The Collision Project

JULY 19TH - 26TH, 2025

STARLING, 31 Nicholas Street, Limerick

The Collision Project is an initiative by Screen Service that facilitates collaborative pairings between early-career artists. Three artist pairs were carefully curated, matched for both shared sensibilities and striking divergences. Over the past four months, each pair has been working remotely to develop investigative, collaborative works.

In this exhibition, three pairs experiment with ideas of layering, concealment and revelation.

The most potent element of this project format, and what allows the collaborations to ignite, is the obvious (but essential!) shared agreement that “we’re both open to this”. That openness finds its own language, and artists begin to investigate what might inch them forward. The pairs in this exhibition uncovered this rhythm quite quickly, in exciting and surprising ways. Think: secrets in ceilings, mediated airport images and the thresholds of women’s bodies. 

A shared curiosity runs through all three collaborations about what lies beneath, or behind, or purposely crammed out of sight. There's a lot of peeking, cropping, peeling back and adding in new layers. Small, methodical, laboured and quiet excavations. Animation and embodied installation hold and control these intentions effectively as the artists engage with architecture, archive and the body.

When people come together, isn’t there often an instinct to get to the bottom of something?

A Lock at the Mouth

Sarah Long and Kate Hynes

A Lock At The Mouth is a collaboration between Kate Hynes and Sarah Long across painting, textiles, moving image and installation.

The work explores feminine forms of communication and the mythological link between women's mouths and their vaginas.

“When it is not locked the mouth may gape open and let out unspeakable things” (The Gender Of Sound by Ann Carson). Where is the line between public and private and why does it lie there? Who patrols it and what happens when it’s crossed?

  • Sarah Long and Kate Hynes are both Irish artists living on opposite coasts. Their work explores femininity, nationhood, myth, domesticity and reproduction. Making use of auto-fictive storytelling.

    There is plenty of connective tissue here. Both drawn to similar mediums. They approach the body in different ways.

Layover

Barry Gibbons and Lauren Conway

Layover is a collaborative drawing project by Lauren Conway and Barry Gibbons which explores how prescribed photographic histories of Ireland can be presented to form an accepted narrative of global connections and complicities. Referencing archival photographs of Shannon Airport, one of the early showcases for Ireland’s projection of an international image, the animated loops and drawings in Layover represent a shift from the stasis of the printed image to the transient and ephemeral disorientation of video and live social media feeds. The history of Shannon Airport encompasses a range of disparate visual documentation including early aviation in Ireland, foreign and domestic military aircraft, and the invention of duty-free shopping.

Halftone reprography enables imagery which oscillates between states of dissolution and resolution based on the proximity of the viewer. In Layover, improvisations on the halftone are brought about through introducing moving image elements by way of experimental animation processes. Taking a single cropped image as a starting frame, subsequent frames are stacked and layered creating a cyclical loop between coherent and incoherent visual states. The resulting layering and diffusion within the animated works touch upon themes of distortion and obfuscation as it plays out in the digital world.  

  • Lauren Conway and Barry Gibbons, both based in Dublin, began their collaboration in March 2025 following their selection through Screen Service Collision Project 2025 Open Call. Their work together has to date included drawing, printmaking, and experimental animation. Conversations which arose during the making of this project considered: dots and loops, cropping as investigation, aviation slang, physical distance with halftone, caput mortuum pigment, molecular movement, and processes of co-authorship.

Drop Ceiling 

Tara McGinn and Cillian Finnerty

Drop Ceiling engages with the architecture of STARLING's exhibition space as a way to avoid the addition of any particular 'object' to the gallery. An excavation upwards, to uncover the bodily organs of the building, the work alternately takes place in the gesture of removal of the gallery's ceiling tiles, and the distribution of sediments/residues that echo the form of ectoplasm or 'angel hair' (materials supposedly present in the wake of UFO appearances or supernatural events).

  • Tara McGinn and Cillian Finnerty are artists based between Ireland and the UK: Belfast and Co.Wexford in McGinn's case, London and Co. Mayo in Finnerty's. The practises of re-use, recontextualisation, and recombination from one form into another take place across both artists' practices; the tactile language and materiality of surfaces, particularly with private domestic objects and public space, switch registers in McGinn's works through figurative ceramics, experimental biomaterial, and textual explorations, while Finnerty draws from eclectic printed and found materials to recombine far-flung social contexts into open-ended, speculative situations.

Screen Service is a service-oriented collective supporting artists in or from Ireland. Through collaboration and flexible formats, projects are produced that prioritise experimentation, connectivity and artist-led development.

With a focus on media and interdisciplinary practice, Screen Service works with artists across all disciplines to expand the possibilities of contemporary art.

STARLING is a platform and threshold for both local and international artists and projects. Emerging out of a vacant shop in the historic medieval quarter of Limerick city, STARLING is led by artist-curators Ailbhe W. Drohan (Ireland) and Teresa Collins (Ireland / Aotearoa New Zealand).

We believe in supporting critical and thought-provoking contemporary artists and projects. Our approach to programming values non-traditional modes of exhibition making, collaborative process and community focused relationship building.

Curated by Ellen O’Connor, Bronagh Gallagher, Alex Keatinge and Olivia Normile.
Install photography by Richard Harvey
Visual design by Cian Pawle-Bates.

This project is funded by the Arts Council and in partnership with STARLING, Limerick.

Images, courtesy of the artists:

Sarah Long & Kate Hynes, A Lock At the Mouth, painting, 2025

Lauren Conway & Barry Gibbons, Layover, Video Stills from Homeplate Sequence 1, pencil on punched paper (selected frames), 2025

Tara McGinn & Cillian Finnerty, Drop Ceiling, image, 2025