Borrowed Space
Spacecraft members show 2026 18-20th of September 2026
This exhibition has been curated by Studio members Carey Long & Hazel Gardner, with thanks to Eilis Fanning for her tech support during installation.
A huge thank you to the team at Studio Saol for generously providing the space and supporting the exhibition.
We would also like to thank our funders and sponsors, Culture Night, Limerick Arts Office and The White House Bar, Limerick, for their support in making this exhibition possible.
Finally, we would like to thank all Spacecraft members for their time, commitment and contribution to the exhibition.
Their continued support and engagement are integral to Spacecraft.
Eilis Fanning
The Dying Art Of Loitering (encaustic wax photo transfer and oil paint on copper) documents Limerick's primary corners to loiter, lurk, and laze about. Places where it doesn't cost money to sit and socialize, spots where community can be built on street corners and quays and park benches, third spaces built through infrastructure that forgives an off-licence can be drunk in the sun. Made during the heatwaves of 2026, The Dying Art Of Loitering explores the need for a city where public life is accessible, where loitering is not policed and where inhabiting space is not paywalled by privatisation.
Works numbered 1 & 7
Hazel Gardner
Hazel Gardner is a painter and multidisciplinary artist from Roscommon. She is currently based in Limerick City, where she received a first-class BA in Fine Arts (Painting) from the Limerick School of Art and Design. Her paintings and drawings depict semi-abstract figures and landscapes that exist in a fluctuating, dream-like reality. Her work invites the viewer to enter this fantasy world and explore their own imagination through it.
Hazel predominantly uses paint, paper, charcoal and collage in her practice,which she expands through fabric, sound and video. Her process begins with blind drawing often inspired by her Dadaist style poetry. Then, like recognizing shapes in a cloud, she allows the images to unfold intuitively through free association, simultaneously guiding and being guided by the content.
Hazel’s visual language is influenced by children’s art and craft manuals and historical artifacts such as palaeolithic Venus statues, Athenian red figure vases and the Bayeux tapestry. The resulting coalitions of animal and human forms found throughout her drawings and paintings convey a sense that a mythopoetic story is being acted out, yet their amorphous and entangled bodies refuse to divulge any specific narrative. Hazel purposefully leaves these meanings open to interpretation, encouraging the audience to form their own personal connections.
In 2025, Hazel received the Collector General Award for Innovation in Practice for her exhibition ‘The Garden’, which was subsequently Longlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards of the same year. She was also named Winner of Best Costume in Big Shots’ Halloween Screams All-Island Film Competition 2025, for her work as costume designer and fabricator in the short film ‘The Cosmic Gap Between the Fridge and the Wall’, directed by Edward Hannon.
Works numbered 3 & 10
Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe
A pause between acts, something caught in the throat, let slip into the cracks, pulled from the stone.
Soft stones tip against your tongue, you are told to bite down and you falter , stick out your tongue and lick, quick solid turn to liquid, a state between, slippery sticky and sweet. Softer than you thought, and you bite down into the stones.
This project explores how exchanges between human bodies and the matter of the land shape identity and how places, bodies, and organic matter act as repositories of personal, environmental, and collective histories.
This installation presents a moment of pause in an on-going body of work entitled; Aftermatter which is an unfolding exchange between the artist, the Burren and surrounding environs in Co Clare. The body of work is presented in a series of acts; this installation is a moment of pause between acts, proposing a reimaging of stones as vibrant, vital and mortal beings. The bodies of the stones are held in sugar and beeswax. Each material body performing in the installation transforms and transmutes over time, slipping between states from liquid to solid, the slippery inaccuracies and softening impressions of the wax the fallible quality of memory made visible through the repetitive casting process. Time physicalised in the minerals, soil particles, and pollen settling as sediment in the body of the syrup. Pieces of fiction activate the sculptures, telling stories of encounters with disappearing lakes, drinking down the knowledge of place contained in foraged and homemade cordials, and sleeping out in the stones.
The audio piece offers a glimpse into an unravelling story grown out of this body of research, out of the body of the objects, installing an image in the mind of the viewer or the listener, exploring material memories of finding paper in the belly of the Turlough bowl, our protagonist wading through matter as she casts the kitchen table in her family home, casts the fissures in the rocks, and sleeps in the stones.
The maker gently explores the precarities of the housing crisis, the climate crisis, and the figure of the blow-in and invites you to play with the desire of belonging to place, inviting you to absorb/assimilate place through consumption, touch, and conversation. She asks you to consider the cultural relation of place and consumable materials, thinking about the appetite to belong, to hold the knowledge of matter and social memories of a place within you, to move from outside to inside the skin of place
Works numbered 5 ‘Sleeping in the stones’, number 11 ‘In pressed stones’ number 13 ‘Fertile stones’
Caoilfhinn Geary
“Words Words Words” is a collection of thoughts, poems and drawings by Caoilfhinn Geary. Starting out on the topic of zines themselves, this perzine grew and became a body for which to hold poems, drawings and personal inquiries. Acting like a time capsule for her future self, this zine is a reflection on all the things she's concerned with at the moment, neatly tied together in some sort of concluded way. She explores topics like her relationship to drawing, rest, and writing. It is a result of following ideas, putting trust in your own writing and enjoying the process and act of making itself. This led to the making of “inside the box”, a sculptural, multimedia piece to accompany the zine. This work reflects on the saying that artists "think outside the box” and argues that maybe we think inside the box instead. The box being society, or norms or expectations. We're often put into boxes, so we spend a lot of time in them, questioning them, and figuring out what can be changed, and how to get out.
The zine was made using a typewriter, dip pen, Indian ink and letter stamps. Printed on Munken pure rough 100gsm. “inside the box” was made using polymer clay, wire, foil, acrylic paint, fabric, paper and cardboard.
Works numbered 9
Angela Vaughan
Angela Vaughan offers a peek behind the scenes as she presents her studio practice work, ‘Micro Moments - a Working Progress’ These mini 10cm x 10cm painting works are meditative panels that Angela creates as a form of art practice. The unresolved paintings act as a gateway to a different dimension and help lay the foundation for her socially engaged arts practice that centres around sacred moments within everyday life. For these meditative paintings, Angela ritualistically performs a repetitive, fluid and layered painting technique. The panels are often revisited over time and the paintings evolve with patterns and shapes informed by various traditions of philosophy and mindful living.The Artist is always questioning the paradox of flow state versus awareness and these practice based meditations show the ebb and flow of the artist at work on a daily basis.
Works numbered 2
Carey Long
You don't get many chances to go to the woods, do you?
Life's too hectic, everything feels like it's forever moving and never stopping.
So, when am I actually meant to go to the woods? To be in nature, if you will?
That's where nature is, right?
But what if it isn't?
What if there’s something else?
Surely, there's not something else?
Have you heard of Novel Ecosystems ?
They’re where the concrete meets the wild and nature finds another way.
Think about it.
Roots split the pavement, moss softens the stone, birds nest in spaces we forgot to fill.
None of this was really planned.
Nothing there is entirely planned; people, plants, animals, rain, all become something new.
A city breathing between its buildings, an ecosystem inventing itself.
You don't have to go into the woods to see it.
it's all around us.
Just stop for a second…
and look.
Works numbered 4
Sibéal Riordan
This series is inspired by anti-facial-recognition makeup and the ways makeup can be used to disrupt how facial recognition systems identify a face. A huge influence on the work is CV Dazzle, a form of computer vision camouflage created by artist and technologist Adam Harvey in 2010. CV Dazzle uses bold, asymmetrical makeup, hairstyles and graphic shapes to interfere with the facial features that early face-detection systems relied on (unfortunately this type of makeup is redundant for the facial recognition systems that exist now)
More recent forms of adversarial makeup are often much subtler than the dramatic early CV Dazzle looks, using small changes around areas such as the eyes to alter how facial-recognition systems process a face.
Works numbered 6
Johnny Mchon
Johnny McMahon's practice explores how meaning is constructed, negotiated, and fragmented. Utilising found imagery and fragments, he employs collage-based processes to decontextualise everyday media, playfully exposing the contradictions and shifting symbols embedded in low or throwaway culture.
House of Horror and Son of Satan position found objects and collaged imagery within the reverse side of paintings on panel, lying face down. Images are revealed and obscured simultaneously, true meaning is blurred and new narratives are constructed through a negation of intended purpose.
Works numbered 8
Laura O'Loughlin
The process is the practice.
Works numbered 12