"Flesh and Stone" Vanessa Jones, Margaret Fitzgibbon, Edwina Bracken
Main Gallery
16 October – 3 December 2026
Artists: Vanessa Jones (www.vanessajonesartist.com), Margaret Fitzgibbon (www.margaretfitzgibbon.net), Edwina Bracken (www.edwinabracken.com)
Flesh and Stone brings together three practices that move between the body and the built, the intimate and the monumental, and the symbolic charge carried by materials, images, and place. In the context of CHG&S’s 2026 programme, the exhibition holds attention on what endures, what is remade, and what is passed on, through lineages of making, looking, and lived experience. Across painting, sculpture, drawing, and mixed media, Flesh and Stone considers how identity is shaped, how histories are carried, and how alternative forms of knowledge and energy might be summoned in the face of social and ecological rupture.
Vanessa Jones is a figurative painter whose practice explores themes around the feminine through self-portraiture. Drawing on a long lineage of the figure in Western art, from the contrapposto of the Kritios Boy through Botticelli, cinema, and contemporary fashion editorials, her work stays alert to how “beauty” is constructed, its Hogarthian serpentine line, its connection to nature, and its primordial allure. Working through self-portraiture allows Jones to build imaginative narratives with a hyperreal believability, while also using the figure as a way to move through time and space. Within this shifting register, her paintings hold contradictions in view, bringing together attraction and scrutiny, agency and projection, and the paradoxical ideas that exist within the self and the wider world.
Margaret Fitzgibbon’s work is rooted in a desire to layer meaning and draw several threads into a single artwork, often blurring the socio-political and the personal. Her themes include the natural world, the female body, embodied memory, histories from below, and the legacy of female artists through the ages. In recent work she has returned to Modernism as a live question, drawn to the moment when artists forged new paths and insisted that art does not simply reproduce reality, but creates “a reality of the same intensity”. Fitzgibbon’s proposals for new bodies of work consider selected works by female modernist artists such as Dora Maar, Eileen Agar, Meret Oppenheim, and Leonora Carrington, treating reference as a starting point for entirely new transformations in sculpture and drawing. Alongside this lineage, her practice evokes an alternative, feminine energy as a counter-force to violence, repression, and ecological breakdown, with Surrealism, and the strange beauty of the unexpected, recurring as a way to recalibrate tensions between reality and fantasy, and to unsettle fixed designations of gender, identity, art, and craft.
Edwina Bracken’s motivation as an artist is to deepen her relationship with paint and to create work that resonates aesthetically and intellectually, where painting is both investigation and meditation. The qualities of paint, its elasticity, viscosity, transparency, and colour, guide the evolution of her compositions, as she explores contrasts of texture, colour, and space, balancing stillness with intensity. While her work is primarily abstract, she sometimes introduces pictorial elements, such as origami forms or landscapes, to anchor specific themes within a body of work. In her current paintings, Bracken presents stratified, abstract views of the Irish landscape that explore a liminal moment between material culture and our existence in the digital world. She draws on tangible access points to the past, ring-forts, hill-forts, Neolithic structures and stonewalls, and on the endurance suggested by ancient and modern field systems that co-exist across the land. At the same time, she notices how these interventions share visual patterns with contemporary technologies of connectivity, imagining virtual networks following roads and field systems, overlapping lakes, tracing river courses, and collecting data in cloud forms. Luminous, acidic colour fields point to the urban and the machine-made, while clear delineated lines cut through the pictorial plane, marking routes that speak to agency, navigation, and the linking of past and future.
Together, Flesh and Stone moves between the body as image and the world as structure, asking how we hold onto meaning, and how we re-make it, when certainty is in flux.
Artist biographies
Vanessa Jones is a Dublin-based figurative painter. Living and working in Dublin, her self-portraits have received multiple awards since completing her MFA in 2021, including the R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award, a Centre Culturel Irlandais residency in Paris, and the Arts Council Ireland Next Generation Artists Award (2022). She was also the winner of the inaugural Sequestered Prize for Self-Portraiture (London, 2021). Her portraits were shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait Prize at the National Gallery of Ireland from 2021 to 2023, and she has exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions including the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Kerlin and Molesworth galleries (Dublin), and ISA Art Gallery (Indonesia). Her work is held in private and national collections across Europe, America and Asia, and she is currently a part-time lecturer in the Painting Department at NCAD.
Margaret Fitzgibbon is an artist living and working in Dublin. She works across sculpture, collage, drawing and textiles, and completed a practice-based PhD at NCAD in 2014. In recent years she has presented solo and group exhibitions internationally, including a solo show at The Mermaid Art Gallery (Bray, 2023) and a presentation of large collages at Godsbannen Cultural Art Centre (Aarhus, Denmark, 2023). In 2022 she contributed work addressing the rise of domestic violence during lockdown at Lane Cove (Sydney, Australia). She has been awarded Arts Council of Ireland support to develop a hand-drawn animation based on a series of charcoal “war drawings”. Her work is held in public collections including the Arts Council of Ireland, Cork City Council, Cork City and County Archives, University College Cork, the University Hospital Cork, and Áras an Uachtaráin, Dublin.
Edwina Bracken is a painter based in Kilkenny with a wide exhibition history across Ireland and the UK, and residencies in Ireland, the US, the UK, and Australia. Her first solo show, Remote Proximities (Edinburgh), was named one of the UK’s top ten exhibitions by Artist News and later toured to Aberdeen and the RHA Gallery, Dublin with Hillsboro Fine Art. Other notable exhibitions include the Royal Scottish Academy Summer Shows, Generation Scotland at Paisley Museum, and Irish Art in the UK at Westminster Hall, London. Bracken holds an MLitt in Painting from the Glasgow School of Art and a BA (Hons) from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Her work is represented in international private collections, as well as the Waterford Healing Arts Trust and the HRH The King’s Foundation Collection at Dumfries House Estate, Scotland.
