INTRINSIC SYSTEMS | 2026 MTU Arts Office STEAM Award Exhibition

 

This exhibition is selected and presented annually by the MTU Arts Office to a number of graduating BA Hons. students from the MTU Crawford College of Art & Design graduate showcase exhibitions. It celebrates innovative art and design works that connect to STEAM concepts.

This might include works and projects that investigate or utilise methods or materials common to another discipline, or that explore new connections and interactions.

Presenting their work in a group exhibition in the James Barry Exhibition Centre is another opportunity to further explore connections and possibilities, and for the artists to engage with expertise from around the MTU community that can benefit their development as artists and designers.

This year sees 14 BA Hons graduates in Contemporary Applied Art, Creative Digital Media, and Fine Art selected to represent elements of their degree works - Alan Brown, Dion Dennehy, Aoife Glavin, Rachel Irwin, Eilis Kennedy, Siobhan McCarter Flynn, Amy Moynihan, Sarah Murphy, Clodagh O'Connor, Ciara O'Neill, Quinn Sweeney, Saran McGrath, Kyra O'Connor, Jack Long & Emma Kenneally.

About exhibiting Artists:

Alan Brown

I am a Cork-based artist for whom sculpture is the dominant part of my art practice. I am drawn to metal, wood, and accessible modern materials in expressing my work. Using the formal language of abstraction, I explore the dialogue between solid mass and void and how they interact within the spatial environments they displace.
I believe in the inherent vibrancy of sculptural materials, as non-living ecosystems constantly in contact with each other and their surroundings. My preferred methodology is direct sculpture, and I see my work as drawing in space. My aim is to create a dialogue between the work and the viewer, in effect creating another space.

I have an ecological and social conscience and am aware of the presence and responsibility of people on this planet. A significant part of my practice is predicting and solving technical problems associated with the realisation of a sculptural proposition, blending these solutions into the aesthetics, often in unexpected ways. This, for me, is an exciting part of the creative process.

The consideration of scale in my work is concerned with marrying the size of the piece with the viewer’s experience and engagement, whether through individual sculptures or installations, indoors or outdoors. I am influenced by the work of many artists including, Alexander Calder, Gego, Eva Rothschild, Ai Weiwei and others, whose sculptural language appeals to me.

 

Dion Dennehy

“How often do you feel overly active and compelled to do things, like you were driven by a motor?” Utilizing 3D animation and printing, my work explores an overactive internal world often associated with various mental health disorders. Experiences of rumination, stress, frustration, hyperactivity, fatigue, executive dysfunction, and burnout are translated into an industrial visual language, where the mechanics of a churning engine mirror a volatile inner chaos. This engine requires an intense build of pressure to ignite, driving itself compulsively forward, burning until it exhausts its fuel or is forcibly shut down. My aim is to create a space which embodies this relentless drive towards motion, in which rhythmic intensity can become stabilizing, offering a strange sense of calm, whereas silence, rather than soothing, can provoke unease and restlessness.

 

Aoife Galvin

I am a multidisciplinary artist working across ceramics and textiles. My work explores the human body through a lens of microbiology, looking at the ways the body is represented through scientific imagery such as microscope images, X-rays and scans. I am interested in how these images can disconnect us from the lived body, turning something deeply human into something clinical or unfamiliar. I use making as a way to reconnect with the body. Through ceramics and textiles, I try to bring back a sense of softness, emotion and physicality. I’m drawn to materials that can be stretched, repeated and reworked, allowing the surface to hold traces of the process. This way of working helps me move away from the clinical image and back towards something more human and felt.

 

Rachel Irwin

My work focuses on ideas of simultaneous sameness and difference. This idea is derived from my experience growing up with an identical twin sister, and the concept of sharing my physical appearance with another being. As an identical twin, from an outside perspective we appear as one homogenous body, while on the inside, we are unique and separate identities.

 

Eilis Kennedy

My practice is process led, starting with charcoal drawings of female figures and forms that overlap into illegibility and multiplicity. These figures are retold from women’s rugby photos, which allows for me to work from a more flesh-on-flesh dynamic. From this, I pull figures forward through oil paint, allowing them to affirm themselves visibly, whilst not allowing other figures to be visible at all. By doing so, I reflect on ideas of womanhood as a collective experience in relation to unity, visibility, fragmentation and ephemerality. I incorporate mark-making as a vestige of the body, creating and responding to line, by tactile methods or otherwise. This aligns with my ideas on female identity and the range in which it can be manifested. Working through a lens of abstraction and representation, the enigmatic figures often integrate into each other, allowing for a fluid demonstration of womanhood and its transformation. My research involves internalised misogyny and a borderspace that situates itself between co-emergence with the male gaze and the rejection of it. Doing both, or perhaps neither. I would describe my practice as a visualisation of the transformation of female identity within a patriarchal framework and the impossibility of fully transcending such ideologies.

 

Siobhan McCarter Flynn

Within my practice I explore the folklore surrounding the grief of the loss of myself through the degenerative disease multiple sclerosis, and the intersections of disability, illness, identity and art. My practice attempts to visualise the gradual deterioration of function of my body and how I've had to accept this function since my teens. I convey this degeneration through paintings of my own brain scans through the years highlighting the visible scarring leading to my diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis at 16. I attempt to lead the viewer through a visual examination of acceptance. My 12 paintings, which numerically represent the cycle in which women live under for the majority of their life, are accompanied by wilting gorse plants that I have nurtured and sown myself. The Gorse represents the self created folklore surrounding my degenerative disease, and my journey to acceptance, through sowing and caring for the rejected fauna I further explore my inner degeneration.

 

Amy Moynihan

Chaos and order are core concepts of my work. Through pouring latex into sheets and welding metal frames and structures, I explore this tension between chaos and order as well as the vulnerability that comes with our growing dependence on technology and communication systems. With prior research into accelerationist theory, my focus has shifted to examining physical infrastructures of communication and the fragility they expose. I use latex as a second skin to represent us, and I stretch it across metal frames and skeletal sculptures. I also use every day wiring, such as HDMI and ethernet cables to ground the digital world into something tangible. These materials are used in such a way as to remind us that the almighty digital cloud is not a celestial place in the sky, but a network of fibre optic cables that lie deep under the ocean. In my work, these hidden systems become a way of thinking through connection and exposure, but also control and collapse.

 

Sarah Murphy

My work explores the glitch as a site of potential emerging from the misuse of a medium. Once understood as an unwanted mechanical failure, the glitch has evolved into a recognised artistic process and aesthetic, challenging the dominance of digital precision and opening space for alternative possibilities of meaning and expression. In an attempt to materialise the immaterial digital error, my work reveals the potential in bending a medium outside its expected function, inducing and appreciating error in digital and physical domains.

I position painting not only as a medium, but as the subject itself. Through grid stencilling and pixelated forms, the fluid nature of paint becomes restricted into a mechanical order. Within this imposed control, “glitches” arise beyond the digital domain into physicality. These moments of malfunction become generative, surfacing a tension between control and breakdown, intention and accident.

My visual language reflects a sense of disembodiment shaped by digital culture, where identity is fragmented through constant mediated interactions. My installation ultimately transforms machines and handmade works into malfunctioning systems, immersing the viewer in a destabilised, hybrid environment merged between analogue and digital realities.

 

Clodagh O'Connor

My current studio practice explores the visual concept of epidemics and viruses, such as the Spanish flu virus, and the AIDS epidemic, through the creation of large scale sculptures. Exploring the ways these diseases spread throughout the human body, I am inspired by the breakdown of the viruses, the patterns they create, and the rapid spread of these viruses from person to person. I use metal and expanding foam to create my sculptures. These materials extend outward from the welded metal framework, and by using darker purple and red tones I create organic irregular forms that represent my theme and practice.

 

Ciara O'Neill

My practice is a reflection of works that trace my journey as an athlete, exploring the highs and lows of chasing success. As an endurance athlete I recreate my story through detailed drawings in pen, watercolour, and charcoal. I focus on anatomical forms that appear strained, distorted, or injured, capturing the physical and psychological toll that I’ve had to endure to continue, embodying vulnerability and resilience.

My work embraces the setbacks and achievements that define progress, presenting success not as a fixed point but as a continuous process. Geography is central to my work. From collecting and analysing graphs and metrics recorded on my watch, I recreate routes, pace, elevation, and heart rate into visual compositions. These mappings preserve memories and capture endurance as both physical and emotional, where the body records each trail as a lasting imprint. I work on rice paper, Chinese paper, wallpaper rolls, and other delicate surfaces. Their delicacy mirrors both the athlete’s body and the unpredictable nature of the future, where winning is never guaranteed. Layering becomes a key process, symbolising the accumulation of training blocks and the gradual building of momentum over time. Just as endurance is developed through repetition and consistency, reflecting growth, persistence, and the fragile balance between pushing forward and breaking point. Muted, earthy tones mirror landscape, medical scans, heavy emotions, harsh weather conditions and memory, grounding the work in lived experience. The repetition of mark making mirrors training cycles, while fragmentation reflects memory’s instability. Ultimately, my work invites viewers to consider the delicate balance between strength and fragility, and the enduring impact of movement through time and place.

 

Quinn Sweeney

Since arriving at Crawford, my research and practice has been informed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘flesh’, which he describes as ‘surrounding and permeating the body, space and experience’. This describes the audible world which connects and informs us, however, audible information also invades and interferes. In emphasising my bodily perception of this invisible interference through drawing, my work challenges traditional ideas of sound; its visual representation and the logic of visual perception in the technological age we live in now. Through an inter-disciplinary and a process-led approach, this work employs visual observation, listening, memory and response, combined with mark making and layers. Working intuitively on surfaces with a fluid orientation, their state is changed – expressing the bodily experience of interference, temporality, asymmetry and texture - visual or physical. The body of work presented here, referred to as ‘Body Echoes’, shows a series of gestural mixed media drawings on paper. These are exhibited at different heights, therefore conveying how sound invades us and our space. Like the human body, paper has a history, responding and remembering its influences. The accompanying audio captures the sound made during the drawing process, propagating, once again, the experience of audible interference.

 

Saran McGrath

I am passionate about Motion Graphics, 3D Design and creating immersive visual experiences through digital media. Throughout my time in Creative Digital Media, I became particularly interested in creating atmospheric and stage based visuals using software's such as Blender and TouchDesigner.

My final year project 'Unseen Order', is an audio visual installation that explores how hidden algorithmic systems shape our everyday lives through organic and computational patterns. My role within this project focused on Generative Systems and 3D Motion Design, where I developed procedural visuals inspired by natural formations, fractals and immersive digital environment

 

Kyra O'Connor

My work is mostly based around motion design, digital media and visual storytelling. I’m really interested in advertising and marketing, especially how people react to visuals and how colour, movement, sound and typography can change the feeling of something.

During my Creative Digital Media degree, I’ve worked with After Effects, animation, branding, interactive media, audio visual design and studio technology. I like making work that moves and has atmosphere, instead of just being a still design.
For my final year project, Unseen Order, I worked on the 2D motion design and visual direction. My role focused on the look and feel of the project, including colour, pacing, motion, branding and 2D visual experiments. I used After Effects and TouchDesigner to create organic visuals linked to natural patterns.

Overall, I like creating work that feels clear, visual and engaging. I’m interested in motion design, advertising, branding and audio visual work, and how these areas can be used to make people notice, understand and remember something.

 

Jack Long

I have a strong interest in creating digital experiences at the intersection of experiential design, motion graphics and visual storytelling. During my time in Creative Digital Media (MTU),  I have built skills across interactive media, projection mapping, product branding and 3D Modeling, using them to explore ideas around technology, perception and digital culture.

My final year project, Unseen Order, is an interactive audio visual installation examining the relationship between algorithmic systems and natural patterns through generative visuals and live audience interaction.

I want to keep making work that sits at the edge of emerging technology, concept driven creative projects and building brands for commercial and creative spaces.

 

Emma Kenneally

I am passionate about creativity, visual communication and digital experiences. Through my studies in Creative Digital Media, I have developed a strong interest in visual experience, user experience and the way design shapes how people connect with digital spaces. I enjoy creating work that balances aesthetics and functionality while exploring new ideas and creative approaches.

My FYMP 'Unseen Order', is an audio-visual installation that explores how hidden algorithmic systems shape our everyday lives through organic and computational patterns. My role 'UX Strategy and Visual Experience Curator shapes how audiences experienced the installation and its exploration of algorithms and natural pattern.