Threads

Threads

Neva Elliott and Ciara O’Connor 

The Courthouse Gallery

28th November 2025 - 25th of January 2026

The Courthouse Gallery has brought together Neva Elliott and Ciara O’Connor for their distinct yet interconnected practices exploring bereavement and recovery through their use of textiles. 

O’Connor uses a combination of hand stitching, free motion embroidery and raw-edged appliqué to create her thread drawings. The slow, meditative nature of hand stitching allows time to become intimately connected with the work. The speed and fluidity of machine stitching allows for a more intuitive, expressive outcome and instant gratification. They are equally important to her. 

Elliott brings together reparative acts of making as part of the post-bereavement healing process through the artist’s own experiences of loss. She creates work extrapolating action from the awareness of the fragile and contingent nature of being human. Using coping mechanisms and transparent vulnerability as the basis of making, the artist uses herself as a subject, content, and non-fictional performer in a lyrical conceptualism that blurs art and life across sculpture and photography. 

Both artists use making as a space for grief, the process of contemplation, meditation, and mourning—providing herself the time and space to heal through making. While working from their individual experiences, they attempt to expand beyond the autobiographical to connect with people through honest, open narratives about aspects of a shared humanity that still hold some taboo – death, bereavement, and mental health.

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Ciara O’Connor is a Kerry based visual artist who works primarily with textiles and free motion embroidery. Her work is figurative and deals with themes of identity, feminism, trauma and recovery. She is interested in pushing the boundaries of traditional techniques to tell contemporary stories. 

Born in Glasgow to parents from County Kerry, O’Connor spent her formative years in Dublin. She studied Fine Art in GMIT, Galway, specialising in Painting and Printmaking. After college she opted to travel before settling in Brooklyn, New York, in 2009. Here she dabbled in photography and millinery before attending Fitzgerald Jewellery School in Williamsburg where she learned the fundamentals of silversmithing. In 2018 she began experimenting with embroidery and it had been her primary means of expression ever since.

Since returning to her practice in 2019 she has exhibited in both Ireland and the UK, including Following Threads in Crawford Art Gallery, and RUA and RSA Annuals. She had her first solo show in Garter Lane Arts Centre, 2022, and has featured in FAIRE, Image Magazine, The Irish Examiner, The Kerryman, and VAN Jan/Feb 2024. Her second solo show will open Sept 6 in Garter Lane Arts Centre, followed by a duo with Neva Elliott at The Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon, in November, and a third solo in GOMA, Waterford, in 2026. 

@ciaraoconnorartist 

The artist would like to thank Alan Raggett, Lynda Kenny, Conor Ryan and Garter Lane Arts Centre. 

Neva Elliott is an artist and writer based in Dublin, with an MA from Central Saint Martin’s, London. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and internationally, including at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, the VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow and the National Galleries of Ireland and South Africa. After a decade as CEO of Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s leading contemporary music group, Elliott returned to her art practice full-time in 2021. 

Highlights since include her solo exhibitions, How to create a fallstreak, at the Linenhall Arts Centre in 2023, and Notes on being human at Pallas Projects/Studios Dublin in 2024. In 2023, she was also an invited artist at the 193rd RHA Annual Exhibition and secured an award for ‘outstanding work’ at VISUAL’s ARTWORKS 2023 Remembering The Future. She was Artlink Fort Dunree’s 2024 Irish artist-in-residence. Her work featured in Out of the Strong, Came Forth Sweetness, an exhibition by the Gay Health Network, curated by Brian Teeling and Aisling Clark in May 2025.

Her writing has been commissioned by Highlanes Gallery, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, The Luan Gallery, the South Tipperary Art Centre, VISUAL Carlow, RTÉ Culture Online and published by Banshee, Unapologetic Magazine, Visual Artists Newsheet, and Source Photographic Review, earning runner-up in their New Writing Prize for 2023. 

Looking ahead, she will have solo exhibitions at the Custom House Gallery, Co Mayo, in 2026, and the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, in 2027. 

Elliott is a signature artist of the Irish Hospice Foundation and is supported by The Arts Council and Carlow County Council.

@nevaelliottartist | nevaelliott.com

The artist would like to thank Darren Campion, Artlink Fort Dunree, Pallas Projects and Studios.

Carlow County Council and The Arts Council have supported her practice.