To Search, To Find

Felicia Garrivan, Dee Hurley, Lisa O’Sullivan, Jonathan Stack, Lara Quinn

Location: Europa Gallery, 11 Chatham Street, Dublin 2

Dates: 31/01/2025 – 21/03/2025

To Search, To Find showcases five MTU Crawford College of Art and Design graduates from 2024. Mining the Irish past for new ways of being with the contemporary world, these artists explore ritual and symbolic forces through photography, print, drawing, painting, textiles, and film. Their works open novel perspectives on Irish folklore, landscape, and mythology. The exhibition as a gathering of art works takes as its starting point the empowering stories and histories of St. Brigit.

We position this show as part of a larger negotiation of Irish history, language and myth by a generation of artists who are engaging with this ancient material to uncover new avenues of connection. In Celtic mythology, Brigit was a triple Goddess - of healing, fire and poetry. The Christian saint who took her name was a powerful leader who founded an inclusive community at a time when, under the Brehon laws, women had few rights. For the artists gathered here, the figure of Brigit, be it in folklore or in history, offers new resonances for our contemporary moment and opens up a space to consider our relationship with land, with spirituality and with a fraught and contested history. 

To Search, To Find is curated by Sarah Kelleher and Pádraig Spillane who lecture at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork City.

Felica Garrivan

Myths help us to understand how our ancestors once lived. They were formed to help guide individuals in their existence and purpose in the world. As myths have been passed down generation to generation orally and through objects left behind, they serve a deep purpose in letting us look at our environment, our connections to others and our cultural practices. Garriavan’s work looks at moments relating to the Tain Bó Cúailgne, known as The Cattle Raid of Cooley, from the Ulster Cycle in Irish Mythology. Using photography, she creates work by going to on-site locations connected to this legend in counties across Connaught and Leinster. Garrivan visually manipulate these images of the Irish landscape bridging time, memory, and fragments in a contemporary light.

Dee Hurley

Dee Hurley’s practice seeks to engage the viewer with the wonder of botanical elements. Her work endeavours to elevate and honour the diversity and beauty of their form and structure. She uses assemblage to display dynamic patterns of roots and seeds, collecting and arranging them until she finds a way of presenting that resonates. Hurley also translates texture and form by scanning and enlarging images of delicate plant materials. These are then printed on up-cycled textiles. Her work is underscored by the sadness of biodiversity loss, and the hope a deeper connection with our living environment can prompt positive change in our world.

Lisa O’Sullivan

Using elements of print, drawing, photography, sculpture, video & performance, Lisa O’Sullivan’s work draws inspiration from folklore and ritual. She is interested in mapping a territory where landscape, ceremonial acts and the marking of time meet, finding new resonances in old practices as a way to navigate the current climate and ecological crises.

O’Sullivan’s work uses folklore as a lens for exploring the metaphysical space between humans and nature. Her practice considers how environmental and ecological collapse require urgent re-engagement with old forms of knowledge and wisdom in an effort to reimagine better ways of co-existence with nature. She examines how ritual and reconnection to the natural world during an unprecedented time of failing systems and global uncertainty, might act as tools of transformation. Central to the work is an investigation- questioning if re-enchantment with nature through folklore could be a potent agent for resistance, change and renewal.

Lara Quinn

Primarily based in oil painting, Quinn describes her conceptual practice as a demonstration of ‘self-mythology'. By harnessing archetypal content rooted within religious iconography, Quinn is projecting her own likeness upon mythological representations of women, reconceptualising their narratives as a means to ultimately reinvent herself in the process. Her paintings convey themes of transformation, primarily concerned with rites of rebirth and redemption. Inspired by the ecclesiastical tradition of reliquaries, these paintings are guarded within protective yet delicate frames, reinforcing the sanctity of this process. This work is motivated by Quinn’s interest in explicating the latent role of sacred myths as allegories which incite subconscious processes of the human psyche.

Jonathan Stack

Jonathan Stack’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses drawing, print, laser cut technology and incorporates artificial intelligence programmes. His work explores Irish and Queer identity through examining the idea of ritual and rites of passage in rural settings. His work is concerned with Catholicism as a system of organising power and its legacies of shame in Ireland. His uses his work as a lens to examine queer experience and as a way of making sense of the social fabric that we have inherited in Ireland.