In Conversation with… gallery talks by exhibiting artists & craftspeople of varying disciplines

Aideen Barry (Golden Fleece Award recipient 2021)

Aideen Barry is a visual artist with a national and international profile whose means of expression are interchangeable. Incorporating performance, sculpture, film and lens based media, she employs visual trickery to create a heightened suspension of reality and express human behaviour in the strange area of the in-between, in an odd time of uncertainty and universal unease. 
W: aideenbarry.com

Sara Flynn (Special Award recipient 2019)

Sara Flynn is based in Belfast. Concentrating on the challenges of thrown forms which are then altered and changed at varying stages of the drying process, she produces domestic-scale decorative vessels. Working with porcelain, her love of form, line and volume is expressed through the qualities and scope of her chosen material. The thrown forms are often cut, reassembled, pushed and pulled; scratched and scraped. They evolve in the same way as sketches do - with silhouettes and lines revisited, adjusted and tweaked.
W: saraflynnceramic.com  

Joe Hogan (Merit Award recipient 2005)

Joe Hogan started basket making in the late 1970's as the living tradition of rural Irish basket making was in decline. He spent many years researching and making indigenous Irish baskets such as creels, potato baskets and lobster pots. Over the past two decades, he has devoted most of his making time to artistic and sculptural baskets through a desire to connect more deeply with the natural world. Hogan is influenced by environmental concerns; “the changes we need to make as a species will become possible only when we begin to encompass the worlds of art, poetry and craft to imagine new -and more responsible- ways of being in the world”.
W: joehoganbaskets.com

Helen McAllister (Golden Fleece Award recipient 2002) 

Helen McAllister is an applied artist working with embroidery, whose work is centred around the shoe-derived form and associated narratives. Her work utilises a variety of hand processes including stitch, beading and fabric manipulation, alongside button-hole stitch. She often incorporates unexpected found materials that investigate notions of narrative, codified motifs with meaning and metaphor.

Jennifer Trouton (Golden Fleece Award recipient 2016) 

Jennifer Trouton is a Belfast based figurative painter who deliberately uses the tools and materials of the past to subtly express ideas around gender, class and identity within Irish history; combining an interest in the mythological and historical with personal narrative.  In her latest body of work, she considers the women impacted by societal and religious attempts to suppress reproductive rights in Ireland. W: https://www.jennifertrouton.com/

Lorna Donlon (Golden Fleece Award recipient 2021)

Lorna Donlon’s narrative practice is ballasted in the age-old culture and technique of Gobelin tapestry weaving. Her installations display the scientific practices of arranging, categorising and labelling, act as narrative devices in which collections of both found and precious objects weave their stories silently in the mind. 
W: ucdartistsinresidence.com/lorna-donlon