Announcing Research Associates 2023

Rachel Botha is a curator, researcher and arts administrator. Her expanded curatorial practice responds to local contexts and investigates how people perceive their social framework. She believes that the responsibilities of a curator are twofold; a facilitator for the artist and a mediator for the viewing audience.

Rachel holds a BA in History of Art & Architecture from Trinity College Dublin, and a MA in Visual
Culture & Critical Studies from Technological University Dublin. She has previously worked in arts organisations such as Poetry Ireland and Fire Station Artists’ Studios, as well as at the Venice Biennale and Galería Alarcón Criado, Seville. I was the Provost’s Curatorial Fellow at The Douglas Hyde, Trinity College Dublin, a co-director of Catalyst Arts, Belfast, and the Emerging Curator in Residence at the Kilkenny Arts Office. This year she was appointed the Emerging Editor of Bloomers Magazine, and the Early Career Curator in Residence at the Regional Cultural Centre and Glebe House & Gallery in Donegal.

Images: Headshot photo credit Dónal Talbot
Genuinely Seeking is a compendium of visual art and writing from Bridget O'Gorman, Fiona Reilly, Cara Farnan, Lily O’Shea and Radical Institute. Edited by Rachel Botha, published by Bloomers.

Beulah Ezeugo is an Igbo curator and researcher. Her work centres on imaging Black futures by engagement with communities, cultural memories, and myths. Her practice is informed by a Bachelor in Social Science from University College Dublin and an MLitt in Curatorial Practice from Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow. She is a committee member at Market Gallery, Glasgow, and one half of the collective Éireann and I Archive, a black migrant memory project. Currently, she is finding out about how national identities are being built and sustained in both Nigerian and Irish post-colonial contexts.

eireannandiarchive.com | @b3333333ulah

Image: let it be like we did not see, 2022, digital collage.

Marie Farrington’s practice articulates intersections between landscape, visibility and histories of display, exploring how matter is coded and transformed over time. She employs casting as a sculptural process to construct material archives that capture residual aspects of sites, approaching surfaces as semi-photographic indexes. By translating geological activities (such as folding, layering and stacking) into methods of making her work, her practice alludes to the studio as a geological site bound to processes of accrual and erasure. The resulting works operate as relics in reverse.

mariefarrington.com | @mariefarrington

Image: Marie Farrington, Settings, 2019.
Cast plaster, Indian ink, muslin, clear varnish. 210 x 168 x 3cm: 210 x 168 x 3cm.
Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

Hattie Godfrey is an artist and researcher whose work combines performance, installation, drawing, writing and collaborative practices to create works that consider her own and society’s increasingly complicated relationship with concepts of illness, care, and convalescence. Hattie’s work has been seen in galleries and festivals across the UK, including the McManus Art Gallery in Dundee, Belfast International Festival of Performance Art and the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast and Vitrine Gallery in London. Hattie recently had her debut solo show ‘inmate’ at Platform Arts Belfast and was selected to make new work in response to the MacLennan Archive at DJCAD. She is a studio holder at Flax Art Studios in Belfast and BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating with first class honours in 2018. She later graduated from the MSc in Psychological Science at Queen’s University Belfast in 2020, receiving distinction.

hattiegodfrey.com | @hattiegodfrey

Lucy Grubb is an artist based in Coventry, UK. She completed her MFA at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford in 2022. Her current thoughts are interested in using shifting, and gesture as compositional devices where potentialities are imagined. Through language and architecture works combine to reconsider modes of production as a rehearsal space where thoughts slip, slide, refuse, relate and hold. In July 2022 she was a graduate researcher with Paul Mellon Centre x Yale School of Art where she organised, COMMON-NOTE(S) - an experimental ground for unpublished thinking and writing. She has previously published in Art Review Oxford, and Must Use Critical Knowledge (M.U.C.K).

lucymaria883.wixsite.com/lucygrubb | @lxcymgx