Réaltbhuíonta (Constellations) presents recent work by studio faculty at Burren College of Art. As practicing artists, faculty who lecture in the college’s studio programmes are active in research across a number of platforms, utilising multiple forms of artistic practice as modes of engagement with a diverse range of research projects. Investigating place, ecologies and politics, such practices when brought together form a constellation, a distributed and evolving map that provides a space for critical reflection on the interconnected worlds we currently inhabit.

Miriam de Búrca is a visual artist who works primarily with film, video, drawing and installation. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and Ulster University in Belfast, completing a BA (1996), MA (2000) and practise-based PhD (2010) in Fine Art. Her work deals with issues around identity, how this comes to be expressed through the marking out of territory, and how landscapes become shaped by power dynamics and the belief systems that uphold them. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in cities such as Dublin, Belfast, London, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Lisbon, Montreal and New York.

Tom Flanagan is an artist, filmmaker based in Galway. His solo and collaborative work with artist Megs Morley is an ongoing investigation of the language of cinema and its relationship to political power and collective memory. Flanagans’ moving image and photographic works examine real and imagined politically complex sites and forgotten histories and attempts to intervene into collective understandings of the present, by exploring the space between images, memory, knowledge, and power. Flanagans’ practice has been supported by numerous arts council bursary and project awards and forms part of the Irish arts councils national collection.

Flanagan’s work has been exhibited, broadcast, and screened nationally and internationally in both gallery and film festival contexts. Select solo and group exhibitions include: Shifting Ground Commission 2018-20 X-PO Folk Radio, EVA International 2016, Still the Barbarians, TG4 ‘Splanc’ Commission – Allagóirí Chumhachta (Allegories of Power) for national broadcast in 2016 as part of their commemoration programming. rish Art Does Not Exist (2014), Station Independent Projects, New York; Agitationism (2014), EVA International, Ireland; Building on Ruins(2013), Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles; Lucca Experimental Film Festival (2013), Tuscany, Italy; Labour and Lockout (2013), Limerick City Gallery of Art; Momentous Times (2013), CCA Derry~Londonderry; Guth Gafa International Documentary Film Festival (2013), Kells, Meath, Ireland; Peaks of Present, Sheets of Past (2013), Mermaid Arts Centre; Rencontres Internationales(2011), Centre du Pompidou, Paris, and Berlin (2012); A Series of Navigations (2012), The Model, Sligo; Post-Fordlândia (2012), The Good Children Gallery, New Orleans; Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (2012), Hawick, Scotland; Post-Fordlândia (2011), Galway Arts Centre.

Eileen Hutton is a visual artist whose practice aims to generate reciprocal relationships with the more than human world and in the process create replicable models for informed ecological actions.

Her studio practice incorporates purpose built habitats, alternative photography processes, scientific methodologies and community based workshops as a means for this practice become an inclusive and collective process of curiosity, engagement and discussion of biodiversity and our surrounding natural environment. After completing her PhD in Studio Art in 2012 at Burren College of Art, Hutton developed the college’s Art and Ecology MFA based on her doctoral research. She worked as the Researcher/ Evaluator for An Urgent Enquiry (2017- 2021) a series of think tank sessions and residencies that address the intersection between art, biodiversity and climate change. A member of the Ecoart Network, Hutton is a contributing author to Ecoart in Action, a collection of essays and provocations on pedagogy and ecoarts practice. She exhibited a series of purpose built habitats and collaboratively produced sculptures as part of  Home: Being and Belonging in Contemporary Ireland at The Glucksman (IE) and was the Artist in Residence for the Soil Project Residency with the Butler Gallery (IE) for 2021. She is currently a member of Roots for the Future, a Radical Climate Thinking Group for and by artists in association with Project Arts Centre. Her work is supported by the Arts Council.

Conor McGrady is an artist from N. Ireland whose work examines the relationship between ideology and the politics of spatial control. Primarily executed in black and white, his often large-scale paintings and drawings explore various manifestations of social order and raise questions relating to the control of space, personal and national boundaries.

Conor received a BA Hons in Fine Art from the University of Northumbria (UK) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA). He has recently held solo exhibitions in New York, Miami, Atlanta and Zagreb/Croatia. Group exhibitions include the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York, Archiving Place and Time: Contemporary Art Practice in Northern Ireland since the Belfast Agreement, The Jerusalem Show VII: Fractures (Qalandiya International Biennial), D-0 Ark Underground Biennale of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo-Konjic, and IK-00 Spaces of Confinement in Venice. Editor of Radical History Review’s Curated Spaces, his writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Ruminations on Violence (Waveland Press, 2007) State of Emergence (Plottner Verlag, 2011), State in Time (Drustvo NSK Informativni Center, Ljubljana, 2012) and The Design of Frontier Spaces (Ashgate, 2015).

Dr Áine Phillips is a visual artist, writer curator and academic based in Galway city. She has been exhibiting, publishing and performing in Ireland and internationally since the late 80’s. Her work is socially engaged and she has created installations and live performance work for multiple contexts; Biennales, public art commissions, public space, social events, galleries, theatres and museums. Digital films of her performances have been screened at film festivals, galleries and museums all over the world. Her work has been supported and collected by the Arts Council of Ireland and the National Museum of Ireland.

In Ireland she has exhibited and performed at The Lab, Irish Film Centre, The Project, Arthouse, Golden Thread Gallery Belfast, EV+A Limerick, Galway Arts Centre, Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin and Killkenny Arts Festival. She has been involved in curating major live art and performance events in Ireland such as Tulca Live 2005-2007 and Future Histories Kilmainham Gaol part of The Ireland 2016 Arts Council programme. She recently published “Performance Art in Ireland: A History” (Live Art Development Agency and Intellect Books UK 2015), the first survey to chart the development of live art and performance in Ireland since the 1970s.

Ruby Wallis is a visual artist working primarily with photography, installation, and film. Her work engages with a haptic approach – using the close-up and psychogeography to work with embodied experience in relation to place and gender. 

She studied at ATU School of Design and Creative Arts and University of Wales, and was awarded a practice-based PhD by the National College of Art and Design in 2015. Recent exhibitions including Whistling in the Dark, Galway Arts Centre (solo) This Rural, Lismore Castle Arts, Bones in the Attic, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Images Are All We Have, PhotoIreland Festival, Engage, Photomuseum Ireland, Post-Picturesque Ireland, Perlman Teaching Museum, Minnesota, I Know, but Only Just, Solas Nua, Washington, Exiles, The Lab, Futures, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, Moving Stills, The Dock, Contact, Belfast Exposed Gallery, Tulca Festival of Visual Arts.

In 2022 she published the photobook A Woman Walks Alone at Night, with a Camera, selected publications also include The Journal of Artistic Research,The New Yorker, The British Journal of Photography, Winter Papers. Her work is held by collections at Rochester Art Centre, USA, and UG. Wallis was awarded residencies at the CCI, Paris, IMMA and TG.. She is the chair of the board of directors at Engage Art Studios, Galway, and lectures at The Burren College of Art, Co.Clare. She is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland