Say Again, This Place is a new body of site-responsive works by artist Shane Malone-Murphy marking his first solo exhibition. Developed for the unique architectural context of the Courthouse Tinahely, this exhibition highlights a continued inquiry into place, memory, and materiality.
Using gathered materials such as glass, soot, ash, and clay, the works are presented in states of transition. Objects lean, fabrics hang, one thing bears the weight of another. These provisional arrangements in unstable forms complicate the boundary between structure and collapse, suggesting a vocabulary of support that is attentive, rather than secure.
Through these delicate balances, the exhibition reflects how sites mediate the intangible. Inviting the viewer to consider the subtle ways in which places hold memory and the history of what has passed through.
Shane Malone Murphy:
“The studio residency opportunity in Tinahely offered me something my previous setup could not: vital breathing room. In my domestic space, the work was constantly constrained—kept small, tucked away, interrupted; wax molds had to be cleared for dinner. I often had to dismantle or store pieces prematurely just to make room for the next task. This prevented me from sitting with the work and understanding how the emerging pieces related and reinforced each other—an essential part of how my practice unfolds.
Balancing domestic demands with artistic experimentation meant key steps in my process were often cut short or foregone entirely. It was impossible to imagine the work fully within the context of an exhibition when it constantly yielded to the rhythms of everyday life—a beeping washing machine, a pull-out bed with golf clubs on top, a desk rearranged by someone else’s needs.
The scale and focus the Tinahely studio provided marked a radical shift. It allowed me to sustain a daily, uninterrupted dialogue with the work; to see it in its complexity, scale, and potential—especially as I explored more sustainable materials within my practice. These materials often behaved differently from traditional ones: beeswax casts needed flat, level surfaces and undisturbed time to set; plaster alternatives required multiple surfaces or containers and dried at varying rates; hand stitching demanded uninterrupted surfaces to keep work clean and unfolded, and proper light to see detail.
This studio was vital to the recentering of my practice, enabling me to bring my work as an artist back into alignment with my daily life.”
Shane Malone-Murphy is a Wicklow-based artist, who recently graduated with a first-class honours degree in Sculpture and Combined Media from The Limerick School of Art and Design.
My work concerns itself with the entanglement of the human experience with land, on both the cultural and personal realms. My work is particularly invested in the impact of grief upon one’s understanding of landscape. I refer to the sites and locations I examine within my practice as ‘Geographies of Grief’.
In a time of ecological crisis and cultural fragmentation, I believe that grief offers an urgent lens through which we might rethink our attachments to land and to one another. My practice is committed to harnessing this power of grief, and reframing it as a catalyst for social and environmental change. By carving out more generous epistemologies of both grief and land, I aim to drive meaningful shifts in our relationship with the environment.
Materials such as stone, paper, canvas, metal, as well as personal objects, converge within my making, often using gestures of erasure and removal to lend a tangibility to negative space. These materials hint at, or are directly lifted from the ‘Geographies of Grief’ that I examine. The resulting works feel like a mapping of absence; quiet, tactile negotiations between memory, material, and terrain.
Artist Biography
Shane Malone-Murphy is a Wicklow based artist who graduated with a first class honours degree in Sculpture and Combined Media from the Limerick School of Art and Design.
Since graduating from LSAD in 2023, Malone-Murphy has completed a professional certificate in Sustainable Exhibition Making from Creative Futures Academy/NCAD as well as the Clancy Quay/Superprojects Professional Development Programme. He is also currently a participant in the 2024 Critical Correspondence Course with the Royal Hibernian Academy as well as a member of the 2024 Douglas Hyde Gallery Student Forum.
Malone-Murphy has exhibited consistently since graduating with pieces shown at numerous group exhibitions in Luan Gallery, Clancy Quay Studios Dublin, Dunamaise Arts Centre Portlaoise, and Signal Arts Bray.
Malone-Murphy works with Kunstverein Aughrim as Technical Support and Sustainability Consultant.
Selected Previous Exhibitions
2025
From Dust, Group Show, Platform Arts, Belfast
2024
Daisy, Daisy-, Group Show, The Complex, Dublin
Take Care to Leave a Trace, Luan Gallery, Westmeath
21 Bridges to the Sea, Clancy Quay Professional Development Programme 2023 Group show, Dublin
2023
Dunamaise Arts Centre, one piece exhibited., exhibition curated by Blaise Smith RHA, Laois
Signal Arts Centre, one piece exhibited, Bray, Wicklow
LSAD Graduate Showcase, graduating student showcase of degree work.
On Not Knowing, collaborative video piece contributed to the symposium, ‘On Not Knowing’ How Artists Teach The Glasgow School of Art convened in partnership with Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Art
The Lord Hath Commanded, The Oobleck Collective, Sailor’s Home, Limerick
WIP, two pieces exhibited in the Church Gallery, LSAD
Urban Co-Op, piece exhibited in the Urban Co-Op Limerick
2022
Cause Célebre, The Oobleck Collective, Sailor’s Home, Limerick
Advance, two pieces, final year student open call, Spacecraft Studios Limerick
After Our Own, two pieces, The Oobleck Collective, Sailor’s Home, Limerick
Otherworld, piece exhibited in Ballinacourty Gardens Limerick
Open Call, two pieces, The People’s Museum Limerick
Hollow House, three pieces, the Hunt Museum Limerick