Echoing Heartlands Exhibition

Background - Who we are

Five mature students who attended art college in different years who met in the canteen and library, and shared their varied life experiences of teaching, accountancy, draughtmanship and travel.

Each brought their own individual paths of life to the conversation and found comfort, humour and joy in mutual support.

The multidisciplinary character of the group, comprising both fine art and design practitioners, yielded much insight, knowledge and exchange of ideas. The strong entrepreneurial emphasis of the ceramic discipline was of great benefit and insight to the fine art cohort, who grew an awareness of business plans, SWOT analyses and website creation, which for their discipline, had not been touched on.

With the focus on skill as opposed to age, they thrived and blended seamlessly into the social fabric and exhibition focused nature of the diverse student population. Weekly exhibition openings, sometimes multiple, some of which they were incorporated in as a class show, or others, where they had been competitively selected for, such as Drawing Awards, now filled their weekly calendars, and they gratefully imbibed the generous wine offerings that accompanied!

A post college foray into an artistic co-operative was explored and ran for three consecutive years.

They are grateful for the championed support by Irish Independent columnist, Ms Mary Kenny in their combined artistic endeavours of elevating and remembering forgotten Irish women of note, particularly Charlotte Grace O Brien in 2015.   

It is their delight to have this opportunity to once again come together and present their work in all its diversity of approach in Munster Technological University's Art Office and Kerry County Council's Culture Night 2026.

Exhibition theme: Echoing Heartlands

Reflections on memory, atmosphere and a deep personal connection to the landscape

are embodied in a creative palette of place through the medium of paint, drawing, ceramics and photography.

by Assumpta Wallace, Ciara Nash, Ann Byrne, Pat Keane and Phyl Guerin.

Statements & Bios

Pat Keane

Her ceramic pieces are inspired by the textures and forms found along the seashore. Places where generations of people  played, worked and emigrated from.

It is a bittersweet magical place where water meets land, never the same, constantly rearranging itself in colour, pattern and form.

Her pieces emerge from memories of this. Forms shaped by flow, erosion and time, churned by the relentless wash of the sea and scrubbed by salt and sand over the millennia.

Bio

Since graduating from LSAD Pat has worked in her own studio, usually working with low fired clay and glazes. She is interested in surface textures, mixed media and post firing techniques.

Ann Byrne

The peatlands of the midlands of Ireland are central to her body of work: a landscape rich in history, memory, and the echoes of childhood. By reducing the landscape to its essence, and through gentle shifts of colour combined with expressive mark making, she seeks to convey the sense of calm, quiet resilience and timeless beauty that she has always felt in these heartlands.

Bio

Ann Byrne is a contemporary artist based in NewcastleWest, Co Limerick. With a lifelong passion for the arts, she works primarily in painting while also exploring sculpture, ceramics and more recently mosaics. She fulfilled a lifelong ambition by graduating with a BA(Hons) in Fine Art Painting from Limerick School of Art and Design in 2012. Ann has exhibited widely in solo and group shows and has been an active supporter and promoter of the arts in her local community.

Ciara Nash

Her work explores the changing character of the city and the disappearance of the buildings, businesses and familiar places that once shaped its identity. Through fragmented architectural forms she explores memory, loss and belonging, considering how the traces of places that have disappeared, continue to echo in our sense of home and community. 

Bio

Ciara graduated from LSAD in 2011 and has continued to develop a practice centred on altered ceramic forms. Her earlier work focused on modifying thrown vessels and exploring delicate porcelain surfaces, often pushing functional forms into more sculptural territory.

This process of alteration remains central to her practice. Her recent work moves further into architectural and sculptural forms, drawing on fragments of buildings and shopfronts to reflect the changing character of our city centre and the gradual disappearance of familiar places that once formed part of everyday life.

Assumpta Wallace

Home is where the heart lies. It is where we create our safe haven. Where we relax after a hard day's work, where we enjoy the company of friends, where new families are formed and where we find comfort when life gets difficult. Like ripples on the water each home spreads out and reaches others nearby. Schools, shops, clubs, entertainment and public amenities are shared spaces.  Communities are fossilised in time. The world changes. Needs change. People come and go. The new emerges from the old. Landscape is altered and identities are remoulded. She considers these issues in her work. Her subject matter comes from her everyday life. She draws and paints what she sees on walks around her local district and when she travels to other parts of the country. She chooses images  that interest her and combines them to form an observation of contemporary life in Ireland. Her wish is that the viewer will engage and converse with her work and make their own observations.

Assumpta is a 2013 graduate of LSAD after attending as a mature student to study Fine Art Painting. Before that she was a teacher. On retiring she took the opportunity to pursue a long held ambition to study visual art. She is delighted that she took up the challenge and has continued to work as an artist since then. She has exhibited her work in many places around Ireland. Among those who have purchased her work is The Collector general- Revenue Commissioners. She has recently been offered a residency in Henrich Boll Cottage- a writers and artists retreat on Achill Island, this October. She is delighted to accept the generous offer and is looking forward to the challenge.

Phyl Guerin

The docks and quays of Limerick Harbour serve as her continuous source of interest and intrigue, not just historically (previously known as Limerick of the Ships in the mid centuries) but its capacity for change and reinvention, and its resilience in the face of changing worlds and emphases, and movement downstream. Materials and ports currently dominate our media headlines, who has them, who wants them, how do we navigate previously little known strategic waterways that now dominate our daily news ingests. But relative and parallel to this, and enshrined within, is our waste economy and its movement throughout the world. Who's generating what and where is it going, and returning, in formats new. Reduction, reuse, stripping and material research all now at the forefront of our thinking. Out of destruction and detritus, new opportunities and ideation, full lifecyle analysis and rebirthing, as evinced by Hungarian biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi, who stated, "Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought."  This is my echoing heartland that never ceases to inspire. Its merchants, diaspora and its current inventory of sand, timber, wire, fertilisers and its adjoining Sailors' Home that references the zeal, energy and passion of James Spaight. My work continues.

Phyl Guerin is a native of East Limerick and a graduate of Limerick School of Art & Design. Fine Art Painting degree. As an employee of MTU library she gratefully profited from a five year career break to pursue her artistic interests at LSAD. Having worked at sea in a previous career she concerns herself and is heavily influenced by the maritime history of Limerick and responds with work inviting nuanced reflection and meditation. Her outputs are both lens based work and active, action research. This approach was evidenced in her funded bursary of a  Research MA in Fine Art (2015), titled A Drowned World: The Limerick Sailors’ Home, which built on her previous undergraduate investigation into the Dereliction and Resurrection of the Home. She is delighted that both her research and the work of many other artists and performers has persuaded the Mayor of Limerick and Limerick Council to purchase the Sailors' Home and to safeguard its future as a cultural icon for the city, estuary and region.