Artist Bio: James Wellwood
James Wellwood (b.1999) is a Kilkenny/Galway-based visual artist who recently graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design (TUS) with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting (2024). Wellwood primarily works with oils and gouache, alongside mould-making and casting processes. He approaches his work as a site-specific, project-based visual diary that responds to places of personal significance through themes of nostalgia, memory, isolation, and perception of space.
His practice is process-driven, combining ongoing research into Ireland’s traditional rural visual culture, our impact on the landscape and the psychology of place, with a strong interest in materiality and making. Observation, documentation, and quiet reflection guide this process while using visual storytelling to balance realism with abstracted elements, creating uncanny, dreamlike and often melancholic representations of mundane yet relatable spaces.
Wellwood’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with venues including The Hunt Museum and Ormston House in Limerick, GOMA in Waterford, Outset Gallery and 126 Artist-Run Gallery in Galway, and most recently iP12 House in Chania, Crete. He is currently an Orbital Studio member at Engage Art Studios, Galway.
Artist Statement:
This body of work explores contemporary landscapes and our yearning for what feels natural and unspoilt in a world increasingly shaped by human presence, framed through the lens of psychogeography. At its centre are Ireland’s bogs and peatlands, landscapes of fragility, memory, and transformation. Once vital to survival, sustaining rural life through turf cutting, they also carried an element of danger, their folklore alive with tales of fairies luring travellers into treacherous ground. Bogs embody this duality, simultaneously safe and hostile, beautiful and menacing. Today, they are shifting from sites of labour and survival to spaces of leisure, renewal, and reflection. This transformation emphasizes their layered histories and enduring significance within Irish cultural identity.
My work approaches the bog as both a cultural landscape and an inner landscape, with Abbeyleix Bog in Co. Laois at its core. Shaped by childhood visits, stories passed down from my mother, and later recurring walks during the Covid-19 pandemic, this place embodies an idealised time, liminal, set apart from the world, almost otherworldly and uncanny, filled with memory, myth, and lived experience.
Research for these works begins with walks within the bog. This involves immersing myself in the bogs atmosphere, observing sculptural traces of natural forms and human activity, and responding to the unexpected arrangements of the land. Rather than presenting a documentary record, my paintings and works on paper translate these encounters into visual diaries of place. Their small scale mirrors the intimacy of these encounters, while vibrant colour and careful attention to overlooked detail reveal how memory, history, and present experience intertwine
Artist Statement: Zelda Cunningham:
Zelda is based in the Wicklow Mountains, drawing continuous inspiration from the natural
landscape that surrounds her. Originally from Dublin, she studied and worked in interior
and spatial design before transitioning into fine art. This shift began after completing a
certificate in art therapy through CIT, which led her to explore embroidery and develop a
more introspective, process-led practice.
Zelda is a member of the Society of Embroidered Works (S.E.W.) and Gallery126 in
Galway, grounding their practice within the Irish contemporary art community. In 2022, she
graduated in Fine Art Textiles from the Crawford College of Art and Design. She is
currently studying painting at the RHA School of Painting in Dublin.
Working across textiles and painting, Zelda's practice is rooted in a slow, contemplative
process that mirrors the rhythms and balance of the natural world. Through this approach,
she seeks to create personal, meditative spaces that explore the connection between
landscape and self—how place shapes memory, emotion, and identity.
Her ongoing body of work invites a dialogue between environment and self. Each piece
becomes a fragment of personal geography, encouraging reflection on how materials and
landscape evoke an internal terrain. Mapping and topography emerge through layered,
process-based techniques: photographic screen prints are stitched into ink-dyed, wax-resist
surfaces, creating depth and dimensionality on an otherwise flat plane. These layers act as a
visual metaphor for memory—accumulated, obscured, and re-exposed over time.
Judy Lawler
Judy Lawler is a visual artist whose studio practice is rooted in the Wicklow Hills. A graduate of TU Dublin and CCAD Cork, she studied Fine Art Painting and Art Textiles—disciplines that continue to shape her layered, process-driven approach. Her visual language is inspired by the structured beauty and psychological pull of pattern, drawing on influences such as Islamic art, M.C. Escher, William Morris, and Koloman Moser. This current body of work centres on the bramble—its repetition, familiar structure, and organic entanglement.
Employing dye and printmaking techniques, Lawler builds complexity through repetition and transformation. Rather than following a rigid design, her pattern-like compositions evolve intuitively, as motifs and colours repeat, shift, fade, and return within a grid. Visual rhythms dance across the surface to suggest both order and spontaneity. This interplay reflects an ongoing search for freedom within structure. At the heart of her practice is a meditative, cathartic connection to making. Her workcelebrates the restorative nature of craft, honouring the slow, deliberate processes that underpin it. Judy Lawler exhibits regularly, and her work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Ulster Hospital in Belfast and the Bon Secours Hospital in Cork.
