COW HOUSE STUDIO RESIDENCIES

Sarah Walsh

5 – 11 August

Sarah Walsh is a Dutch/Irish actor, as well as a drama facilitator with an M.Ed in drama in education. She will use this week at Cow House Studio to finish a play she had been developing in a playwriting course at The Lir that will be performed in a pub. These pub plays are a way to make theatre more accessible to people who may consider theatre too ‘high brow’.   

She will also use this time to further develop a drama programme for disenfranchised youth. She feels strongly that drama, by bringing people together in a room, and by nature of stepping into someone else’s shoes has a very important part to play in the current polarized climate.

Paul Cashin

12 – 18 August

An Irish artist based in Wexford. His chosen medium is oil on canvas, along with photography, drawing and sculpture. His work normally contains a figurative element, but not always, located in an Irish landscape. Usually a mix of vibrant colours and varying techniques that create a feeling of numinousness around the landscape in an attempt to represent the essence of a place.

He is interested in large scale paintings that employ a sense of embodiment to create large complex scenes imbued with pattern and repetition in order to explore ideas of the numinous or Awe.  His latest paintings were presented on a free standing structure bringing a sculptural element to the work. Attention is carried laterally around the painting in its 360 degree form encouraging the viewer to actively participate. The viewer is aware that there is a larger image, yet is denied access to this complete vista, hinting at the perceived vastness of Awe or the numinous. 

Gillian O’Shea

Monday 19 – 25 August

An emerging visual Irish artist passionate about highlighting the importance of our natural world, particularly in the face of the climate crisis. Her practice explores themes of the nature, conservation and transformation through ambitious large-scale works that offer the public exciting new ways to engage with contemporary art.

O’Shea’s immersive installations incorporate paper and fabric sculptures, dynamic lighting, video, and audio components, to invite the viewer to briefly escape their everyday routines by entering an alternative wonderland where things are not what they seem. O’Shea graduated in 2004 with a 1^ST class degree in interdisciplinary sculpture from DIT, and in 2022 completed a Masters in Art & Research Collaboration at IADT.

In 2019 her immersive performance work ‘Dawn’ was selected for the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textile Museums International TECHstyle Art Biennial (ITAB), and in 2020 O’Shea work was shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait Prize. In 2023, O’Shea was selected to showcase a new, solo immersive installation entitled ‘all flesh’ at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Waterford. In 2024, ‘Dawn’ was selected to be performed at the New European Bauhaus Festival – the only Irish artwork selected. In 2024 Gillian was selected to participate as a Fellow of the inaugural Climate Immersion Project. Gillian’s performance work ‘Dawn’ has been selected to be exhibited at the upcoming Earth Rising 2024 festival in the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Fiona O’Connor

26 Aug – 01 Sept

Fiona O’ Connor is an artist who uses photography as a medium to explore her ideas. She has an interest in things that catch her eye, make her think, smile and spark her curiosity. She enjoys and plays with the space photography holds. It can document events and people in our lives but also it has the ability to obscure and twist. She has a particular interest in how words can conjure up an image in one’s head and also how images can bring words to the fore of our minds. She uses photography to capture this relationship between words and images.

Fiona has a BA (Hons) in Photography from IADT. She has exhibited in multiple group shows both nationally and internationally, including Tulca, Galway Art Centre & NUIG; Iontas, Sligo Art Centre; The Lab, Dublin; Concourse, County Hall, Dun Laoghaire; Broadstone Studios and Gallery, Dublin; The Joinery, Stoneybatter, Dublin; Lotz Photo festival, Poland; ‘Cead in China’, 411 Gallery, Shanghai & a solo show in Signal Art Centre, Bray.