Ultraviolet Art Talks

On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to photographer Conor Horgan in 2022.

Conor Horgan is a visual artist and editorial photographer, based in Ireland. His work is concerned with identity, vulnerability, trust and the need for meaningful connections to self, others and the natural world. 

Equally happy on location and in the studio, he enjoys connecting with all kinds of people from all sorts of backgrounds; whether it be working on a commission, an experimental film or shooting a story in a distant country. He also work as a writer and film director, and bring these narrative skills to bear when telling stories through stills, motion, the written word or a combination of all three. 

Selected Solo exhibitions

Post-State - The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Oct – Nov 2022 

En résidence - Permanent installation of portraits of artists-in-residence. Centre Cultural Irlandais, Paris, from November 2021

Selected group exhibitions

Changing States: Ireland in the 21st Century - Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin - 2024

Winter Show - SO Fine Art Prints, Dublin - 2022, 2023, 2024

Annual Exhibition - Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin - 2024

Prism Inside - Íova Group - Tøn Gallery, Dublin - 2024

Summer Show - SO Fine Art Prints, Dublin - 2023, 2024

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For more information, follow Conor Horgan on Instagram @conorhorgan

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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to Curator and Cultural Producer Julia Gelezova in 2022.

Julia Gelezova is a Cultural Producer and Curator, specialising in contemporary lens-based practices. She is General and Project Manager for PhotoIreland, producing events throughout the year like the annual PhotoIreland Festival and Critical Academy, while collaborating on ambitious projects like Creative Europe Photography Platforms—Parallel and Futures.

Julia is co-editor of OVER Journal: The Critical Journal of Photography and Visual Culture for the 21st Century. In 2024, she has founded vicinities.network - a peer network for Visual Arts curators and professionals based in Ireland.

She has ample experience in producing exhibitions and events, including curatorial work and project management, has vast and successful experience in personal and collective application writing for bodies like the Arts Council of Ireland and local councils. She has participated in portfolio reviews, acted as visiting lecturer, and also worked in an editorial capacity and translation for artists and other arts professionals, including work for The Routledge Guide to Photography and Visual Culture.

Most recently, she curated the 2021 edition of PhotoIreland Festival and was the Centre Culturel Irlandais cultural producer resident 2022. She is a member of the AICA International Association of Art Critics.

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For more information, follow Julia Gelezova and PhotoIreland on Instagram @julia.gelezova @photoireland

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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Aoife McCloughlin in 2022.

McCloughlin’s practice is concerned with the materiality of public space. She engages in the act of 'gleaning', drawing from everyday material configurations which often get overlooked. To glean is to gather excess material from disparate sources.

Influenced by filmmaker Agnès Varda’s documentary ‘The Gleaners and I’ (2000), which explores the act in urban and rural settings, Mc Cloughlin feels compelled to appropriate abandoned objects. Beginning with photographing found objects in their respective locations, she attempts to understand the objects’ economies of use and the patterns of these material arrangements. 

No longer fulfilling their intended function, the objects found in their dislocated states lend themselves to reimagining. Through material manipulation, the utility of the objects is subverted by pushing the limitations of the object’s form. Ultimately the work aims to raise awareness around the circulation of mass-produced materials and how they embody the marks we leave as humans.

Aoife McCloughlin has recently joined Provost's Curatorial Fellow at The Douglas Hyde in Ireland (April 2025).

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For more information, follow The Douglas Hyde gallery on Instagram @dhg_dublin

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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Robert Ryan in 2022.

Born in County Limerick, Robert Ryan graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design in 1987. He worked in Copenhagen and London before returning to Ireland in 1994.

In Ireland, Ryan’s work is viewed as somewhat unique. Referencing post-modern, it borrows qualities from European old masters, using traditional characteristics in a modern context. Robert Ryan paints landscape, but his work cannot be described as ‘landscape painting’. Allegorical concepts including the infinity of space and time, solitude, vulnerability, fragility and the cycle of life are explored in his paintings and drawings in which a generic four-legged creature is central. This creature inhabits another world, a universal landscape. 

Ryan has cultivated his images, of both place and it’s inhabitants, into a hybrid, a non-specific and as a result the viewer is left to reflect on essential truths. This is work that ultimately celebrates the commonality between man and all other creatures – past, present and future.

An interest in zoology and travel has hugely informed Ryan’s work. He has travelled widely, visiting over sixty countries on all continents where he has encountered many different eco-systems, experiencing first hand how all living things interact and how they respond to their environment, how man responds to other evolutionary groups and how we value that fact. This knowledge forms a major part of the work. 

Robert Ryan lives and works in Lough Gur, Co Limerick. Lough Gur is a small placid lake, surrounded by rugged limestone hills and deciduous woodland. it has been continuously inhabited since the arrival of neolithic people five thousand years ago and is of outstanding archaeological significance. Ruins and artefacts from many periods of irish history have been found there. The evocative qualities of this environment have been a constant source of inspiration for Robert Ryan.  

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For more information, follow Robert Ryan on Instagram @robertryanireland

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Closing Season 12, Caren Sullivan have a super chat with Ángel Luis González Fernández from PhotoIreland in 2022.

PhotoIreland grows the reputation of Irish artists globally through a 360 degree support framework and platform for contemporary photography, activated through a diversity of projects. These include events such as PhotoIreland Festival and Halftone print fair amongst others; resources such as the PhotoIreland Collection, a specialised research library of photobooks, and Ireland’s Art Bookshop, The Library Project; via publishing with projects such as OVER Journal and TLP Editions; professional development support through networking and consultancy opportunities; and empowering early and mid-career photographers via our international partnerships, most relevantly through Creative Europe co-funded platforms such as FUTURES and Parallel.

A new cultural hub in the Dublin’s North Docklands opening Summer 2025 will strengthen PhotoIreland's work supporting Photography in Ireland.

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For more information, follow FotoIreland on instagram @photoireland

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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to visual artist Doireann Ní Ghrioghair in 2022.

Doireann Ní Ghrioghair (b. 1983) graduated from Chelsea College of Art & Design, London in 2010.

Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Eight Gallery, Dublin (2016) and CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery, Cork (2014). Notable group exhibitions include Tulca, The Headless City (2016); ARTWORKS, VISUAL, Carlow (2016); Veins, Molesworth Gallery, Dublin (2016); After the Future, Eva Biennial (2012) curated by Annie Fletcher, Limerick. She was selected three times to exhibit at Creekside Open, APT Gallery, London (2015, 2013 & 2011 curated by Lisa Milroy, Ceri Hand and Phyllida Barlow respectively).

She was commissioned to create an installation, Beyond Excess, at Shunt, London Bridge (2011). She has received Arts Council of Ireland bursaries and was an award winner at Now Wakes the Sea, Kinsale Arts Festival (2013). She was selected to participate in the WARP Artist Village, Bruges (2015). Future projects include a solo exhibition at Platform Arts, Belfast (2017) and a two-person show at Arthouse1, London (2017).

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For more information, follow Doireann Ní Ghrioghair on Instagram @doireanndoireann

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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to visual artist Shane Lynam in 2022.

Shane Lynam (b. 1980) is an Irish photographer based in Dublin. His first book, Fifty High Seasons, was published in 2018. He is represented by Galerie Bertrand Grimont in Paris who presented his work at Paris Photo and exhibited Fifty High Seasons in 2019.

He won the Gallery of Photography Solas award in 2015 and the Curtin O’Donoghue RHA award in 2018. He was selected for a residency at the Irish Cultural Centre Paris in 2019 which included an exhibition at the Centre. He was the recipient of the Arts Council Visual Arts Bursary Award in 2022.

By spending prolonged periods photographing built environments and overlooked public spaces, and weaving the images together to create intuitive narratives, he looks to provide a fresh perspective on how we regard public spaces.

“Having moved around a lot since my childhood, I found myself back living in Dublin in 2012 and slowly realised that I would be spending an indefinite period of my life here. I have been negotiating my relationship with the city ever since. This has involved obsessively photographing as much of the fabric of the city as I can. By returning over and over to the same sites and almost deconstructing the space, I then look to put these fragments back together to suggest an alternative representation of the city, somewhere between reality and my own experience. The work intends to challenge popular visual representations of the post-crisis period in Dublin by emphasising the subjective experience and how it can be reflected in the texture and physicality of the built environment.”__Shane Lynam

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For more information, follow Shane Lynam on Instagram @shanelynam

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On this episode, Caren Sullivan Talks to artist Sorcha McNamara in 2022.

Sorcha McNamara lives and works in Mayo, Ireland, and sometimes elsewhere. She works in abstraction. 

Her approach to making things is simultaneously meditative and improvised; at once thoughtful and thoughtless. Her eye attends to the overlooked, unnoticed or disregarded aspects of the everyday, focusing her attention towards material, objects and fragments that are often discarded, salvaged, reclaimed holding traces of a previous existence, or entirely ambiguous in their origin.

Selected recent group exhibitions include VISUAL Carlow Centre for Contemporary Art (2024); Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2024); Draíocht Gallery, Dublin (2023); and The LAB, Dublin (2023). Solo projects include Echo/Locate, Linenhall Arts Centre (2025); Fathomless Arms, Ballina Arts Centre (2023); (dis)attachments, The Hyde Bridge Gallery (2022); and Oonagh Young Gallery (2022).

Recent residencies include Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2024); Zaratan Arte Contemporanea (2024); Totaldobze Art Centre (2022); and Tangent Projects (2021). Sorcha’s work has been supported through the Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award (2023, 2022, 2021) and a Mayo Artist Bursary Award (2023, 2022).

She holds an MA in Art + Research Collaboration from IADT Dún Laoghaire (2024) and a BA in Painting from Limerick School of Art & Design (2019). 

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For more information, follow Sorcha McNamara on Instagram @sorcha.mcnamara

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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Kitsch Doom in 2022 about their unique and fantastic works.

Kitsch Doom (Isabella Bonet) is an award-winning visual artist and filmmaker based in Ireland and the U.S. With a background in fine art printmaking, performance, photography, and video Kitsch combines elements of fine art and media. Kitsch graduated with a first-class honours in BA Fine Art and Visual Culture in 2019 and recently graduated from an MFA in Fine Art Media at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.

Kitsch has won 4 awards for Best Experimental Film in New York Film Awards, Los Angeles Film Awards, Festigious Los Angeles and FilmCon for their video performance The Clothes Wear You (2020). Kitsch has exhibited work both nationally and internationally and is represented by Stoney Road Press.

Notable exhibitions include #ICPConcerned at the International Centre of Photography New York City, Ink Miami, London Original Print Fair, The RHA 190th, 191st, and 192nd Annual Exhibition and Galway International Arts Festival where they were awarded with the NUI Galway Purchase Prize. Kitsch’s work has been collected by NUI Galway, The United Arts Club, Wexford Arts Centre and other private collections. 

Inspired by theories on gender, sociology, and posthumanism, Kitsch transforms themselves and volunteers into fictional characters through acting techniques such as improvisation and the Method. Through performance, video, photography, print, and social media experiments Kitsch explores new ways of conceptualising ‘the self’.

Kitsch creates work about the many layering processes behind human identity, and how we are now living in a strange, chaotic time in the world that lies in-between dated traditional values and trailblazing digital realities. Undoubtedly, the imprint of man is changing. In a world where being human isn’t cutting it, where does our sense of self lie? 

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For more information, follow Kitsch Doom on Instagram @kitschdoom

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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Alan Raggett in 2022.

Alan Raggett (b.1977, Kilkenny, Ireland) is a visual artist, living, and working in Kenmare, Co. Kerry.

​Raggett is a fully committed and energised professional with a strong track record as a practicing artist, art collections coordinator and project manager, working for 25 years in the arts industry in Ireland, alongside curators and other artists to bring exhibitions to domestic and international audiences.

Working primarily in oil paint, Raggett’s work is ambitious, original, and distinctive. It deals mainly with the abstraction and retelling of the source image. Images, found and self-documented, are retold by means of collage, rephotographing, cropping and manipulation. These manipulated images become the starting points for his paintings where he explores ideas of repetition, contemporary landscape, and storytelling.

He has exhibited regionally and nationally, and his work is held in private collections worldwide.

Selected solo and group shows 

March 2024

GRILSE GALLERY

-be good if you can-

Killorglin, Co. Kerry

2024 

Salon du Kerry, Crane Visual, Cork

‘Bucolica’ Open call, Mount Congreve Gardens, Waterford.

K-FEST, Killorglin, Co. Kerry -KFEST ART PRIZE Finalist 2024

2022 Grilse Gallery, Killorglin, Co Kerry

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For more information, follow Alan Raggett on Instagram @alan.raggett

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