Kate McElroy: Residency & Exhibition
Tue 08 Apr 2025 - Sun 01 Jun 2025
11am
FREE
Kate McElroy is a Cork-based artist whose practice spans across media, presenting a dynamic constellation of work including expanded photography, moving image, sound, spoken word and sculptural installation. The work questions the altering environment and our place within it. Kate graduated with a First Class Honours Master’s Degree in Art and Process, MTU Crawford, 2021. Since graduating she has exhibited in over twenty national and international exhibitions and co-founded the artist collective inter_site. Recent exhibitions and residencies include GlogauAIR, Berlin, 2024, Error: /undefined, Pallas Projects, Dublin, and Oscillation: An Altering Rhythm, Counting House, Cork City, 2023. Upcoming included Restructuring Elements, The Firkin Crane, January 2025, Vertigo, Cork County Council Building, February 2025, Liquid Urbanism, The Lab Gallery, Dublin, March 2025 and an artist residency at Correlacioìn Contemporaìnea, Iquitos, Peru, September 2025. Kate is supported by Arts Council Agility and Project Awards and a Cork City Council Artist Bursary.
Existing in a space between construction and destruction, her work highlights a moment of precarity. McElroy points to the tension between the economic need for constant growth and
the incipient destruction of our natural environment and human experience. Through correlating different media that spans across places and times she questions the interlinked nature of our current conjuncture. She draws largely from the environment, taking elements of place, dismantling and reconstructing, to create new alternative areas of contemplation. She is interested in creating areas of activation, where elements move, breathe, and speak encompassing a space for altered ways of viewing and being in the world through a dynamic use of material and media.
McElroy’s practice merges a sense of past, present and possible future(s). She is interested in the process of change itself and how, by seeing the world as a constant state of transformation, we are given opportunities to interrupt it. A sense of flux is contrasted by a sense of slow observation. She is interested in the intermingling forces that affect our environments and actions.
The work represents elements on the edge of abstraction, stretching the usual parameters of perception. It highlights a betweenness, where definitive boundaries dissolve. She creates critical and ambiguous environments, opening a threshold space to interrupt structures and reconfigure.
This residency and exhibition will coincide with Ireland’s Overshoot Day, a day that marks when the Earth’s biological resources – if everyone lived as we do in Ireland – would be exhausted for the year. In 2024, this day fell on 2 May, and in 2023, it was 21 April. This day highlights the unsustainability of the way we are living under our current systems and shows the urgency of why we need to reorient our ways of relating to the environment. This residency and exhibition at TRISKEL SAMPLE Project Space will allow time to create work that responds with urgency to the interlinked cultural and environmental crises.
Kate worked previously as the Public Engagement Artist at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre where her role largely focused on bridging the gap between the artwork and the community. She advocates using art as a tool for fostering communication and meaningful exchange. This residency will enable her to develop public discourse about the work. Kate McElroy currently facilitates a reading group in Cork and for the four weeks of residency, she will run a weekly reading group with Sample-Studios’ members to explore texts that influenced the work.
Triskel Sample Project Space is a new partnership between Triskel and Sample-Studios that will provide a visual arts project space for artists, especially emerging and mid-career artists, to test ideas and to develop new work that can be seen by the public. This offers tangible career development and audience engagement opportunities to artists on their ‘home turf’ where they have a safe space to develop new ideas, within which risk-taking is possible.
