Aoife Kearney

Aoife Kearney is an emerging Irish artist currently undertaking an MFA at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University, having previously completed a BSc in Cinematic Arts at Ulster University, Derry/Londonderry. Her background in filmmaking is rooted in a love of experimental documentary practices, where she explored hybrid approaches to storytelling using papercut animation and standard footage; her work has been recognised through selection for the First Time Filmmaker Sessions Volume 5 festival in 2021, alongside collaborative projects with local groups in Derry/Londonderry.

Kearney’s current practice spans sculpture and installation, exploring mythology, transformation and immediacy of impact. Inspired by Irish mythology, specifically the figure of the hare, she experiments with uncanny hybrid forms that are simultaneously animal and human, tangible and otherworldly. Influenced by contemporary practice, philosophical thought and quantum mechanics, her work stages events situated between rupture and aftermath, summoning viewers to confront instability, embodiment and shifting identities.

Madison Henry

Madison Henry is a Belfast-based artist currently undertaking an MFA at Ulster University, having previously completed a BA in Fine Art with a specialisation in painting. Her practice operates between painting and object, exploring hybrid forms through the use of found wood and constructed surfaces. By reworking discarded materials, Henry reconstructs new objects that hold a sense of space and place, where fragmented surfaces suggest partial and shifting perceptions. Working from observed environments and photographic references, she translates familiar structures into layered compositions, using repetition to continually alter and reconfigure the image. Through processes of overpainting, erasure, and accumulation, forms begin to dissolve, existing between recognition and abstraction. These works offer glimpses of fractured imagery, where surfaces act as both image and structure. Her practice extends painting beyond the flat plane, emphasising materiality, depth, and the instability of how spaces are perceived and reimagined.

Alex Plunkett

Alex is still non-binary, to their inevitable detriment. They’re also still ride or die for Astarion Baldursgatethree. But they’ll never have a handicap in a way that matters. Until American empire is radically dismantled, there is no future. We’re all dead. We’re all dead. We’re all dead. We’re all dead. We’re all dead. We’re all dead. We’re all dead. We’re all dead. We’re all dead. We’re all dead. Anyway Karlach deserved better than my power hungry ass. I’m a dreadful imaginary wife. But we had a nice dinner. So it goes. Kill everyone now, condone first degree murder, something something :) . The tyranny will only end when you acknowledge its roots. Round up rounding up the round. Divinity rots. I don’t like this world anymore.

Anna McKinstry

Anna McKinstry is a Wexford-based artist currently studying for a master’s degree at Belfast School of Art after earning an honours degree in Art from South East Technological University. Her oil paintings depict narrative and figurative scenes, exploring themes of the everyday and the interconnectedness between strangers, specifically enjoying what some may view as trivial social interactions, such as a moment of eye contact or a nod of acknowledgement.

Through photography and film, she captures these instances for further development during walks through Belfast during rush hour. Controlled by her apperception of past encounters contributing to the development of the paintings, her process continues with multiple experimental sketches and drawings of selected images that allow for the unintentional manipulation through repetition. McKinstry is interested in capturing and monumentalising these shared experiences in her paintings, allowing the viewer to acknowledge the gestures that are often overlooked.

Ronan Lunney

Ronan Lunney is an Irish-born artist living and working in Belfast. His practice engages with questions centred around identity and control through material processes that emphasise fragmentation, repetition, and order. Working primarily with found or discarded materials, he employs a process of deconstruction and reconstruction according to self-imposed systems—grid structures, repeated forms, and controlled interventions.

These actions reflect a tension between the desire for order that embrace the imperfections. The resulting forms operate as both objects and conduits, embodying a negotiation between control and instability that mirrors psychological and emotional states. The material language of the work draws on the immediacy and accessibility of everyday objects, particularly in its use of modest, often overlooked materials focusing on the symbolic capacity of these materials to act as extensions of the self.

Found materials act as containers and protective structures, becoming a metaphor for the body and its mechanisms of presentation and concealment.

Georgia Esler

Georgia Esler is a 23-year-old Irish artist currently studying the MFA course at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University, having previously been awarded a First Class Honors in her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art at Ulster University, Belfast. Her creative practice delves into dark, often uncomfortable topics, always relating to her own personal experiences; this creates a much deeper connection between herself and her work. Through the medium of acrylic paint she has previously explored topics such as absence, family past and abuse.

Her work was recognised by Artisann Gallery Belfast who held an exhibition for emerging artists, Ulster Tatler magazine where her work featured in an article and recently Póg magazine, an independent Irish magazine focusing on creatives. Georgia was also longlisted for the RDS awards. However, Georgia’ s current practice has taken a turn from painting to photography/videography inspired by surveillance, voyeurism and the act of watching and being watched. Influenced by her own feelings of anxiety around being watched, this new work is meant to have people feel the way she has felt in the past, uncomfortable, alone and paranoid.

Jonathan Pratt

Jonathan Pratt is a Northern Irish lens-based artist and curator. His practice explores the materiality and limitations of digital systems through compression and glitch, focusing on the anomalies and artefacts that develop within them. Working across immersive installation and screen-based media, Pratt investigates how digital processes can be unified with the tangible world, inviting audiences to reconsider the tenuous boundaries between virtual and physical experience.

Through foregrounding error and disruption, his work challenges traditional notions of technological efficiency, instead framing malfunction as expressive aesthetic. With a playful yet critical approach, Pratt repositions the digital imperfection as sites of conceptual potential as well as visual intrigue. In his current work he is exploring photography beyond its aesthetic function, considering it as a system of capture, translation and mediation within digital cultures.

Surbhi

Surbhi is an emerging artist from India, currently undertaking an MFA at Ulster University in Belfast. She has completed her BFA and Diploma in Computer Graphics from India. Whose practice explores self-discovery, the fluidity of identity, and the cyclical nature of existence.Using painting as her primary medium, she often works with the form of the circle, seeing it as a symbol of continuity, repetition, and transformation. She is interested in the quiet, often unnoticed moments of everyday life. Her practice is guided by personal experiences and everyday observations, which she develops into thoughtful and intuitive compositions allowing each piece to develop freely rather than following a fixed plan. She engages with philosophical ideas of selfhood and becoming. Each piece develops over time, reflecting an ongoing thought process.Through her work, Surbhi encourages viewers to reflect on their own sense of self and the idea that identity is always in the process of becoming. She hopes her work creates a moment of pause for the viewer.

Tanya Troughton

Tanya Troughton’s practice explores architectural space and the psychology of perception through photography and cyanotype. Focusing on abandoned environments, she examines how spaces hold traces of time while remaining open to interpretation, existing between presence and absence. Her work investigates the illusion of photography—what is seen, and what lies beyond the image—inviting the viewer to engage with what is implied or imagined.

Central to her practice is the creation of three-dimensional photographic works, formed through layered cyanotype images on glass. Mounted in chronological sequence, each layer introduces subtle variations, producing fragmented and fluid experiences of time. The transparency of glass allows images to overlap and obscure one another, generating both depth and uncertainty.

Through these sculptural forms, Troughton explores the gaps between images, where viewers actively construct meaning. Her work presents time and space as ephemeral sensations, shaped through movement, memory, and perception.

BENCOLE

BENCOLE is a Belfast based visual artist exploring the boundaries between expanded painting and installation. With a BA in drawing and painting he is currently studying MFA where his work engages ideas of life and death, the conscious and subconscious, and the unknown spaces in between. His practice is rooted in materiality and develops through a playful, sculptural process using suspended semi-transparent fabrics.

Colour plays an important role in BENCOLE’s practice, connecting him to memory. Working with fabric dyes and spray paint, he creates layered surfaces that blend marks of both control and chance.

BENCOLE’s work exists with both an exterior and interior, forming immersive, atmospheric spaces that invite the viewer to become submerged within them. 

Upon graduating, he received the CCA Graduate Support Award and has exhibited in shows including Emergence XI (QSS, 2026) and the Royal Arcade Academy Show (2025).

Alex Sheridan

Over, under, or through? With social, textile, and mixed media, Alex Sheridan builds facsimiles of us: examining how we reciprocally define ourselves with our environment. Methodologies are colloquial and classical–prints, gauze weaving, written ink on fabric–speaking to the part of you that has always known it is capable of building, making more.

The focus is defined by agency. Marks are made by wearing and wearing and mending a pair of jeans. Selves are altered by faith and teaching and medicine.

Alex is Australian, or Irish now. She has a Liberal Arts degree from Queen’s University Belfast focussed in History, and writes prolifically. You can find her in the MFA studios at the Belfast School of Art, or on Instagram @middleof_june

Janice Cherry

‘Ceremony to Remember a Lost Loved One’ marks Janice Cherry’s first performance. She blends intuitive elements and both pagan and Christian traditions in an imagined ritual which features her unique ceramics alongside personal items of significant sentimental value. This intimate work explores ideas of personal identity, grief, emotional turmoil, truth and authenticity. Ideas of the human body on a physical level and its relationship to coping and resilience are implied. The emphasis is on gratitude for the existence of the loved one, the impact of loss and the pain of leaving loved ones behind. The remnants of the performance remain throughout the duration of the exhibition as a testimony to the action of remembering. Photographs and quiet individual personal participation are welcome during the performance. Viewers are reminded that the ceremony remembers a real individual who has left this life and as such may cause unintentional upset to some.