Student Forum 2025

Jessie Aylmer

Jessie Aylmer is an emerging visual artist and recent Fine Art graduate from TU Dublin whose work explores spatial articulations through drawing and photography. Recent projects, such as Emulsioned Botanics, layer Polaroid, digital, and analogue photography with architectural drawings to map out personal and domestic landscapes. The process of recalling measurements allows something unconscious—almost as if in a daydream—to leak through, with her photographs existing as proof of this lived experience.

A persisting element in both individual artworks and display mechanisms, the grid serves as a bridge between the scientific and the sacred. As Rosalind Krauss describes, the grid appears rational and material, yet it holds a mythic quality, creating a sense of illusion and belief. This duality is central to her practice, where structures of measurement intersect with personal experience. Through the materiality of photographic objects, shifting projections, and alternative display methods, she examines how images hold and transform spatial memory.

Síofra Egan

Síofra Egan is a Dublin-based visual artist exploring language, identity, mistranslation, and power dynamics. A 2024 Fine Art Sculpture graduate from NCAD, her work examines presence and absence, the deceptive neutrality of aerial perspectives, and their ties to modern warfare and digital spaces.

Influenced by Donna Haraway and Hito Steyerl, she applies a feminist, sci-fi lens to challenge traditional media hierarchies. She blends modern and traditional techniques, photogrammetry, knitting, drawing, and sculpture, to investigate the interplay between digital, linguistic, and physical realities. Her work explores how image quality, media bias, and internet dynamics shape perception, questioning the authority of the “view from nowhere.”

Recent exhibitions and projects include NEW WAVE (Outset Gallery, 2025), COMPRESSION (Dublin Modular RHA, 2024), Muine Bheag COMMUNE Graduate-in-Residence (2024), Irish Art Review Featured Graduate (Autumn 2024), and the NCAD Degree Show (2024).

Shanaia Kapoor

Shanaia Kapoor is a writer and artist from Mumbai, currently based in Dublin. Her creative practice spans essays, poetry, and visual storytelling. With work published across literary platforms and photography exhibited in group shows and featured in print, her projects explore themes of identity and its influence on human interaction, community and language.

Bernadette Kenny

Bernadette Kenny is a third-year Illustration student at NCAD. Her work combines portrait drawings with visual storytelling to explore themes of identity, youth culture, and social change.

Her current research focuses on the town of Athenry, using visual ethnography to trace shifts in rural Irish life. She recently completed internships at Eversholt Ltd and the National Railway museum, where she collaborated on design projects including murals and a sensory room space for neurodiverse visitors.

Eoghan O’Kelly

Eoghan O’Kelly is an emerging visual artist from Galway. In 2023 I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art, graduating with a First Class Honours. I specialised in Sculpture and Combined Media.

In my practice I explore metamorphosis and regeneration in the context of the human body. Based on my own past experiences with illness I explore the body’s capacity to recover from both physical and mental trauma and the potential for change that this can ignite. Through the creation of 3D soft sculptures I imagine an alternate idea of humanity where wounds become sites of new growth, drawing on a hybridised biology of human and plant to visualise the human body regenerating into new forms. I use a variety of fabrics and textile elements such as beads and yarn to create textures which evoke the internal structures of the body such as organs, veins and sinews.

Marita O’Hanlon

Marita O’Hanlon is a visual artist based in Sligo, Ireland, and a graduate of the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) with a BA (Hons) in Education and Fine Art in 2023. Her painting practice explores emotional landscapes shaped by light, colour, and the shifting qualities of place. Her recent work focuses on transitional states, examining surfaces that suggest both stability and fluctuation. Inspired by the rugged landscapes of the west of Ireland, Marita’s paintings invite viewers to engage with the rhythms of nature, offering quiet moments of celebration within its cycles of change.

After a year of teaching art in Stockholm, Marita returned to her studio with a renewed interest in how spaces are experienced and remembered. This shift continues to inform her creative process, emphasizing the relationship between physical and emotional environments. Recent exhibitions include This Moment at Temple Bar Medical Centre, the Mason Hayes & Curran Annual Art Exhibition, and group exhibition Celebration at Tang on Abbey Street.

Róise McGagh

Róise McGagh is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Dublin. Their practice centres on the relationships between the art object, the space it inhabits and the experiential concerns related to viewership. Using construction and utility materials, McGagh creates installations that investigate support, considering the formal, spatial and affective contexts in which it occurs. 

Often visually sparse, McGagh’s work is motivated by an interest in the means, relationship and underlying ideologies in the making and representation of space. The work is influenced by concepts and philosophies of social space, but also rooted in the ongoing practical investigation of materiality and form. Through incorporating elements of architecture, design and sculpture, the work explores the role of support as a condition of the object.

These artistic interests surrounding space, care and social relations come from a background in journalism. McGagh has exhibited in Mud Between the Toes Pallas Projects/Studios (2025) and Fractal Powerscourt Townhouse (2024). Róise McGagh is a recent graduate from IADT.

Emma Murphy

Emma Murphy is a Kerry-born, Dublin-based artist and musician whose interdisciplinary practice explores club culture, identity, community spaces, and digital world-building. Their work engages emerging digital technologies to build layered, narrative-driven pieces, while working across illustration, 2D and 3D animation, as well as combining photography, live-action video, and hand-drawn sequences.

A graduate of the National Film School at IADT with a BA (Hons) in Animation, they have worked in the Irish animation industry on various TV shows and films and is currently undertaking an M.Phil in Digital Arts and Intermedia Practice at Trinity College Dublin. Murphy is also a co-founder of HONEYPOT, a club night and community for queer women, which platforms female, trans, and non-binary artists through regular club events, workshops, screenings, and lineup curation. HONEYPOT was awarded the Music Project Award from The Arts Council in 2024.

Anna O’Leary

Anna O’Leary is a Galway-born, Limerick-based artist and teacher. Her interdisciplinary practice questions the masculine, imperial desire to control both land and woman. Drawing parallels between the Irish landscape and the female body, she explores how each has been mapped, intimately observed, and entered into. Through scale and curation, she disrupts the ease at which audiences can view her work, challenging the hegemonic male gaze that one views landscape and female body through, questioning its role in environmental degradation and gender-based violence.

O’Leary graduated with First Class Honours in Art and Design Teacher Education from the Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD), before pursuing a professional certificate in Art and Ecology at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD). Upon graduating, she was awarded the Test-Space residency at Limerick City Gallery of Art, where her practice shifted from a research-based approach to a more personal one, recognising her landscape photography as a form of self-portraiture.

James Murray (Ó Muirithe)

James Murray [Ó Muirithe] is a writer based in Cork City.  He recently completed a Joint Honours BA in Béaloideas (Folklore) and History of Art in University College Cork. Operating through and between two languages, James remains oriented towards global art histories and a critical engagement with the legacies of evolutionary nineteenth-century frameworks within Irish cultural institutions. James is set to continue his academic training through a MRes supported by the UCC Department of Folklore and Ethnology and supervised by Dr. Ciarán Ó Gealbháin this September.

Jack Pierce

Jack Pierce is an emerging artist and teacher, and a recent Fine Art graduate from NCAD. His practice is process driven, integrating aspects of sculpture, paint and costume. Exploring themes of queer ecology, monstrosity and identity, he experiments with material processes and imagery to explore his interest in a sustainable future.

Utilising alternative and found fibres/fabric and exploring antiquated crafts and processes, aid in my questioning of our material legacy, Anthropocene horror and the fragmentation of nature. Current research is centred around ‘unruly heritage’ and queer ecology, exploring the connection between the haunting, afterlife of the things we create and discard, and how this overlaps and interacts with the queer philosophy of decategorisation and its celebration of interconnectedness. 

Anastassia Varabiova

Caoimhe Wandel-Brannigan

Caoimhe Wandel-Brannigan is a dance artist, movement director and PhD researcher in the School of Creative Arts, Trinity College Dublin. In her work she explores how emerging technologies such as virtual and augmented reality (XR) are reshaping choreographic processes, physicality, and audience-performer relationships.

Her work has been supported by The Arts Council, Dance Ireland, Galway Dance Project, Mayo County Council, EU-Japan Fest and Irish Research Council.