Lily O’Shea is a visual artist based in Cork, working across sculpture, drawing and text. Her practice weaves together political questions surrounding labour, time, and home. Through woodwork, Lily develops quasi-sculptural structures that evolve into expansive installations, integrating video, technical drawings, and reflective texts.

Her current work is concerned with the materiality of precarity and loneliness in the midst’s of  an ongoing housing crisis that erodes any sense of rootedness. She is interested in exploring how this crisis manifests not only in the physical absence of space, but also in the psychological toll it takes – producing a fragmented, unsettled way of life where connection becomes difficult and time feels fractured. Her installations give form to this ambiguity; sculptures that lean, fragment, or remain unfinished speak to suspended time and unstable ground.

Lily’s work looks not only towards loss, but also gestures toward the possibility of reimagining space and home—away from notions of ownership and profit margins, and toward shared, and relational forms of dwelling. It centres on the question: What does it mean to have hope in a time that feels devoid of it? Her research approaches hope not as a political tool but as a paradigm shift—an openness to alternative ways of thinking, relating, and enduring amid ongoing crisis.