"Vestiges" Lily O'Shea, Margot Galvin
Main Gallery
17 April – 31 May 2026
Artists: Lily O’Shea (www.lily-oshea.com), Margot Galvin (www.blackchurchprint.ie/artist/margot-galvin)
Vestiges brings together two practices that ask how we live with what remains, traces of place, traces of labour, traces of memory, and the ongoing work of belonging. Through sculpture, text, performance, and printmaking, this exhibition holds attention on the infrastructures, physical and psychological, that shape identity, connection, and how we endure within a perpetually shifting landscape. Bringing these two artists together, the exhibition asks what remains of a place when it is changing, and what remains of a life when “home” cannot be secured.
Lily O’Shea is a visual artist based in Cork, working across sculpture and text, and drawing. Her research-based practice weaves together political questions surrounding labour, time, and identity, often through traditional woodworking techniques that evolve into expansive installations, integrating drawing and iterations of writing. She is currently interested in anxieties caused by the impossibility of putting down roots in Ireland, looking at parallels between housing and creativity, and honing in on the lack of stable space which conflicts with the demand for artistic productivity. Her research reaches towards community, connection, and exchange, within the greater context of the housing crisis, and a practice focused on sustaining an art practice in Ireland, grappling with ideas of care, space, and energy.
For CHG&S, O’Shea is bringing a project titled “A framework for me and you” taking the the shape of a deconstructed modular home, featuring an exposed wooden roof, floor, and wall studs. Beginning with technical drawings and maquettes, the work engages the language of construction to explore precarity within the housing crisis. A sense of absence and incompletion runs throughout the work, acknowledging the impossibility of stability and mourning a structure that never fully existed.Its self-sufficient construction gestures toward autonomy, inviting speculation on futures that might exist outside the borders sustaining our precarity. Developed through technical drawings and maquettes, the design of this modular home takes inspiration from IKEA flatpacks. The house can be broken down into panels that connect with nail plates slotting together like puzzle pieces, designed for repeated assembly, reconfiguring and relocation.
Margot Galvin is an artist living and working in Dublin. Her work explores ideas about place, home and belonging, using psycho-geographical explorations of various locations to question how a sense of place or belonging is developed, and how closely our current environment echoes our place of origin. Drawing, painting and primarily printmaking are used to explore these ideas, with a particular interest in repeatedly walking, drawing and “mapping” certain locations. The works arising are not straightforward imitations of observation, but reconstructed interpretations or responses to the experience of being in a particular place, a composite of visual fact, feelings, memory and imagination. Galvin also extends the norms of printmaking to incorporate materials such as metal, wood and glass, bringing print into 3D “print sculptures”, objects or assemblages.
Galvin’s work links art practice with community engagement and environmental activism. In her current body of work she explores the River Dodder near where she lives. Her work can involve engaging with local people, including recording interviews with locals about the river and its significance, and facilitating print workshops where participants can make monoprints using flora gathered along riverbanks. She describes highlighting immediate surroundings as a palimpsest of nature, history and human geography as a relatable way for people to connect with environmental issues.
For this exhibition Galvin brings 'Flow' the latest iteration of a long term ongoing project that explores the vibrant environment along the River Dodder through expanded printmaking processes. Developed through regular walks along the riverbanks, the work responds to natural rhythms, human impact, and the tension between urban infrastructure and ecological systems.The project draws on conversations with local environmental and citizen groups, whose work in conservation, clean-ups, and advocacy informs the visual and conceptual layers of the exhibition. Through print, installation, and found materials, the work examines the dynamics of the river’s edge—registering movement, accumulation, and residue.. Flow invites reflection on our relationship with place, presence, and environmental change.
Together, Vestiges brings these enquiries into dialogue, the home as a destabilised structure and the landscape as a layered record, asking what it means to seek attachment, stability and exchange, and what traces we use to measure where we belong.
Artists’ Biographies
Lily O’Shea is a visual artist based in Cork, working across sculpture, text, and performance. Her research-based practice weaves together political questions surrounding labour, time and identity, and is currently concerned with anxieties caused by the impossibility of putting down roots in Ireland, and the parallels between housing and creativity. She has received support including a Visual Arts Bursary and an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland (2024), and a Creative Practitioner Bursary from Galway City Council (2023).
Margot Galvin is an artist living and working in Dublin. Her work explores ideas about place, home and belonging through psycho-geographical exploration, repeatedly walking, drawing and “mapping” locations, and creating works that combine visual fact, feelings, memory and imagination. She primarily works through printmaking, extending its norms to incorporate materials such as metal, wood and glass in 3D “print sculptures”, objects or assemblages. She graduated from NCAD with a first class honours degree in Fine Art Print (2012) and completed an MFA at NCAD (2014). She is a member of the AtHome artist group and The Black Church Print Studio, Dublin.
