This exhibition is selected and presented annually by the MTU Arts Office to a number of graduating BA (Hons) students from the MTU Crawford College of Art & Design graduate showcase exhibitions. It celebrates innovative art and design works that connect to STEAM concepts.

This might include works and projects that investigate or utilise methods or materials common to another discipline, or that explore new connections and interactions.

Presenting their work in a group exhibition in the James Barry Exhibition Centre is another opportunity to further explore connections and possibilities, and for the artists to engage with expertise from around the MTU community that can benefit their development as artists and designers.

This year sees seven BA Hons in Fine Art & Visual Communications selected to represent their degree works of Alan Foley, Aoibhean Geary, Aoife Clifford, Caoimhe Murphy, Danny Foley, Pascaline Horan, and Patrick Penney. The exhibition title EARTH been used to connect to the themes of grounding, transformation, the universe, information overload, skin, symbiocene, and perception.

Alan Foley - ARTIST STATEMENT

I have always held an insatiable curiosity about the Universe and how it functions at both quantum and cosmic scales. As an individual who has struggled with mathematics since childhood, I often felt this enigmatic world was inaccessible to me. However, by amalgamating my passion for sculpture and photography with my scientific curiosity, I’ve found a way of exploring and visualizing the invisible world around us.

Using art as a catalyst, my aim is to make our most complicated scientific discovery’s accessible in a fun and informative way to everyone, especially children and teenagers. To achieve this, using philosophical reasoning, fact based information and my intuitive imagination, I re-interpret many of quantum physics most incomprehensible enigmas.

I utilize an array of darkroom and digital photographic techniques, focusing on unique mono photogram prints to create visual representations of particle collisions, gravitational warping of space, and black hole phenomena for example. I also create bespoke sculptural installations. My aim is to portray these scientific curiosities in a relatable, informative and fun way in an attempt to inspire people of all ages to question the world around them.

Aoibhean Geary - ARTIST STATEMENT

Artist Statement: 
Grounded was my final year project which I presented at the MTU Graduate Exhibition 2025. This work explores the concept of grounding through sea swimming, in particular, pushing past any apprehension and fear of getting into the cold Celtic Sea. Through photography and experimental design, I hope to capture the stages one might go through before, during and after a dip in the cold sea water and I hope to highlight the 
unique mental and physical benefits that sea swimming can offer. 

Artist Bio: 
Aoibhean Geary is a graphic designer based in Cork City. She approaches each project with a thoughtful and strategic mindset, aiming to create design solutions that are both meaningful and functional. Aoibhean excels in collaborative environments and values the creative energy that comes from working within a team. Her key areas of focus include brand identity, promotional design, and editorial projects.

Aoife Clifford - ARTIST STATEMENT

My work engages with navigating life in a contemporary world fueled by information overload. I focus on immediate issues surrounding our schizophrenic relationship between information and understanding. I rely on my own personal bias to guide my practice, opening up my thoughts and fears of living under surveillance and allowing those intuitions to guide my work.

Because of this, my work explores concepts without barriers or answers through visual means. I explore questions without conclusions, in the hope of resonating and potentially generating new ideas or solutions to the problems through the viewer or myself. Perhaps this is where change can occur?

I tend to focus on visual analogies through the mediums I work with. This creates a tension between the natural or more organic materials such as paper and inks versus the harsh or sterile aspects of using digital mediums such as screens or autonomous or interactive elements. This tension, I believe, allows the viewer to understand that there is conflict taking place. This is also why words or symbols are important in my practice, because of their paradox. The intention is to communicate clearly, but in our modern online world, they become isolating and unclear - from advertising, influencing, politics, intentions, and more.

In this way, my practice becomes both a reflection of and a response to the complexities of navigating a world where clarity is constantly obscured by the very tools we use to seek it.

Caoimhe Murphy - ARTIST STATEMENT

Caoimhe Murphy is a Waterford born multi-disciplinary artist working within the realms of photography, painting, drawing and textiles. Caoimhe is interested in the body on a biological and cellular level studying imagery of the bodies systems that she then incorporates into her artworks. Her practice has always involved a fascination with the body and the soul ruminating on the various questions surrounding the purpose of the soul on earth and its possible journey once it leaves the body. The concept of her degree show work involved the close examination of the surface of her skin using microscopic technology. The process involved using microscopic lenses and microscopes used for making cameras generously provided by Tyndall Research Institute Cork. Using the cameras the artist focused on details and textures apparent on the skins surface in the process of searching for meaning. Caoimhe has a BA Honours in Fine Art from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design and is a 2025 graduate.

Danny Foley – ARTIST STATEMENT

Danny Foley’s work navigates the shifting boundaries between the human and the More-Than-Human World. Working across drawing, animation, and installation, he explores the self and otherness through a lens of Irish folklore—guided by the Púca, a shapeshifting trickster spirit.

In Foley’s practice, the Púca is not merely a subject, but a method: a way of working that embraces transformation, chance, and the unknown. Drawing from archival footage of his infancy, where he is seen playing with his shadow as a double or animal other, his work considers the self as unfixed, formed by ongoing encounters with the other—both human and non-human.

These themes now echo in his largescale drawings and stop motion animations. Using charcoal, he renders shadowy figures that act as guides. Shaped by mythic and ecological entanglements, each drawing is a threshold or a mirror, emerging intuitively through the act of mark-making, erasure, and discovery. His animations unfold as metamorphic journeys across empty terrains—creatures transforming in and out of form, mirroring shifts in state and being.

By reconnecting with the embodied gestures of his childhood and drawing from tales of the Púca, Foley’s work contemplates ideas of ecological consciousness, the multiplicities of being and seeks to disrupt human-centred hierarchies through the perspective of the self/other as shapeshifter.

Pascaline Horan – ARTIST STATEMENT

My work explores the personal connection I feel with nature, particularly through walking in the landscape. I draw inspiration from the ideas of the Symbiocene and biophilia—concepts that emphasize the potential for harmony between humans and the environment. In my practice I work across multiple media. I seek to create immersive installations that invite the viewer to experience the interwoven relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. My current work focuses on an area of bog where nature is reclaiming its lost territory following the cessation of industrial peat cutting. The common reed, a plant that was important in the formation of the raised bogs of the midlands, and in providing shelter in the past, is colonising the rewetted area. Aspects of Irish mythology inform the work.

Patrick Penney – ARTIST STATEMENT

My focus at present are the ideas of perception, inclusion, omission and layers of history. How details offer up insights into the layers of history present but not seen. Presenting and representing these things in different forms can change the viewers perception of something. Be it information or imagery when taken into a different form, context or system the viewer perceives it differently, for better or worse. This dichotomy is something that I am exploring and hope to carryon exploring through varying processes and systems of production/ reproduction. I am informed by places and their history but also through research and reading in the historical context and perception of a place in history.