The Collision Project is an initiative that facilitates collaborative pairings between early career artists, celebrating the open-ended, playful and process-driven experimentation of artists working in tandem.

A panel of four creative practitioners carefully peer-curated two pairs from an open-call participation pool. Pairs were matched based on thoughtful commonalities and exciting divergences. 

The two pairs are connecting virtually, and undertaking a remote collaboration over 12 weeks, working at a self-directed pace. We will facilitate an online presentation and in-person culmination event in May 2024!

Holly Pickering + Djuna O’Neill

Holly Pickering is a visual artist from Waterford based in Dublin. Her practice moves between the mediums of film, sound, and sculptural installations which are often oriented around experimental texts and fictional narratives. Her practice explores feelings of desire and defeat which arise in our attempts to express the weight of individual experience via language. 

Recent work includes, There is no backdoor to your character, Dublin Art Book Fair (2023), forefinger;pointer;guiding principle Muine Bheag Arts, Carlow (2023), and solo show Amanuensis at Ormond Art Studios, Dublin (2022). Recent awards include the Ormond Art Studios Recent Graduate Award (2022) and the Garter Lane Film Artist Residency Award (2022).

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Djuna O’Neill is an Irish, London - based artist who works across text, digital mediums and mixed media sculpture. Her current work draws on themes of Irish folklore, concepts of world building found in gaming environments and science fiction, and the hauntological as a tool for exhuming untold stories and building future imaginaries.

Djuna was awarded the warden’s prize at the Goldsmiths MA degree show, exhibiting with the inaugural year of the MA Art and Ecology in 2022. Since then she has been commissioned to create a body of work for a solo exhibition at Flatland Projects, Bexhill-on-Sea, with curator Fran Painter Fleming and supported by the De La Warr Pavilion. During the development of this commission Djuna received support from the Discovery Programme, Centre for Archaeology and Innovation Ireland, to repurpose archeological 3D lidar scan data. Djuna’s practice conveys an archeology of mediums of storytelling; following threads of folklore which have continued from one intangible form to another.

Leda Scully + Lily O’Shea

Leda Scully has a multidisciplinary practice which leans heavily towards painting. Her work explores the ways in which we experience the world and how we translate these impressions to ourselves in private, divergent ways. She draws on a personal lexicon of imagery which includes found images and childhood cartoons to look at how memory shows up in the present and as a way to process sometimes uncomfortable truths.

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Lily O’Shea is a multidisciplinary artist based between Galway and Cork. Her practice interrogates political questions surrounding labour, home and productivity. Through sculpture and text, her work delves into the anxieties caused by the impossibility of situating oneself anywhere in Ireland. She explores parallels between housing and creativity, honing in on the lack of stable space which conflicts with the demand for artistic productivity. As an artist based in Ireland, this research has come about within the greater context of the housing crisis, this has been unavoidable in the production of all work whether conscious or not. The research draws from reality tv, fiction and unfinished artworks to gather potential strategies against burnout and uncertainty. Lily received her BA from Crawford College of Art and Design in 2020 and has since participated in residencies and exhibitions in Ireland. She is currently a co-director at 126 Artist-run Gallery, Galway.

Images:

Holly Pickering, There is no backdoor to your character, publication, 2023. 

Djuna O’Neill, still from The Ground is Kind, Black Butter, 2023. 

Lily O’Shea, conversations with a roof, work-in-progress, photographed at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, 2023.

Leda Scully, Untitled, paper, silk, mixed media, 8.5” x 11”, 2023. 

Courtesy of the artists.

Curated by Ellen O’Connor, Bronagh Gallagher, Alex Keatinge and Olivia Normile.

This project is graciously funded by Rethink Ireland.