PhotoIreland presents the 5th edition of New Irish Works in 2026, a triennial programme of activities launched in 2013 to support Irish photographers, bringing new works by 10 selected artists to local and international audiences.

Under the name New Irish Works, PhotoIreland presents at the International Centre for the Image an exhibition of new works, many of which are being exhibited for the first time, by 10 outstanding artists: Austin Hearne, Billy Kenrick, Ciara Richardson, Debbie Castro, Dorje De Burgh, Emily O’Connell, Garry Loughlin, Kate Nolan, Mandy O’Neill, and Miriam O’Connor.

Launched in 2013, New Irish Works is a triennial project by PhotoIreland that represents and promotes the growing diversity of contemporary photographic practices in Ireland. It aims to enrich the Irish ecosystem with much-needed new voices and curatorial approaches, facilitate much-deserved opportunities, and invigorate the Irish photography scene.

New Irish Works is a unique artist support programme for Irish and Ireland-based artists at any stage of their careers, comprising public-facing activities such as the New Irish Works exhibition, as well as a growing range of behind-the-scenes professional development opportunities tailored to lens-based practitioners. Artists are selected by a jury composed of national and international experts representing a diversity of art fields and specialisations, and they benefit from the programme over the 3-year duration.

The ten artists and their presented projects are:

Austin Hearne, Slabs
Slabs is an ongoing, open-ended photographic project that uses damaged wallpaper pasting tables to display selected images from a personal archive spanning over 30 years, reflecting an ongoing struggle with the volume, value, storage, and meaning of photographic material amid the shift from analogue to digital practice. Through juxtaposed images that move between the personal and political, the work interrogates memory, authorship, and trust in technology, while situating a queer lived experience within profound social and cultural changes in Ireland.

Billy Kenrick, The Very End of Everything
The project examines the material qualities of photographic media and indeterminate peripheral landscapes through the use of multiple analogue formats. Drawing inspiration from Antonin Artaud’s failed 1937 visit to Inis M r, the work positions both landscape and image as ambiguous sites that invite interpretation while simultaneously resisting it.

Ciara Richardson, How would you like it to happen to you?
Richardson presents a playful yet critical interrogation of traditional gender stereotypes in visual culture by subverting the male gaze through the transformation of found photographic imagery from 2D into 3D forms. Drawing on Dadaist strategies, it repositions male nudity as the object of the gaze and uses mechanical processes to symbolically resist reductive representations, prompting reflection on gender, power, and visual authority.

Debbie Castro, Age is a privilege, unless you forget!
Castro revisits and intervenes in her father’s photographic archive to explore Alzheimer’s disease, memory loss, and anticipatory grief, drawing on recorded conversations to determine what is remembered, partially recalled, or forgotten. Through physical acts of cutting, scraping, and the symbolic use of colour-coded stickers, the work renders cognitive decline tangible, merging two photographic practices into a universal meditation on vulnerability, care, and the fragile persistence of memory.

Dorje De Burgh, Now is the Time
Now Is The Time is a document of protest, repression, censorship and state control. It is also concerned with the positionality of the photographic gaze amid complex networks of digitised self-, citizen- and state- surveillance, exploring the multiple tensions between indifference, engagement, power and performativity within the contemporary spectacle. The protesters' identities are concealed both out of respect for the physical and legal risks they are taking by occupying public space and as a formal reflection of a political landscape in which peaceful protest, free assembly and critical speech are increasingly criminalised.

Emi O'Connell, and then I ran
and then I ran combines self-portraiture, text, and staged imagery to re-enact O’Connell’s grandmother’s escape from an Irish mother and baby home. The work examines institutional shame, trauma, and the enforced erasure of women’s identities. Through black-and-white performative images, colour landscapes, repetition, and techniques such as long exposure and distortion, the work situates personal memory within a broader history of oppression, loss, and psychological confinement in Ireland.

Garry Loughlin, What Makes An Island?
What Makes an Island? examines the contested status of Rockall, a remote North Atlantic islet, using the islet as a lens to explore territorial control, post-colonial legacies, and the instability of national boundaries. By combining documentary and speculative strategies, the work interrogates how geopolitical power, cartography, and historical narrative construct the meaning and value of place.

Kate Nolan, The Cut Tells its Own Tale
In The Cut Tells its Own Tale Nolan revisits family albums from her early childhood years in Baghdad in the 80s, to explore architecture, family life, and expatriate experience in a politically charged context. Drawing on archival images, family testimonies, and preserved ephemera, the work reconstructs a largely unremembered past and develops into a multi-strand project that is rooted in a reimagining of the family’s journey from Iraq back to Ireland.

Mandy O’Neill, Best Laid Plans
Best Laid Plans is the outcome of the artist’s four-year practice-based PhD. The site-specific work employs expanded photography practice to consider scenarios and outcomes in relation to housing and planning in the inner suburb of Cabra, Dublin, while also considering the wider historical and ideological context.

Miriam O’Connor, Fox=Cow
Fox=Cow explores care and responsibility, set on a family farm in rural Cork, where a wildlife camera is employed to document the farm as the artist balances tending the land, her elderly mother, and her art practice. The automated camera blindly, unsympathetically, and sometimes poetically goes about its work and rearranges the farm into categories, sections, scenes, micro events, moments that matter, into things that feel important, points in time worth remembering.