Holding | Exhibition
A collaborative installation created by Mary Callaghan, Emma McNulty, Louise Kiernan, Róisín Ní Chonaill, and Sergey Kior.
Between the familiar and the unknown, a place of sublime wonder, where the unseen forces of nature are comprehended, lies the cliff edge. Each step here needs to be more careful, aware, and intentional. So often our movements are routine, habitual, unthinking. We invite you now to slow down and draw closer to the edge.
The 2026 BAVA Visual Art Degree students present this collaborative exhibition, which explores the experience of human encounter through landscape, language, memory, trace and voice. Questioning the ability to see the concealed, to feel the unconsidered, and notice the smallest gestures, by creating bodies of work sited on Sherkin Island that speak to one another with rhythms and patterns that we’ve long forgotten.
Within these themes, each artist explores a facet of what it means to “Hold”. Mary Callaghan’s work + Headland located above Cow Strand, presents five large pieces of sheer material, positioned as points of collaboration with the wind, rain and sun. A meditative acting painting performance, using the universal language of the line, Mary offers her hand as a corporeal form to begin a dialogue with the elemental forces.
Voice Rewilding by Louise Kiernan, Beyond the Surface by Emma McNulty, MARTS MOTHERS MADNESS by Róisín Ní Chonaill and Sherkin Island at Night by Sergey Kior
Gesture and noticing the un-noticed in the everyday is the focus of Emma McNulty in her work entitled: Beyond the Surface, a site specific work, displayed in Peggy’s House, Farrancoush, using gesture as an exploration of the self within the domestic space, invisible labour, the unseen and the often overlooked acts of service, care and resistance are represented through sculptural casts of the hand, frozen in moments when gesture is beyond language itself.
In Voice Rewilding by Louise Kiernan the connection between language and landscape is explored in an immersive multimedia installation that creates space for the voice to be reclaimed and rewilded. It honours voices and lived experiences of living with stammered speech through a series of oral accounts, the film stages the voices that have often gone unnoticed or unheard. It offers an opportunity to celebrate all voices, to reflect on the power structures that shape them, and to trace the landscapes from which they emerge.
+ Headland by Mary Callaghan
Róisín Ní Chonaill’s installation, located near Michael’s Farm, presents her film MARTS MOTHERS MADNESS, an exploration of the search for belonging. The work traces a journey of rebirth, rupture, and eventual dispersal within the landscape, unfolding across Sherkin Island and the cattle mart in Skibbereen. In this moving portrait of interspecies intimacy, Ní Chonaill collaborates closely with cattle as more-than-human participants. Together, they shape a world in which the animal becomes a threshold of care an embodied space where both human and non-human lives are held.
Sergey Kior turns our attention to the unseen in his body of work: Sherkin Island at Night; a series of large scale prints placed in different locations across the Island. Working only at night, after the last ferry leaves, the artist focuses on a time when the island becomes quiet. Using only available light from the moon, street lamps, or passing cars, the images capture moments where familiar places lose their clarity. The photographs are rough and unpolished, with things appearing and disappearing in the dark. Rather than showing the island, the work is about staying with it in this state of opacity.
All artists seek to re-imagine what we have not yet noticed. To give time, space, and pause for openness, connection and reclamation of body and space. To explore lived experience as a continuum of cycles, but one that allows us to slow down, contemplate and be present. They each approach Holding as a way of listening, sustaining humanness, carrying lineage and resisting forgetting. Across these five artist’s works mapped across Sherkin Island in interior homes, on cliff edges and placed in the environment, hands become vessels, landscapes become keepers, and time itself seems briefly held in suspension, asking what it means to hold and be held within a fragile, shifting world.