The trackmaker was a sluggish mover
Bryony Dunne

Irish Architectural Archive
45 Merrion Square, Dublin

16 January–27 March 2026
Tuesday to Friday, 10am–5pm

The Irish Architectural Archive and Askeaton Contemporary Arts are pleased to announce The trackmaker was a sluggish mover, a solo exhibition by Bryony Dunne. Spread throughout the ground floor galleries and inside the reading room of the IAA’s Merrion Square building, the exhibition is the culmination of the artist’s year-long research and production residency at the site.

The presentation centres on a series of footprints, still seen on Valentia Island in Kerry, of the first creature recorded to have walked on land. Dunne writes, ‘Impressed into soft silt at the edge of a swampy river almost 360 million years ago, they belong to a tetrapod – an amphibian ancestor that hauled itself from water onto land during the Devonian era. Described as a sluggish mover, this creature left behind what are now understood as the earliest traces of animal life crossing a threshold: a body learning how to inhabit and adapt to a different world on land.’

The motif of the tetrapod’s footprints begins a reframing of the IAA’s collection, asking fundamental questions about the genealogy of architectural form. Dunne’s playful ceramic sculptures intertwine with an artefact from University College Cork. They appear alongside an extensive selection of photographs and drawings from the archive’s own holdings, ranging from ancient stone monuments to urban developments such as the controversies of Dublin’s Wood Quay. In this endeavour, Dunne brings geological trace, archival image, and personal memory into dialogue, considering architecture as a place where deep time, lived experience, and material transformation meet.

The Irish Architectural Archive celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2026, and holds the most significant body of historic Irish architectural drawings in the world, with a mission to collect and preserve material of every kind relating to the architecture of the entire island, making it freely available to the public. Since 2019, Askeaton Contemporary Arts have partnered with the IAA to create a bespoke artist-in-residence programme within this vast resource, and publicly present newly-commissioned artworks investigating the social and cultural context of the built environment, finding new possibilities to dwell in authentic and resilient ways. 

Working in film, sculpture and photography, Bryony Dunne has exhibited in museums, biennales and galleries globally, along with participation in numerous film festivals. She was previously resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and in the European  Ceramics Work Centre in the Netherlands. 

Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Tuneful Places
John Carson
Martin Folan
Max Guy
Léann Herlihy
Niamh Schmidtke
Frank Wasser

Curated by Michele Horrigan and Sean Lynch

Co-Prosperity
3219 South Morgan Street
Chicago

Opening reception Tuesday 7 April
4–6pm

Until 9 May 2026

In April 2026, Ireland’s Askeaton Contemporary Arts continues a growing relationship with the city of Chicago, presenting a series of exhibitions bringing together artist-led activities of the Irish art scene and American Midwest. As part of this initiative Co-Prosperity host Tuneful Places, a group exhibition exploring artists that disrupt and challenge representations of geography, state and capital within an Irish idiom.

John Carson’s American Medley embodies a tour to fifty locations in the United States famed in popular music, from ‘What Made Milwaukee Famous to ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ and more in-between. Postcards and Polaroid photographs were initially sent back to Carson’s native Belfast, displayed during the conflict of The Troubles of Northern Ireland in the window at one of Carson’s favourite haunts, Delany’s ‘American-style’ diner. Carson’s chase of the American dream is one of myth-busting – Frank Sinatra’s crooning ‘Chicago is my kind of town’ is juxtaposed with an image of a mound of rubble from a demolition site that constitutes what Carson actually saw when he visited here.

Martin Folan (1955–2014) worked with the Traveller community of Limerick, realising collaborative artworks that addressed the inherent racism towards indigenous ethnic communities in Ireland. At that time, and today throughout the island, large stone boulders are placed at roadside parking and traffic lay-bys as barriers to prevent Travellers practicing a traditional nomadic way of life. The boulder, in this form, represents exclusion. In 1991, Take Away The Stone was realised – a large fiberglass replica of a rock pushed over seven days in the Irish landscape, followed by a pilgrimage of hundreds demanding civil rights and respect for Traveller identity. 

Max Guy’s No Reason sees him annually film Chicago’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade and the famous ceremony of dyeing the city’s river green. The green dye is mixed by Plumbers Union Local 130 and is so saturated that its colour can be easily altered in video post-production technology. Guy enacts this alchemy, as a mediation on the cultural significance and shrinking of Chicago's Irish diaspora and the ecological implications of the water’s flow. 

Léann Herlihy’s The Long Internecine Quarrel is an account of the artist’s court case against Ireland’s taxman, the Revenue Commissioners. In a whirlwind of administrative chaos, Herlihy was denied a tax break offered by the Irish state for art. Their public billboard artwork was categorized by authorities as an advertisement and form of self-promotion, devoid of artistic merit. After several unsuccessful appeals, Herlihy gathered a folder of evidence and initiated legal proceedings, winning their case in the latter half of 2024.

Niamh Schmidtke’s Drafting communication, drafting climate, drafting futures is a fictional exchange between the wind, represented as Aos Sí (the supernatural race in Celtic mythology considered true spirits of nature) and a multinational venture capital firm. Mimicking passive-aggressive corporate chatter and policy Schmidtke researched while on an artist residency at the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg, they ask how value is ascribed to nature, and how global finance’s role in climate breakdown becomes evident. 

Frank Wasser debuts a new video and salvaged sculptural arrangement, recalling the recent closure of The Complex, one of Ireland’s key experimental cultural venues. Falling prey to the increasing gentrification and profit-seeking of the Dublin’s inner city, Wasser salvaged pub signs from the venue and transports them to Chicago, while onscreen he creates a spiralling narrative, addressing the intrinsic desire for grassroots cultural production and artistic communities to rally against the blatant aggression of contemporary city policy and corporatization.  

A programme of audio artworks and interviews with exhibiting artists will feature on LUMPEN FM, broadcasting WLPN-LP 105.5FM and at www.lumpenradio.com 24 hours a day.

Tuneful Places is supported by Culture Ireland, Hyde Park Arts Center’s Jackman Goldwasser artist-in-residence programme, EXPO Chicago and The Irish Consulate of Chicago.

Image: John Carson, American Medley, 1981–86

Artist talks and meets
With Gabriel Chalfin-Piney-González, Mark O’Gorman and Risa Puleo
Accompanied by artworks from Stuart Whipps and John Carson

Ireland House
401 North Michigan Avenue
Suite 1500
Chicago

Wednesday 8 April
12pm

Register here

Doors open at 11.20am, with light lunch served

Join at Ireland’s Consulate in downtown Chicago to meet participating artists and guests in our 2026 programme, discussing the key issues and themes in contemporary art and how it is made in Ireland and Chicago today.

The event foregrounds three key cultural voices and inspirations for Askeaton Contemporary Arts’ activities. 

Gabriel Chalfin-Piney-González is a multi-hyphenate artist and administrator with over 15 years of experience working with community art organizations, orchestrating multidisciplinary programs, and supporting artists in a career-changing capacity. They are the Exhibitions and Residency Manager at Hyde Park Art Center and founder of the Jewish Museum of Chicago.

Independent curator Risa Puleo makes exhibitions, such as Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System at The Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 2018, about how artists intervene in social structures. Risa increasingly uses artistic and curatorial channels to implement changes in the material, infrastructural, and social fabric of a place. In collaboration with the 2023 Counterpublic Triennial in St. Louis and Native film collaborative, New Red Order, she supported the rematriation of a sacred site back to Osage Nation. She teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Mark O’Gorman is the inaugural curator and producer of visual art at The Complex, a multi-disciplinary arts centre in Dublin’s north inner city, since 2018. He focuses on commissioning site-specific work with a prolonged developmental process and conversational approach with artists, who are carefully brought together in relation to one another. Mark has presented exhibitions and events at The Complex featuring artists including Jeremy Deller, Vivienne Dick, Aleana Egan, Jaki Irvine, Sean Lynch, and Locky Morris.

In addition, Stuart Whipps’ video Askeaton Hands will be screened, a 2025 portrait of the local Askeaton community and a representation of the hands that move, handle and shape the very existence of everyday life in Askeaton and its hinterland. 

John Carson’s American Medley (1981–86) is also represented, embodying a tour to fifty locations in the United States famed in popular music, from ‘What Made Milwaukee Famous to ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ and more in-between. Postcards and Polaroid photographs were initially sent back to Carson’s native Belfast, displayed during the conflict of The Troubles of Northern Ireland in the window at one of Carson’s favourite haunts, Delany’s ‘American-style’ diner. 

Image: Gabriel Chalfin-Piney-González, Risa Puleo and Mark O’Gorman

One Twenty-Nine
Andy Fitz

Curated by Benjamin Stafford

Patient Info
902 North Western Avenue
Chicago

Opening reception: Friday 10 April
6–10pm
Exhibition until 10 May

Andy Fitz’s new exhibition continues a recent series of sculptures debuted at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art in Carlow, curated by Benjamin Stafford. Unremarkable domestic objects are balanced in precarious abstraction from their usual surroundings, each building on these unresolved tensions; the personal in the political, and the present in light of the past. Memory, like the nature of Fitz’s materials, is mutable; open to use, misuse, interpretation, corruption. Memory failure can be understood as a technological fault but also a human one, prompting one to look again, and again.

Andy Fitz lives and works in Berlin, Germany. A graduate of the Stadelschule in Frankfurt, his recent solo exhibitions include Guts Berlin, Kunstverein Göttingen, Germany, and Kerlin Gallery Dublin. A major solo show, NOW NOW, continues at VISUAL Centre of Contemporary Art, Carlow until May 10.

Benjamin Stafford is a curator and writer based in Ireland, where he works closely with artists to realise exhibitions, performances and publications. Benjamin has worked as a curator and director in public and private institutions, including Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, the and the Arts Council of Ireland. Since 2021 he is Visual Arts Curator at VISUAL, Ireland’s largest purpose-built gallery space where he presents a wide programme of exhibitions, events and publications.  

Locky Morris
Liz Vitlin

When I think of Liz and Locky I think of scanning.
I think of finding.
I think of collecting.
I think of looping.
I think a conversation is an evolving composition.

I think of repetition, not to repeat oneself, but to contain oneself.
I think of the prefix “re-”, meaning again, back, or anew. It is added to verbs or nouns to indicate that an action is being repeated (e.g., redo) or to signify a return to a previous state or place (e.g., return, reclaim)
I think of routine as religion.
I think of the digital archive as a landscape.

I think of thumbnails, QuickTime players, loading, storage. I think of lists, lists of words, lists of images, lists of titles with machine generated names including DSC. IMG, 2122, 003234.
I think of provisional titles like Bag Flip iPhone Landscape.

I think video is the best way to extend a memory's surface, although it would be much easier if the camera was built into our eyes.

I think of the distance of memory. The distance is huge, expansive, things remembered become unrecognizable.

I think of my parents, of how they shaped me and how they could only shape me to a certain point. I think of how I, in turn, changed them. I think of Thomas describing becoming a father as cataclysmic and Chris telling me that a child reorients every aspect of your life.

I think of Liz's father, a hardware engineer from the Soviet Union, making her a personalized computer when she was eight.

I think of Locky’s father fashioning him a toy from a bicycle wheel and a length of wire pulled from a heap of scrap on Derry Quay as they passed by one day when he was six.

I think of Grasmere and Dove’s cottage, and a cat named Bumble walking the hills. It is my childhood, and I remember it through a mixture of digicam videos and point and shoot photos, but also my bodily memory.

I think of the revelation of boredom, not the revolution of boredom.

I think of everyday life, the practice of everyday life, and the potential reaffirmation of daily life that a gallery can help you formalize. The gallery acting as a fridge to keep the shifty thing alive still.

I think of foraging for fragile states of balance.

I think of boundaries, but not borders.

I think of inherited structures and daydream of how to leave them.

I think of movement, being in movement, performative movement, dramatic movement, anatomical movement, comedic movement. I have been thinking about Peter Sellers.

I think of Monty Python’s The Ministry of Silly Walks, and to mock is to undermine, to undermine is to destabilize.

I think peak southwesterly gusts are reliable choreographers.

I think dance first, think later.

I think of something flickering.

I think mimicking is a form of protection, performing something, but at a distance.

I think of Locky’s spectrum of gesture, nudging to resolve. The untouched. The staging. The involved. Get out of the way! Do what you want! Try not to jinx things!

I think of objects, like children, on the loose, unburdened by societal responsibilities.

I think you have to have eyes on the back of your head.

I think of the phasing that occurs between two asynchronous loops. Where a beginning is not locatable, where a transition in not locatable. Instead, freefall, limbo, purgatory.

I think of Milford Graves, the polyrhythmic free inducer, playing two different rhythms at the same time.

I think of Kenneth Koch’s In Bed.

I think of Walter Benn Michael’s The Shape of the Signifier. He references a sci-fi novel where the main character walks the shores of Mars. And as the water breaks on the shore, lines from William Wordsworth’s poem begin to crystalize.

A slumber did my spirit seal; 

I had no human fears. 

She seemed a thing that could not feel 

The touch of earthly year. 

I think of the correspondence between Joseph Cornell and Mina Loy, Transatlantic friendship.

I think of Nancy Lupo’s emails about Greenland, documenta 12 emails, I think of Park McArthur’s emails, I think of Guy Debord’s letters to his rotating gang of situationists.

I think of Sara Deraedt’s show at the Art Institute of Chicago, of ears, of Isa Genzken.

I think of Madonna.

I think of the magpie.

I think Art Povera wasn’t poor enough.

I think that language often carries cultural and conceptual baggage and crude expression is a necessary way to lighten the load.

I think you’re going to want to get her a computer.

I think of being in a band.

I think of school.

I don’t think too much about contemporary art.

Mark O’Gorman & Julian Van Der Moere

Curated by Mark O’Gorman in collaboration with Met him pike hoses

Gertie
400 North Peoria Street
Chicago

Opening reception:
Saturday 11 April
2–5pm

Exhibition until 24 May

For decades, Locky Morris is a key and influential voice in Irish art. Renowned for his early work that explicitly dealt with the conflict in the North of Ireland – most notably from a socially-embedded perspective in his native Derry – he has gone on to develop a working vocabulary that moves fluidly between the personal, public and political. While still informed by the complexities and intricacies of his immediate landscape, today his practice extends across video, sound, photography and gallery installations, with a fascination for what confronts him in the often chaotic details of the everyday.

A series of his video artworks make their American debut alongside building dialogue with artist Liz Vitlin and the local Chicago art scene. you see the thing of the thing is is will give form to a sustained and growing conversation between Mark O’Gorman and Julian Van Der Moere, which began in 2024. This exhibition continues the curatorial interests of both Mark and Julian, whose exhibition programmes in the last decade have focused on site-specific work and detailed conversational approaches with artists, bringing together carefully-considered yet surprising outcomes.

Image: Liz Vitlin, Nobody Knows Me, 2026

Seanie Barron

Good Weather
1524 South Western Avenue
Chicago

Opening reception:
Saturday 11 April
5–8pm

Exhibition:
11 April–6 June

For decades, Seanie Barron has carved and shaped wood in a workshop at the rear of his house in Askeaton town in the west of Ireland. His creations, made with simple handtools and an intuitive approach, are borne out of his understanding of nature and the environment around him. He roams around the countryside looking for the right branch in a tree or underneath a bush to then shape into a walking stick. These often take on surreal forms, at Good Weather referencing seahorses, dancers, Hollywood films, soccer’s World Cup trophy, Greek myth and wasps, all of which seem to emerge organically and effortlessly from the wood.

Barron’s art has had a private trajectory, fermenting secretly for many years before being revealed in a flourish. After featuring in his first exhibition a decade ago in Askeaton, his work has since been seen in galleries and museums in London, Dublin, Paris and Helsinki. He often tours around Ireland, enthralling audiences with stories related to his art and life. At a packed village hall on Inisbofin island on the Atlantic coast of Ireland he once explained his philosophy on keeping active, claiming that ‘there are two things that can kill you in this life: the electric chair, and the armchair!’

Please join at Good Weather for the North American debut of Seanie Barron’s creations.

Seanie Barron’s exhibition is additionally supported by Culture Ireland and The Irish Consulate of Chicago. 

Léann Herlihy is Jackman Goldwasser artist-in-residence at Hyde Park Arts Center

Open studio:
Hyde Park Arts Center
5020 South Cornell Avenue
Chicago

Saturday 4 April 2026
1–4pm

Developed through an exchange partnership between Askeaton Contemporary Arts and Hyde Park Arts Center, Léann Herilhy travels to Chicago to continue work on their ongoing transdisciplinary project With Everything We’ve Got! Highlighting the urgency of queer and trans* self-defence clubs in preserving community existence, Léann will actively support the strong network of community defence within the Chicago region, and witness how these communities offer complex and nuanced narratives of place and identity. 

Léann Herlihy (they/them) is an artist, researcher and educator based in Dublin. With a practice is informed by trans, queer ecological, feminist and abolitionist theoretical frameworks, they have produced exhibitions, live performances and workshops that explore collective engagement and resistance. Léann Herlihy’s exhibitions include Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Innsbruck International Biennial, VISUAL Carlow and Toronto Biennial of Art; and EVA International, Limerick.

Herlihy will additionally feature as part of Tuneful Places, a group exhibition curated by Askeaton Contemporary Arts at Co-Prosperity, Chicago, opening 7 April 2026.

Image: Yǔjié Zhōu

Artist Michael Holly continues his ONLY IN ASKEATON series of films in the West Limerick landscape, to investigate and offer new viewpoints and ideas to how we live in an enriching land. 

In mid-2025, his fieldwork in the region’s infrastructure takes a broad scope, from a proposed fracked gas terminal on the Shannon Estuary to the medieval Ardshanbally broach-pin, unearthed during excavation works for a new motorway underway. Probing the complex reasons for these scenarios – from Adare’s affluent billions, Ryder Cup golf, and a new age of industrialisation – he muses on intersecting politics of commerce, heritage and ecology. Ardshanbally is realised in collaboration with Tony Lowes, writer, activist and founder of Friends of the Irish Environment. 

Watch here