STAC will be running two, free Curator Lunchtime Talks of this exhibition with STAC curator and Artistic Director, Helena Tobin, on Saturday 2nd May and Friday 15th May, 1pm.

No booking required.

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ABOUT THE STAC AT 30 ARTISTS

Aideen Barry

Aideen Barry is an Irish visual artist whose diverse international practice spans filmmaking, performance, sculpture, installation, experimental lens-based media, drawing, and sound. Her work employs visual trickery to create a heightened suspension of reality, often exploring themes centred on sinister systems and social critique. Barry’s collaborative and intersectional approach has led her to work with a broad spectrum of creatives. She engages with artists, historians, scientists, and activists to produce large-scale interventionist artworks that transcend conventional visual and pop culture with an attempt to democratise the access to visual culture and art lingualism. One of her most notable projects includes the feature film *Klostės*, created in collaboration with nearly a thousand Lithuanian citizens, which is now part of the National Collection at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and contributed to Kaunas earning UNESCO World Heritage status. Barry’s work has been exhibited globally at prestigious venues such as the Bangkok Art Biennial, BFI London, Salzburg Kunstverein, CAC Málaga, NASA Kennedy Space Center, and the Banff Centre in Canada, among many others. A member of Aosdána and the Royal Hibernian Academy, her art is held in major public and private collections worldwide.  Barry is originally from Cork but lives with her children in the Silvermines in North Tipperary. 

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John Burke

Born in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, in 1946, John Burke studied at the Crawford School of Art in Cork, and in London with Brian Kneal. He has shown sculptures in all the major Irish group exhibitions, as well as international shows like Artists 77, New York (1977); 18 European Sculptors, Munich (1978); Sculpture Européenne, Brussels (1979); A Sense of Ireland, London (1980); and C.A.N., Cork (1985), where he won the sculptor prize. He has held solo shows at Trinity College, Dublin; the Ulster Museum, Belfast; the David Hendriks Gallery, Dublin; and an open-air show in Cork city. He won the Cork Arts Society Award (1967), a Macaulay Fellowship (1970), and the Alice Hammerschlag Travel Award (1979). Instrumental in defining sculptural practice in Ireland during the 1970s, he juxtaposed simple geometric shapes to form abstract compositions, and employed colour to soften and disguise unwanted elements of the metal. Burke taught at the Crawford School of Art and counted among his pupils Eilis O’Connell, Vivienne Roche, Maud Cotter and Jim Buckley. He was a member of Aosdána.

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‍Ursula Burke ‍

Ursula Burke is an Irish artist who grew up in the Republic of Ireland and later lived in post-conflict Northern Ireland. She uses this experience as a starting point to develop a dynamic practice that reflects on aesthetics and ethics of different cultures. Incorporating porcelain sculpture, soft sculpture, embroidery sculpture and drawing, her practice investigates identity politics of historical and colonial eras, from tradition to modernity, creating a conceptual bridge between antiquity and the contemporary, mining art historical tropes of representation and display. Mediated through craft-based processes re-configured in a fine art context, her approach destabilises conventions using unexpected juxtapositions of materials, processes and images with a desire that bends towards the surreal. 

In 2024/25 she undertook a Highlanes Gallery National Tour titled Siren with partners The Butler Gallery and Wexford Arts Centre, she was awarded a Dwell Here artist residency in IMMA, and she received a Building as Witness commission by the Crawford Art Gallery. Her work was included in Self Determination (2024) and The Narrow Gate of the Here and Now (2022) exhibitions in IMMA. In 2022, she had a major solo exhibition with Visual, Carlow titled Supplicants. She was awarded a Markievicz Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Decade of Centenaries in 2021. Her work is part of national and international collections.  

Patricia Hurl ‍

Patricia Hurl (b. Dublin, lives Co. Tipperary), is a former member of Temple Bar Galleries and Studios, Dublin and often works in collaboration with artist Therry Rudin. Hurl was a lecturer in Fine Art Painting at the Dublin Institute of Technology and studied at the National College of Art and Design (1975) and at Dún Laoghaire School of Art and Design (1984). Hurl co-founded the Damer House Gallery in Co Tipperary with artist Therry Rudin in 2012. Hurl is also a member of the artists collective Na Cailleach. Hurl has exhibited widely in selected group and solo shows such as Who Will Write the History of Tears? (Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, 2022); The Narrow Gate of the Here and Now: IMMA 30 Years of the Global Contemporary: and Queer Embodiment (IMMA, 2021 – 2022).  She has represented Ireland in international symposiums and was also a contributor to ‘The Great Book of Ireland’. Her work is included in the publication ‘Art and Architecture of Ireland Volume V: Twentieth Century’, Royal Irish Academy (2015). Hurl’s work is represented in private and public collections including IMMA; The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon; the Highlanes Gallery and the Collection of University of Limerick.  She was awarded the Pollock Krasner Artist award in 2023. 

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Sheenagh Geoghegan

Sheenagh Geoghegan completed her MFA at The Slade School of Art, London (2013) where she was awarded the Stanford Scholarship, The Orpen Award and The Charles Heath Hayward Award.
She has exhibited widely in Europe and America including Cornell University, New York, Alma Zevi in Venice, and the Leila Heller Gallery, New York.
She has participated in the Colour and Poetry Symposium at The Slade School of Art, University College London in 2024, 2025 & 2026.
Recent solo exhibitions include Atelier Concorde in Lisbon in 2023 supported by Culture Ireland, Camera Cluj, Cluj Romania in 2024 and Limerick City Gallery in 2025.
Recent awards include The Galway Arts Centre Bursary Award and The Tipperary Artist Award.

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Alice Maher

Alice Maher’s work touches on a wide range of subjects often reprising, challenging and expanding mythic and vernacular narratives. She is recognised for her experimental use of non-traditional materials, for her explorations of embodiment and identity, and her incorporation of a range of literary, historical and folkloric subject matter in a multi-various practice that spans drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and moving image.  Her first major solo show was at the Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin in 1994. That same year she represented Ireland at the Sao Paolo Biennial. She has had solo shows at the Brighton & Hove Museum, the Djanogly Art Centre Nottingham, Purdy Hicks Gallery London, David Nolan Gallery New York, Green on Red Gallery Dublin, Crawford Gallery Cork, Butler Gallery Kilkenny, RHA Dublin, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, and many more. She has made numerous collaborative works in theatre, dance, film and social activism and was recognised with an honorary doctorate in Fine Art in 2013. Her work can be seen in numerous international collections and has been selected for inclusion in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2026: In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh. Alice Maher is represented by Kevin Kavanagh Gallery Dublin, Purdy Hicks Gallery London, and David Nolan Gallery New York.  She is a member of Aosdána.

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Austin McQuinn

Austin McQuinn’s (b.1967, Co.Kerry) recent solo exhibition, Mountains, Fall On Us, at Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) (2024) amalgamated new paintings with live art performance and sculpture in a series of ambitious installations across the four main galleries at LCGA and followed with a full-colour Publication. His practice is defined by these deeply researched bodies of work creating solo exhibitions; in Project, Dublin; in Butler Gallery, Kilkenny Castle: David Cunningham Projects (DCP), San Francisco: and, more recently, at The Source, Thurles and South Tipperary Arts Centre (STAC) in Tipperary, where he lives and works. For STAC Chapel, he manifested a 24hr live art event curated by Helena Tobin. His doctoral expertise in live art practice and critique is expressed in his book, Becoming Audible, on sound, animality and performance, reissued in paperback this year by Penn State University Press.

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Bridget O’Gorman

Bridget O’Gorman (she/her) is an artist and writer working with text, live event, video and sculpture.  Her career includes group and solo exhibitions and her works are held in public collections including the Butler Gallery, OPW and The Arts Council of Ireland.  Recent projects include ‘The Skin Reads the Room’, Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art, IE, 2025, 'Supernatural Bread', Project Arts Centre, IE, 2022, 'On Slowness', Auto Italia UK 2021, 'The Legacy of Gesture', FACT & DaDa Fest UK, 2019. Over the past five years she has been supported in disability-led research by Arts Council England, A-N, and the Arts Council of Ireland. She is a portfolio artist with field:arts curator and producer, Iarlaith Ní Fheorais.  In 2023 they developed an ambitious new body of sculpture and text entitled ‘Support | Work’ as part of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, commissioned by Arts & Disability Ireland.  In 2026, her collective research project ‘Deep Time’ was funded through an Arts Council of Ireland Project Award and produced as part of the 41st EVA International Platform Commissions, culminating in a publication launch with the Project Arts Centre, IE.  She is currently engaged in an ongoing, slow working exchange with The Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, towards a major solo exhibition for 2028.