Tairseach: Standing at the Mouth
of the World
The Tea Houses, Kilkenny
Curatorial Residency March-June, 2026
In the mystical spaces between the visible and invisible, two Kilkenny-based artists explore profound encounters with the Irish landscape. Vicki O’Donoghue and Mary Doyle Burke approach their local environments with curious hearts and open minds, creating work that meditates on thresholds where the physical world meets something deeper, older and sacred.
O’Donoghue’s paintings emerge from sustained walking across the mountainside. Her vivid, abstracted imagery draws from cave sites and ancient symbols, beasts and herds that speak to collective consciousness and primal instincts. Through gestural marks and contrasting colours, she explores herd mentality in polarisation with individualism, interrogating contemporary life while reaching back more primordial forms of being. Her work exposes the tension between conformity and divergence, a dynamic that sits at the heart of our fractured relationship with the environment.
Doyle Burke’s practice is grounded in shamanistic engagement with Kilkenny’s ancient bogs. Working with bio-materials, handmade dyes and bog matter, she positions the bog as a collaborator, friend and guide. Guided by meditative trances beginning in the bog and taking full form in her studio, tapping into intergenerational memory and cyclical rhythms that bind human and ecological experience, and form the basis of her sculptural and painting processes.
Both artists dance on the edges of sacred threshold, sense portals within the landscape. Their work invites us to perceive wider realities beyond what immediately appears. Caves and bogs hold a millennia of geological memory, offering us a recalibration of scale and challenging what we think we know. Both artists model ways of being with landscape that are attentive, reverent and transformative, helping us rediscover long forgotten sacred pathways and knowledge we have barely begun to reclaim.
Curated by Shannon Carroll on curatorial residency, as part of the Kilkenny County Council Arts Office Programme.
Exhibition photography below by Amelia Caulfield.
