Meet the Artists
Jack Pierce
Jack Pierce is a Dublin-based multi-disciplinary artist and educator. Influenced by queer ecology, monstrosity, and identity, their practice is process-driven, blending sculpture, painting, and textiles. Sustainability and materiality play a central role in their work; experimenting with alternative and found fibres, and drawing on antiquated crafts to question our material legacy, Anthropocene horror, and nature’s fragmentation, while guiding an ongoing exploration of the relationship between craft and fine art.
Their current work explores ‘unruly heritage’ and queer ecology. They are interested in the haunting/afterlife of discarded materials and how they intersect with queer philosophy; particularly its rejection of fixed categories and emphasis on interconnectedness. Incorporating time honored craft techniques highlights the tactile legacy of making and the ancient industries of craft in Ireland. Referencing Donna Haraway’s call to “make kin” across species, histories, and practices, the work considers how generational knowledge and skill can act as forms of kinship, binding us to one another, to material traditions, and to the ecological systems we inhabit.
Andrew Grace
Andrew Grace is a Visual Artist and Researcher based in Dublin. They graduate from NCAD Dublin in 2023 with a BA in Fine Art with Critical Cultures and are currently a resident of MART awarded by Fingal Arts Office. Their practice evolves from in depth queer theoretical research where a form of visual essays are displayed, critiquing the way of queer being and engaging with space both physical and digital. They often critiquing bodies in space through sexual relations with land, or further investigating queer existence within political spheres questioning where queerness is or will be with in future contexts . Although consistent with the digital form, Andrew continues to explore different formats of expression through physicalities and their represented meanings. They wish to place visuals to people where discussion and co-learning can be experienced, where questions are central to their practice to engage with alternative understandings of queer placement through different spaces and politics.
This body of work focuses on queer placement within politics, by working through Irish (unofficial) symbolism and aligning it with queerness, by means of site specificity and physical objects. Through this, they work with political texts and queer theory as an aid to critique where queerness lies within all this. Centring Bunreacht na hÉireann and legislation to the work, creates a form of essay focusing on queer futurity. The Irish Hare emerges as a common motif throughout and allies queerness and Irishness as digital form; although not always identifiable its presence is clear. While queerness is being scrutinised globally and language is being trivialised in order to objectify queers, it feels essential to assess where queerness belongs in politics and questions the future of queerness within Ireland.
Ciarán McGannon
Ciarán McGannon is a composer, producer, performer, and multi-instrumentalist. They founded and lead Mothbell, an experimental rock/folk project which creates music set in a fantasy world. Mothbell began as just a band, but has evolved to incorporate my experience with theatre and visual art to create unique live performances. Their performance will feature a solo music performance, storytelling, field recordings, drawings, and sculpture/costume elements made of foraged materials. It follows the story of Suibhne the Wren Boy, loosely influenced by Irish folk tales. Their approach is informed by Michael David Forster’s book ‘The Folkloresque’, which describes the practice in modern media of creating a “sense” of folklore by making broad gestures towards folk tale motifs and creatures, such as in Studio Ghibli movies. Mothbell deals with themes of social and economic hierarchy, and how that influences our culture’s ever increasing disconnect with the sensory experiences of the natural world and art.
Ciarán graduated from BIMM in 2023, and have since worked with a wide range of artists, including award-winning collaborations with multidisciplinary artist Venus Patel that deal with Queer identity and nonconformity. Their latest collaboration is ‘Monsters’, an experimental musical theatre piece, was developed during a 2023 residency in the Centre Culturel Irlandais, and debuted in the Dublin Fringe Festival 2024. They have also produced several independent releases for multiple bands, such as Fly Parts. They are a seasoned live performer who has played for several live music acts, including at Electric Picnic with Actress, and a sold out shows at the Workman’s Club. They received the Fingal Artists’ Support Scheme in 2025, the MAKE Residency in 2024, and the Agility Award in 2024.
Lenny Sanches
Lenny Sanches, known as Goosebatss, is a designer and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of memory, repression, and silence. His practice investigates how voices—whether of individuals, families, or entire communities—are erased, censored, or deliberately silenced, and how these absences shape both personal identity and collective history.
His recent project, Spiral Succession. Selective Silence, is rooted in the absence of his grandfather, Albert Gavrilovich Stetsuk, whose memory within the family was fragmented by both loss and political repression. Through publication, moving image, and typographic experimentation, the work reconstructs this absence, positioning it within a broader meditation on historical amnesia and the silencing of inconvenient truths.
Influenced by thinkers such as Milan Kundera, Achille Mbembe, Umberto Eco, and Yuri Lotman, Sanches approaches his work through the lens of semiotics and cultural memory. Eco’s concept of the “open work” and Lotman’s exploration of semiotic systems inform his methods, allowing typography, grids, and visual structures to operate as carriers of both what is present and what is withheld. His work becomes less about fixed meaning than about opening interpretive spaces where absence and silence speak as forcefully as words.
Nicole Manning
Nicole Manning is a Dublin based artist working predominantly through the medium of paint. Manning is a recent graduate of NCAD (2024) in which she received her Joint Hons BA in Fine Art Painting & Education. Inspired by the mind-body connection & the interplay between the physical and psychological, her work explores the external expression of inner turmoil within the human experience. Rooted in her experience of living with chronic stomach pain over the last 8 years as a result of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), Manning’s recent work focuses on how trauma manifests within the body. Using gestural, twisting, brushwork to mirror the visual of the intestines, she explores how symbolic & archetypal imagery can narrate the complex experience of living with an invisible illness. Victorian bed frames, curled bodies & animals act as metaphor & alter-ego within her paintings. Her work aims to translate internal pain into visible form.
Following her degree show “To continue to live even when you don’t have the Stomach for it” (2024), she was awarded a year-long studio residency at the Clancy Quay Studios (2024 - 2025) in Island Bridge, Dublin, alongside a place on the ‘Superprojects’ Professional Development & Mentorship Programme for recent graduates. In August 2025, she was awarded the ‘Fingal | Draíocht Studio Residency Award,’ which led to a funded mentorship with Sharon Murphy. Later in 2025, she will begin a residency at ‘RAMA’ in rural Portugal, just outside of Lisbon, running from October to December. Manning’s work is frequently exhibited, including recent shows such as “Mercado” (July, 2025) in TØN Gallery, and “Peering into the Songbird’s Organ” (June, 2025) in Gallery X. As well as self curating group exhibitions, such as “Go Around, Go “, “ “,” (July 2025), “Silver Apples of the Moon, Golden Apples of the Sun” (Feb, 2025), and “Sweet Splinters” (Nov, 2024).