Niamh Campbell‘s debut novel This Happy won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2021. Her second novel, We Were Young, is forthcoming from Weidenfeld and Nicolson in February 2022. She lives and works in Dublin. 

Daphne Wright (b. 1963, Ireland) lives and works in Dublin. She makes work that manoeuvres things into well-wrought but delicate doubt – shifting between tautness and mess, it sets imagery, materials and language in constant metaphorical motion. Using a wide range of materials – unfired clay, plaster, tinfoil, video, printmaking, found objects and performance – she creates worlds that are beautiful and rather eerie which feel like the threshold to somewhere new.

Wright’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Davies Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; Arnolfini, Bristol & National Trust, Tyntesfield; New Art Centre Sculpture Park and Gallery, Roche Court, Wiltshire. Important group exhibitions include: Infinite Sculpture, Musée des Beaux Arts ENSBA, Paris traveling to the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon; Presence: The Art of Portrait, The Holburne Museum, Bath; Garden of Reason, Ham House, Richmond upon Thames. In 2018 Wright curated the exhibition The Ethics of Scrutiny at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Wright is an elected member of Aosdána.

A group of Wright’s sculptures are currently being exhibited in Portals at the former Public Tobacco Factory, Athens. A collaboration between the Hellenic Parliament and NEON, Portals is curated by Elina Kountouri, Director, ΝΕΟΝ and Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Portals Neon Athen runs until the end of December 21.

Daphne Wright is represented by Frith St Gallery, London.

Katie Watchorn graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include; Zero-Grazing at Studio Pavilion at House for an Art Lover, as part of Glasgow International, 2021, A Calf Remembered, Wexford Arts Centre, BalehomeBalehome at VISUAL Carlow, supported through the Arts Council Ireland, both 2018. Group exhibitions include: Guest, curated by Marysia Wieckiewicz Carroll, Newbridge House, Donabate, Dublin, Muine Bheag, Co. Carlow (both 2021); PAST/URES, The Library Project, Dublin, 2020, Periodical Review #9, Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2019, and Please Touch, Glucksman Gallery Cork, 2018. She was the Overall Winner in the Visual Arts Category of the 2014 Irish Undergraduate Awards, received the Hotron Recent Graduate Award 2016, selected by Annie Fletcher, and has been the recipient of a number of Arts Council Bursaries, including the Next Generation Award (2018) which supports emerging artists of promise at a pivotal stage in their career. She was a resident at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2019 as part of their 1000 programme and is currently an artist-in-residence at Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin. She splits her time between Dublin and her family farm in rural Co. Carlow.

The Response Series generates collaborations between experts, researchers, and artists not only across disciplines but also across methodologies and approaches to research and practice, with a view to creating new experiences and forms of knowledge.

Image: Katie Watchorn, Old weekday, 2021, blended beef fat, painted steel, threaded bar, coupling nuts, stitched headliner fabric, wadding, plywood, 11.47m x 1.3m x 0.5m. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph: Louis Haugh.