2nd – 30th November 2025
a bheith ann (to be there) Sinead Smyth offers insight into the artist’s process of gathering ideas – how observation becomes gesture and thought transforms into form. Viewers are invited to journey through points of contact and connection, where elements meet and shift, and to sense how these encounters give rise to new work.
The exhibition includes night drawings in charcoal and ink, works on paper of varied scales, paintings, photographs, video, audio, arrangements, and installations. Created with materials such as charcoal, gathered dust, soil, acrylic, and oil paint, these pieces explore the thresholds between sea and land, light and dark, and the moments that exist between day and night.
“I am interested in what happens in between – where things touch, resist, and become something new,”
the artist reflects.
The work poses quiet yet profound questions: What are the forces that shape and mould the coast? Where does resistance come from, and why? And what happens when these elemental processes mirror our own lives?
Drawing from observations of natural movement—weathering, erosion, the ebb and flow of waves, and the streams feeding the sea around Fort Dunree – the artist collected visual, sonic, and gestural traces. These become reflections of the micro and macro forces that shape both landscape and human experience.
“Sometimes the sea is a whisper; sometimes it is a breaking point.”
This body of work seeks to cut through the noise of contemporary life, offering a form of stillness and connection through elemental process and time. Time itself functions as an active ingredient—both in the gathering and the making.
The artist spent ten days on the beach at Port Bán, camping after an October storm, making driftwood charcoal over an open fire. Tools crafted from found materials—horsehair, fishing rope, driftwood—evoked a personal memory: watching a father tie fishing hooks.
“I remembered him with the longing of a child—but for the first time, without pain.”
Through this process, the artist found a quiet freedom: to remember without sorrow, to change without resistance, and to accept that simply being—here, now—is enough.