist from Dublin working in drawing, video, publishing, and installation art. As Brass Neck Press he publishes, designs and distributes artists’ publications and zines.
