Artists Talk
with Lucy Sheridan & Eleanor McCaughey
Saturday, 28 February 2026
2pm
Free Event - No Booking Required
For this informal event, Eleanor and Lucy discuss the background and context of their joint exhibition, Silent Parlours as well as talking through some of the wider themes within their respective practices.
Silent Parlours is the third collaborative presentation by Eleanor McCaughey and Lucy Sheridan. Central to the work is the association between femininity and domestic space, with inherited objects such as ceramics, textiles, furniture, understood as carriers of cultural memory and gendered expectation. This inquiry is complicated by Ireland’s housing crisis, raising questions of precarity, inheritance, belonging, and the instability of home, themes explored in Sheridan’s installation, including a commissioned textile work by Emma Sheridan that signifies intergenerational exchange and support. McCaughey’s installation responds to the widespread eviction of artists from studio spaces due to redevelopment, foregrounding the value of artistic labour and the studio as a vital site of reflection, experimentation, and making, functioning like the domestic interior, as a contemporary “silent parlour.”
Find out more: Silent Parlours
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Dublin, Ireland, Eleanor McCaughey studied at TU, Dublin. Selected exhibitions include ‘When you open your door to a mountain’ Solo 2025, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. A sea change into something rich and strange, 2024, RHA, Whispers of rhythm balance on my hands, Draíocht, 2024, Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, The Complex, 2023, Bones in the attic, Hugh Lane Gallery,2022, Super Market Art Fair, Stockholm, 2021, Vignettes, Richard Heller Gallery, LA USA, 2019 and Sytonic State, Tulca, Galway, 2018
Eleanor McCaughey is a recipient of the Fingal County Council Bursary 2019-24, Arts Council Ireland Bursary Award 2019-2023, Culture Ireland 23, Fingal CoCo, RHA Residency 2022, The Temple Bar Project Award 2021, and the Next Generation Award 2018. Her work is represented at the OPW, Arts Council Ireland, and private collections internationally. Eleanor is represented by Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.
Lucy Sheridan is a visual artist based in Kildare with a studio in Talbot Studios, Dublin. Recent exhibits include; Behind the Curtain for Artworks 2024, VISUAL Carlow; Somewhat Damaged, Red Couch Gallery, 2024; Matters of Table (group), Gorey School of Art, 2023; Portals (group), Luan Gallery, Athlone, 2023; Pay no Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain, Complex Gallery, 2022; Crucible (group), Thameside gallery, London, 2022; Oddly Accurate Things, 126 Galway, 2019. Lucy participated in Peripheries POST, Gorey School of Art in 2022/2023 and MASS Correspondence Course 2020/2022. Lucy graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design in 2006
Lucy Sheridan is a recipient of the Artworks Prize at Visual Carlow 2024, Kildare County Council Arts Act award 2022 - 2024, Arts Council Agility Awards 2022 & 2023, and the Dún Laoghaire‑Rathdown Emerging Artist Award 2022. Her residencies include the Leitrim Sculpture Centre 2024, Cill Rialaig 2014, 2017, 2021 & 2022, and SIM in Reykjavik 2010. Sheridan's work is held in OPW, as well as in private collections in Dublin, Hong Kong, and London and paintings have been published in Poetry Ireland 2022.
