As part of her residency, Kate has launched her exhibition in TRISKEL SAMPLE Project Space entitled An Absence, An Edge. Join Kate in Triskel on 24 May at 12pm where she will be in conversation with Miguel Amado, Director of Sirius Arts Centre, to discuss the concepts, processes, and material investigations that have informed her latest solo exhibition.
Kate McElroy is a Cork-based artist whose practice spans across media, presenting a dynamic constellation of work including expanded photography, moving image, sound, spoken word and sculptural installation. The work questions the altering environment and our place within it. Kate graduated with a First Class Honours Master’s Degree in Art and Process, MTU Crawford, 2021. Since graduating she has exhibited in over 20 national and international exhibitions and co-founded the artist collective inter_site. Recent exhibitions and residencies include GlogauAIR, Berlin, 2024, Error: /undefined, Pallas Projects, Dublin, and Oscillation: An Altering Rhythm, Counting House, Cork City, 2023. Upcoming included Restructuring Elements, The Firkin Crane, January 2025, Vertigo,Cork County Council Building, February, 2025, Liquid Urbanism, The Lab Gallery, Dublin, March 2025 and an artist residency at Correlación Contemporánea, Iquitos, Peru, September 2025. Kate is supported by Arts Council Agility and Project Awards and a Cork City Council Artist Bursary.
Existing in a space between construction and destruction, her work highlights a moment of precarity. McElroy points to the tension between the economic need for constant growth and the incipient destruction of our natural environment and human experience. Through correlating different media that spans across places and times she questions the interlinked nature of our current conjuncture. She draws largely from the environment, taking elements of place, dismantling and reconstructing, to create new alternative areas of contemplation. She is interested in creating areas of activation, where elements move, breathe, and speak encompassing a space for altered ways of viewing and being in the world through a dynamic use of material and media.
McElroy’s practice merges a sense of past, present and possible future(s). She is interested in the process of change itself and how by seeing the world as a constant state of transformation, we are given opportunities to interrupt it. A sense of flux is contrasted by a sense of slow observation. She is interested in the intermingling forces that affect our environments and actions.
The work represents elements on the edge of abstraction, stretching the usual parameters of perception. It highlights a betweenness, where definitive boundaries dissolve. She creates critical and ambiguous environments, opening a threshold space to interrupt structures and reconfigure.
This residency and exhibition will coincide with Ireland’s Overshoot Day, a day that marks when the Earth’s biological resources—if everyone lived as we do in Ireland—would be exhausted for the year. In 2024, this day fell on May 2, and in 2023, it was April 21. This day highlights the unsustainability of the way we are living under our current systems and shows the urgency of why we need to reorient our ways of relating to the environment. This residency and exhibition at TRISKEL SAMPLE Project Space will allow time to create work that responds with urgency to the interlinked cultural and environmental crises.
Kate worked previously as the Public Engagement Artist at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, her role largely focused on bridging the gap between the artwork and the community. She advocates using art as a tool for fostering communication and meaningful exchange. This residency will enable her to develop public discourse about the work. Kate McElroy currently facilitates a reading group in Cork and for the 4 weeks of residency, she will run a weekly reading group with Sample-Studios’ members to explore texts that influenced the work.
