All at Once Collapsing Together, book published by the Butler Gallery
96 pages. 22 x 27cm. Hardback, cloth-bound, four colour printed.
All at Once Collapsing Together is a monograph of Caoimhín Gaffney’s work across film, photography and writing, which uses fiction to imagine new ways of relating to the natural world. Published by the Butler Gallery, and designed by Alex Synge, All at Once Collapsing Together encapsulates and translates the various elements of Gaffney’s work into book form, with the book being an integral part of the project from its inception.
Medium-format photographs capture diverse colour in the Irish landscape and try to reflect the respite it offers us- but what remains unphotographable is the decline in certain bird populations. An image of Ireland’s largest lake acts as a memory: being taken in 2022, before the lake’s ecosystems collapse was visible. Speaking with – and against – the images are text pieces in the form of poetry and short stories. These reflect on the relief from trauma that immersion in the natural environment can bring but, because it is in distress itself, questions are raised for the protagonists about their sense of self and their place in the ecosystem. In the film, images and text unfurl across the two screens with fragmented depictions of the human figure trying to become part of the ecosystem again.
Exhibited text pieces were re-designed to work within the book’s framing, and the cadence of the two-screen film is visualised across still images- with the script formatted as it is performed and spoken. Context and reflection on the work is provided in an introduction by Anna O Sullivan, Director and Chief Curator of the Butler Gallery, and an essay by writer, curator and art historian Pádraic E. Moore.
Published as part of an Arts Council national touring exhibition in Ireland, which travelled to the Highlanes Gallery and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. It is the artist’s second monograph, with Unseen by my Open Eyes published by Black Dog London in 2017.
Purchase from the Butler Gallery online or in person, or the Highlanes Gallery in person.
To be spat back out at GOMA
To be spat back out is a three-person exhibition by Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Jennifer Mehigan and Caoimhín Gaffney, where individual and collaborative practices overlap and interact across world building (fiction and CGI), world destroying (climate change) and worlds colliding (queer networks, and traumatic experiences that interrupt the present as spectres). Emerging out of their conversations and exchange of skills across the various technologies in their work, the images, objects, and animations they produce are often oriented towards the presentation of climate change in the media, with each artist exploring how ideas of ‘nature’ can be re-examined from a postcolonial and queer perspective.
To be spat back out revels in waste and excess, examining the expressions of excessive emotions as a queer strategy of resistance. Through storytelling, images and texts, reality bends to a breaking point; mirroring how trauma distorts, remakes and retells lived experience in its own image. The legacy of colonialism is examined as a material component of the climate crisis, and how the binary dynamics of indoor/outdoor and private/public spaces fail to imagine what is possible in the present.
Situated in relation to their practices, the exhibition employs non-linear storytelling, poetry, surreality, virtual reality, and daydreaming, growing into a new unpredictable formation as a collective body of work.
Opening at GOMA Waterford on Saturday 26 July, 4–6pm.
The exhibition will run from Saturday 26 July – Saturday 23 August 2025.
Butler Gallery: June- July 2024
Highlanes Gallery: August- November 2024
Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre: January- February 2025
Butler Gallery presents All at Once Collapsing Together, a new body of work by Caoimhín Gaffney in a National Tour travelling to Highlanes Gallery and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre.
Spanning across film, photography and writing, All at Once Collapsing Together uses fiction to imagine new ways of relating to the natural world. Images throughout the exhibition act as mirrors to the healing and relief the environment can offer, with narratives fraught with climate anxiety interrupting and reframing these as temporary and fragile.
“The combination of these diverse elements is coherent and synchronous, albeit that purposeful cross-currents are at work within the exhibition as a whole. […] The show conjures a fictional world of verdant landscapes that in some scenes pass over into wildernesses suffused with an otherworldly, sublime quality.”
Tom Lordan, irish times; Read the full 5 star review
In the Butler Gallery, three films are also being exhibited in the upstairs screening room, running on a loop: Everything Disappears (2014), Our Stranded Friends in Distant Lands (2015) and A Numbness in the Mouth (2016). These will also be shown on a loop in Uillinn.
Supported by: the Arts Council of Ireland, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Cavan Arts Office, Cavan County Council. The project was developed through research and development funding from Platform 31 and University of Atypical.
Milk and Nectar at Belfast Photo Festival
Emerging too damp to catch fire, 2023.
Medium format photograph, Giclée printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, 35 cm x 25.6cm, edition of 5.
Household presents Milk and Nectar as part of Belfast Photo Festival. Bringing together the work of seven artists who respond to economic, social and geo-political issues to create compelling alternate visual landscapes. This multi-sited exhibition will take place in the shops, libraries and clubs of the Cregagh Road area of East Belfast. By presenting these works embedded in a local neighbourhood, we aim to draw out how global issues can affect, and intersect with, our day-to-day existence.
Featured Artists: Bassam Al-Sabah, Caoimhín Gaffney, Michael Hanna, Jan McCullough, Jennifer Mehigan, Katie Watchorn. The artists in this exhibition are represented on UPHOLD, Household’s not-for-profit online platform for selling and promoting work.
Dates: 8 – 16 June. Location: Venues along Cregagh Road
Artlink interview about new project
Artlink interview about new work made on residency at Fort Dunree, Co. Donegal.
Under Cover of Night at Ormston House
As part of Belltable Late Night, Ormston House presents Under Cover of Night, a late-night screening programme of artists’ film. The event features a double-bill: Becoming Plant by British-Kenyan artist Grace Ndiritu and Expulsion by Irish artist Caoimhín Gaffney.
‘Under cover of night’ is an idiom used when describing activities carried out during night time hours, in darkness, avoiding detection from authority. The clandestine and revolutionary connotations of this idiom frame this programme. With distinct focuses and subject matters, the films find commonality in their radical propositions for alternative forms of living and being.
A brief introduction precedes each film, and there will be a DJ in the foyer playing music before, between, and after the films. The screening is Friday, 15 March from 9pm–12am. Tickets are €10 and can be purchased on the Belltable website here.
Expulsion (2021) follows a fictional utopian Queer State as it devolves from a promised oppositional force into a dystopian bureaucracy. Interspersed throughout is archival footage of queer activist Joan Jett Blakk, the drag persona of Terence Smith, who ran for President of the USA in 1992. Expulsion navigates through queer history, from the witchcraft trials and the inquisition, to current debates around the co-opting of queerness by capitalism. The optimism and determination seen in the footage of Joan Jett Blakk’s speeches is countered by the fictional queer state depicted by Gaffney, which descends into totalitarianism.
Editioned photographic prints available through Uphold
I can still taste the lake water in my mouth, feel it in my ears, 2023.
Medium format photograph, Giclée printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, 35 cm x 28.7 cm, edition of 5.
Uphold presents three of my new editioned photographic prints as part of their collection. I’ve developed these medium format photographs over the past year as part of a larger body of work reflecting on the restorative power of nature alongside the reality of climate change – and resulting climate anxiety – through a fragmented representation of the landscape. The photographs engage a quiet register to examine the subject and were shot throughout Ulster: on Rathlin Island and at Lough Sheelin and its adjoining bog in Cavan.
Uphold is an iniative based in Northern Ireland, run by Household, that sells work by contemporary artists in a not-for-profit model: when you buy from Uphold you are directly supporting the artists and their work.
The bog released all that it was holding, 2023.
Medium format photograph, Giclée printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, 29cm x 35cm, edition of 5.
These works were developed with the support of funding from Platform 31, the University of Atypical and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Purchase editioned photographic prints through Uphold.
It all began with the turlough: broadcast and publication online
A short story I wrote, It all began with the turlough, was shortlisted for the RTÉ Short Story Competition. It all began with the turlough was read on air by Aaron Monaghan and broadcast on Friday 20th October on RTÉ Radio 1. The judges called it an “extraordinary feat of imagination” and “an original and funny fantasy with a lake as the protagonist”.
Over the past few years, I’ve walked to and photographed a local turlough, sometimes surprised to return to its disappearance. I’m interested in how we view nature as something that should provide us with our wants and needs, and how often we also view it with irritation when it defies or inconveniences us.
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