Matters of Process | Group Exhibition at Leitrim Sculpture Centre

Event Details

‘Matters of Process’ – Exhibition Launch Friday 8th August 5-8pm.

Niamh Fahy, Lucy Mulholland, Blaine O’Donnell, Kate Oram, Sonya Swarte.

Matters of Process is a new series of exhibitions that explores the work of artists who completed a Technical Development Research Residency (TDR) the previous year at the Centre. During their research phase, artists conducted experiments with diverse materials and objects, examining the often hidden processes and energies involved in their creation. Matters of Process highlights these processes and showcases how they influenced the generation of new work and ideas.

Niamh Fahy’s approach examines how disembodied forms might metamorphose into speculative bodies within the landscape. Working with the malleable and translucent qualities of wax, the artist introduces the disobedient cow’s tongue, detached from notions of human ownership. Her series of ‘roaming’ sculpture works forms a playful engagement with imagined worlds and unseen relationships in the landscape. Lucy Mulholland’s sculptural practice explores ecological precarity, interspecies entanglement, and the ethics of care through labour-intensive processes like mould-making, slip-casting, and metal casting. She works primarily with clay, metal, and paper, investigating how these raw materials are transformed through process. Humour and play are key strategies in her work — ways of navigating the emotional complexity of living through ongoing crisis. Her recent work examines how small, seemingly futile gestures can take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of climate anxiety and collective denial. Blaine O’Donnell has created new work investigating the sculptural potential of electro-mineral accretion processes, where limestone deposits gradually build up on wire forming an Irish word in a tank of mineral-enriched water. O’Donnell explores the art object as a site for the meeting of disparate things – limestone dust, metal, electricity, water, solar energy, and the Irish language – tracing points of separation and connection between the material and incorporeal, presence and absence, artwork and place. Kate Oram’s large-scale welded steel installation features fractal-inspired branching forms, echoing the self-similar, repeating patterns of tree growth. These sculptures are rooted in an exploration of recursive geometry, mirroring the natural logic of tree development and limb structures. The works aim to translate natural growth systems into durable, tactile forms that provide space for quiet observation and bodily resonance. Sonya Swarte’s installation employs the mechanics and processes associated with the early stages of photography and animation to reconfigure images from mobile phones, old photographs, postcards, drawings, animation, and diaries. Inspired by the persistence of images from the past, as in the concept of ‘hauntology’, Sonya works with print, drawing and photo-reel manipulation to develop an experimental work-in-progress installation using a self-made mutoscope, a praxinoscope and series of wall-mounted drawings.

Bio’s

Niamh Fahy is a visual artist and researcher from Galway, she has worked as a Research Associate at the Centre for Print Research (CFPR) at the University of the West of England. She completed her BA in Fine Art Printmaking at the Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland and holds her MA in Multidisciplinary Printmaking, University of the West of England (2019) and she is currently studying towards completing her PhD. Through her practice, Niamh investigates the possibilities and capacity for the print artist to challenge and expand modes of understanding anthropogenic changes within landscape. Between 2021 and 2023 she was awarded the UWE HAS-ACE connecting research project grant for the project Slow Violence and River Abuse: The Hidden Effect of Land Use on Water Quality. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at shows including The Masters: Relief, Bankside Gallery, London. The RWA, Bristol. The TYPA letterpress and Paper Arts Centre, Estonia. International Printmaking Conference Impact 9, Hangzhou, China and Woolwich Contemporary Printmaking Fair, London.
http://www.niamhfahy.com/

Lucy Mulholland (b. 1999) is an emerging artist based in Belfast. Working across sculpture and installation, her practice playfully investigates connections and exchanges between humans and the more-than-human world. She focuses on actions or gestures that may seem insignificant or even futile, reimagining them as catalysts for potential future action. Lucy holds a First-Class Honours degree in Sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art (2022) and was recently awarded the 2025 Gilbert Bayes Award by the Royal Society of Sculptors and the Meyer Oppenheim Prize at the 195th RSA Annual Exhibition. She has exhibited across Ireland and the UK, including Hidden Door Arts Festival Edinburgh, AWAKEN (Artlink, Buncrana), Materials, Messages and Meanings (R-Space, Lisburn), and They Had Four Years (GENERATOR projects, Dundee).

Blaine O’Donnell received the 2019 Emerging Irish Artist Residency Award at the Burren College of Art, followed by the exhibitions CAOL AIT, BCA, Clare (2019) and CAOL AIT Cuid a Do, 126 Gallery, Galway (2020). In 2021, he created a permanent sculptural installation at VOID, Derry, for Office of the Rest, a Forerunner project commissioned by Mary Cremin. O’Donnell’s essay Things to Do With Photographs was shortlisted for the Source Magazine Writers Prize 2021. Recent exhibitions include hinder/further, The Complex, Dublin (2022), and TWO PHOTOGRAPHS AWAY, Ardgillan Gallery, Balbriggan (2024). Residencies include the Temple Bar Gallery+Studios / HIAP Residency Exchange (2023), the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico (2024), and Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin (2024/5). Awards include the EMERGENCE Award, Wexford Arts Centre (2024) and the Paul Robinson Award, TBG+S (2025).

Kate Oram was awarded a Bachelor’s degree in Wood, Metal, Ceramics and Plastics in Brighton in 1991. After thirty years in the studio producing finely crafted bronze and stone sculpture, in 2021 she completed an MA in Creative Practice at IT Sligo during which she engaged with new processes, exploring the depths of her connection to the landscape. Her work has evolved towards a more conceptual, ecologically-focused art practice, allowing the creative forces of nature to shape her work. Exhibitions include King House, Boyle Arts Festival 2012-2023; Sculpture in Context, Botanic Gardens, Dublin 2015- 2023; Ballymaloe Sculpture Exhibition, Co. Cork, 2018; Sculpture at the Castle, Blarney, Co. Cork 2019, 2023/24; Tread Softly Festival, Sligo, 2021 and ‘Bloodroot’, Pulchri Studio, The Hague, Netherlands and Hamilton Gallery, Sligo 2025.

Sonya Swarte grew up in The Netherlands where she acquired a BA in Archaeology in 2005 at Leiden University. In 2007 she came to Ireland and has since been based in Leitrim where she lives with her three children. Swarte finished an Art and Design course (ETB) in 2017 and a Masters in Creative Arts (ATU Sligo) in 2022. During the Masters she started working in film photography and (stop motion) animation and later made a collaborative work entitled Bridey, with M. Blake, which was shown at the Galway Film Festival that year. In 2023 Swarte took part in the Chervona Kalyna animation project for Creative Leitrim and is based at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre where she continues to explore various ways of printing, developing photos and super 8 film. In 2025 Swarte joined the art collective ^ in Manorhamilton and is also a member of the Manorhamilton Print group where she facilitates print workshops with other artists.

Image credit: Kate Oram, Work in Progress. LSC 2025