The Gallery, 21 Arran Street East, Dublin 7, D07YY97

Preview: 25 October 6pm - 8pm

Exhibition Run: 26 October - 2 November

Gallery Opening Hours: Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm, Saturday 12pm - 5pm

Waystation is the forthcoming graduate exhibition of the MA Fine Art at TU Dublin, 2024 at The Complex Gallery. The five artists have worked collaboratively as a group and in conjunction with Complex curator Mark O'Gorman, to create Waystation as a site of cross contamination and colliding worlds beyond the usual conventions of a degree show. A way station is an intermediate stopping place, a moment to pause on a journey. Waystation is an imagined rest-stop for the artist’s work, an interval as it prepares to embark once again on its journey in the world. As such, Waystation is less a fixed destination and more a process and journey.

Waystation deploys archival and storeroom conventions as a means for display, speaking to processes of gathering, storing and contextualising knowledge. Each artist follows threads of disturbed temporalities and queer fictions. Moments of flux and slippage are acted out, documented, and archived within the multiplicities of The Complex Gallery - a space retains pasts from its storied life - from warehouse to gallery to Waystation. The artists generate portals into possible pasts and speculative futures, inviting viewers to cross thresholds and collaborate in world building.

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Aideen Farrell is a Dublin-based artist. She works with found materials, clay, drawing, and photography. She gathers materials and detritus while following routes of canals and disused railways. She focuses on these site's relations to ideas of ruin, extraction, transformation, and decay processes.

Aideen graduated with her BA from NCAD in 2017. Recent exhibitions include solo shows; Brittle to Look Back at Custom House Gallery (2023), A Weight of Windows at Pallas Projects/Studios in 2019 and Showroom Linenhall Arts Centre in 2018, and group shows; Waystation(upcoming 2024), Gaffer Tape, Phizzfest 2023, The Stars are in the Earth at A4 Sounds in 2022, and Halfway to Falling at the Lord Mayor's Pavilion in 2021. She was awarded the Fingal County Council Artist Support Scheme 2018-22, the Arts Council’s Agility Award 2021, and Visual Arts Bursary 2021 and 2023. She was awarded the FSAS Sculpture Award in 2021.

Eden Munroe is a visual artist based in Dublin. She makes work that is concerned with excavating unthought-of pasts and crafting speculative futures, through a queer archaeological lens. Her work employs the stone artefacts of prehistoric Ireland as queer tools for sense-making, utilising speculative fictioning to collapse binaries across space and time. She desires to open up wormholes with her work, and has probably been poisoned with dark matter in the process.

Munroe graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from TU Dublin in 2022. Her work has been exhibited as part of the RDS Visual Art Awards (2022), and the group exhibition Gaffer Tape (2023). She was a recipient of the Arts Council Agility Award (2022).

Ger O’Brien has a background in landscape architecture and natural science, and these fields of study and practice inform his art. For his master’s project he has researched and developed a video work looking at the relationship between humans and other life forms through the tale of ‘The Zoologist’. The work also deals with ways of knowing/knowledge systems.

Ger hails from Dublin but lived for over twenty years in Scotland where he participated in a number of group shows most notably with Dundee Artists in Residence (D-AiR). He has been part of award-winning landscape teams and lectured in landscape architecture. While working as a lecturer he took part in international conferences and was awarded for his teaching. Prior to his master’s he worked with the design advocacy body Architecture and Design Scotland.

Kat Lalor is a Queer Visual Artist, using speculative fiction and performative film to explore the multiplicity of Queer intelligibility. Operating from a position of other, Lalor’s work is invested in moments of tension, choice and slippage. Drag is adapted as a methodology of purposeful embodiment, used to interrogate theoretical and personal ponderings of identity. Subversion, absurdity and humor explore the fragility of narrative and knowledge production, putting pressure on dominant ideals and evoking intimacy with a Queer experience.

Lalor graduated with a BA(Hons) in Fine Art from TU Dublin in 2022. They were a recipient of the Fire Station Artists’ Studios Digital Media Graduate Award (2022), and an Arts Council Agility Award (2022). Their work has since been exhibited in the RDS Visual Arts Awards (2022), and The RHA Annual (2023).

Claire O’Hagan is a visual artist working through painting and drawing to explore embodied experiences of the erotic. Her work is concerned with queer eco-feminism, the body, and bio-politics, and their intersection with sexual subjectivity. Claire has a background in Anthropology. She graduated with First-Class Honours from Maynooth University in 2014. She was a recipient of the Arts Council Agility Award in 2023.

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