Curatorial Projects - Recent
All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun
February 14th – May 11th, 2025 Dublin Castle
Artists: Nina Canell • Lauren Conway • Christy Brown • Aleana Egan • Genieve Figgis • Paul Hallahan • Samir Mahmood • Maria Maarbjerg • William McKeown • Mairead O’hEocha • Adrian O’Carroll • Elizabeth Peyton • Linda Quinlan • Eva Rothschild • Anne Tallentire • Luke van Gelderen • Marcel Vidal • Lee Welch • Michael Warren
There is a song by Jeff Buckley and Elizabeth Fraser that was never finished. Its title consists of eight words that suggest a kind of gravitational pull: All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun. When Lee Welch and I began to curate this exhibition for Dublin Castle, we were interested in that specific pull. We wanted to look at how certain things we think of as opposites are actually leaning into one another.
We thought a lot about Flann O’Brien. We thought about how his work exists in the uncomfortable and often funny space between the rural and the urban, or between a deep seriousness and a sudden shift into the absurd. In O’Brien’s writing, these things occupy the same room. They rely on each other to exist.
The exhibition is not a study of conflict. It is a study of tension. We wanted to see how nineteen artists, working across different forms, navigate these internal dualities.
Curatorial Projects 2010-2016
This is Water
12th – 19th February 2016
Artists: Simon Cummins / Paul Hallahan / Lee Welch
The exhibition takes it title from This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, an essay by David Foster Wallace that was written for a graduation speech for Kenyon College in Ohio in 2005. The text brings forward the notions of the everyday, the banal and the outright frustrating nature of day-to-day life, something Foster Wallace was trying to describe to the group of new graduates and offering ideas on how they may overcome these and take inspiration from perceived negative situations and interactions. Foster Wallace was attempting to offer these small scenarios as moment’s beauty and of a sublime nature rather than the mundane and outright antagonising that they could be perceived as.
Paul Hallahan curated an exhibition of works by participating artists with the Foster Wallace text in mind and through conversations with each other about the ideas behind it, the idea of beauty and also moving forward from the project in 2013 titled Fuck, Shit, Piss, exhibited in 126 Gallery in Galway also curated by Paul Hallahan.
For Catalyst Arts the artists have put together works that will attempt to both stand on their own and also be part of one overall installation encapsulating the gallery.
Installation photograph
Installation photograph
Lee Welch
Simon Cummins
Installation photograph
Installation photograph
FUCKIER, SHITTIER, PISSIER
Broadstone Studios
22 Harcourt Terrace
Dublin
Jan 31 – Feb 22, 2014
Simon Cummins, Lee Welch, Paul Hallahan, Teresa Gillespie, Stéphane Hanly, Aoife Mullan, Oisin O’Brien, Maya Deren, Mike Fitzgerald.
FUCKIER, SHITTIER, PISSIER looks at three very unique but commonly used words, Fuck, Shit, Piss - defined by an overall theme and design set in place by artist/curator Paul Hallahan that looked at language as emotion or description of emotion. The inception of the idea was exhibited as part of an Engage Studios larger project; Too many Dinner parties at 126 Gallery in Galway in June 2013. Titled Fuck, Shit, Piss, the exhibition brought the works of Cummins, Welch and Hallahan together in an attempt to look at the acquired meanings to the chosen words - one taken by each artist - and also the relationship between them; creating links to patterns and relationships between the works within the gallery space.
The exhibition expands on this original idea, with each of the original artists inviting two more artists (Lee Welch – Stéphane Hanly and Maya Deren / Simon Cummins – Mike FitzGerald and Aoife Mullan / Paul Hallahan – Oisin O’Brien and Teresa Gillespie) each on board for a new incarnation to be presented in Broadstone Studios as part of their Broadstone Invited Artist (BIA) series, which Paul Hallahan was invited to partake in.
“Religion, for many people, is not taken as seriously anymore so it doesn’t matter if they blaspheme and use profane language in its old sense. And I think sex is gradually going the same way. Micturition, and defecation, and so forth have kind of lost their sting. Pissed is widely used. Shit is used for all sorts of stuff—the shit hits the fan, in the shit, holy shit, and so on. Bodily effluvia is becoming much less taboo. So, you know, what’s left?” (K Allan, 2006)
Install photograph
Install photograph
Install photograph
Simon Cummins
A lamb lies down
Curated by Paul Hallahan
November 14 – 30 2013
Broadstone studios
22 Harcourt Terrace,
Dublin 2
A lamb lies down looks to, takes from, lines itself alongside and hopefully adds to the narratives and concepts looked at in a seminal 1970’s progressive rock album. Guided by the themes and narratives within the album and the story written alongside the album, as well as the albums position in music history, the exhibition brings together a number of artist’ works to be shown in Broadstone studios. A lamb lies down brings together these works with the hope to add to ideas brought up within the exhibitions starting point.
Artists:David Eager-Maher, Mark McGreevy, Lee Welch, Rachael Corcoran, Adrian Duncan, Beagles and Ramsay, Martin Healy, Ricky Adam, Vanessa Donoso López, Jonathan Mayhew
Install photograph
Adrian Duncan
Install photograph
Rachael Corcoran
Ricky Adam
FUCK, SHIT, PISS
27 June - 17 July 2013
126 gallery, Galway
This installation looks at three very unique but commonly used words Fuck, Shit, Piss; defined by an overall theme and design set by artist/curator Paul Hallahan that looked at language as emotion or description of emotion. Invited artists Simon Cummins and Lee Welch were asked to work as part of the project, and take a word each and make a work that coincides with their chosen word. The three artists take on multifaceted views of their assigned words in an attempt to look at their acquired meanings and also the relationship between them, so creating links to patterns and relationships between the works in the newly acquired space of 126 Gallery. The installation is part of the overall Engage Studios project Too Many Dinner Parties specifically for installation at 126.
Install photograph
Paul Hallahan
Lee Welch
Simon Cummins
Hints of the Outside World
30 June 2011 – 30 July 2011
SOMA Contemporary,
Waterford City
Hints of the Outside World an exhibition of works from the IMMA Collection curated by gallery founder and curator Paul Hallahan
Artists: Caroline McCarthy, Carlos Amorales, Gillian Wearing and Dorothy Cross
Hints of the Outside World features some of the most noteworthy of Irish Museum of Modern Arts’s recent acquisitions; the exhibition includes four works by artists Caroline McCarthy, Carlos Amorales, Gillian Wearing and Dorothy Cross. This exhibition showcases IMMA’s diverse collection, shown for the first time in Waterford curated by Paul Hallahan. This collaboration between IMMA and SOMA is designed to create access opportunities to the visual arts in fresh and interesting situations and locations in Ireland. This show presents major works acquired by IMMA: Dorothy Cross’s world of imagination is rich, and her work Ghost Ship, shown as part of Hints of the Outside World pays homage to lightships which once marked the treacherous reefs around the Irish coast, but have now all since vanished. In her work, Sacha and Mum, Gillian Wearing embraces all at once the revealing and the enigmatic, the encouraging and the disquieting, the loving and the menacing; the work has only been shown a handful of times since acquisition. Caroline McCarthy’s video installation Greetings, presents us an exploration of extending and meddling with spacial limits, and Carlos Amorales features work which is personally anecdotal, yet open to the viewers interpretations of the narrative.
Dorothy Cross
Caroline McCarthy
Gillian Wearing
Dorothy Cross
Carlos Amorales
Carlos Amorales
Dorothy Cross
WAFER
SOMA Contemporary
WAFER - contemporary electronic and experimental Art
Artists: Times-up, Anthony Kelly and David Stalling, Bernard Clarke
July 9th - 24th, 2010
The exhibition, a first of its kind in Waterford, celebrates the extraordinary creative production and cultural influence of technological culture. Participating group, “Time’s Up - Laboratory for the Construction of Experimental Situations” undertakes applied research in the behaviour of the individual. From their workshops in Linz, Austria, the group organises situations that disturb the nature of a given everyday situation. The process of removing the person from the realm of the everyday, in theatrical work known as the suspension of disbelief, and placing them in environments that are real yet unreal, allows the investigation of personal and interpersonal behaviour. In the process of pervading spaces and staging experiments in interesting and unconventional physical settings, Time’s Up have consistently displayed extraordinary imaginativeness, and are internationally renowned, having participated in events from Stockholm to Sydney and Shanghai.
Renowned Irish sound art practitioners, Anthony Kelly and David Stalling are also participating. Their work balances on the verge of ambient, noise, voice collage, and intersects with the minimal end of the avant-garde.
Bernard Clarke, presenter of the NOVA music show on RTÉ lyric fm, will be coordinating interactive sound posts for the duration of the show. This landmark exhibition illuminates a turning point in the development of the Visual Arts in Waterford.
Times-up
Anthony Kelly and David Stalling
Times-up