EVA International and Ormston House group exhibition Bíodh Orm Anocht opens Friday, August 29

EVA and ORmston House group exhibition Bíodh Orm Anocht opens Friday, August 29. Pictured is artwork by Seán Hannan

Bíodh Orm Anocht group exhibition by Seán Hannan, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, and Kiera O’Toole opens at Ormston House with EVA International this August 29

Ormston House, in collaboration with EVA International, presents Bíodh Orm Anocht opening August 29, and running up to October 26, 2025.

Bíodh Orm Anocht, roughly translating to ‘be with me tonight’, is a group exhibition featuring new and existing artworks by four artists – Seán Hannan, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, and Kiera O’Toole – presented at Ormston House and off-site locations.

While the contributors work across media and processes, they are unified by a preoccupation with customs and practices that can broadly be described as folk knowledge. These methods and intuitive systems challenge technorational systems of thought.

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These four artists convey knowledge that transcends language and which is all the more potent because it remains unwritten and unspoken. Each artist is concerned with the metaphorical qualities of materials. They draw from disciplines outside the visual arts (including mythology, zoology, and cartography), infusing them with personal meaning. Inherent in these works is the possibility that atavistic wisdom may be sourced from the natural world.

Seán Hannan’s work explores how forgotten voices and rituals can echo into the future, both through unstable technologies and systems of collaboration. Using archival fragments from autobiographical memories referring to Irish traditions, Hannan’s artworks reflect obsolescence and poetic instability.

Received at the Graveyard is a sonic installation revolving around an evolving voice AI (artificial intelligence). At its core lies a handful of field recordings made in Ireland in the 1950s that captured the final traces of a near-extinct tradition, keening (caoineadh).

Another work featured in this exhibition is LUCK (2022), a sculpture in the form of a piseóg (pish-ohg): folk witchcraft. Mainly a phenomenon of rural Ireland, piseógs were cast as an act of malice, often using a chicken egg onto which a curse had been placed.

In contrast, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín employs materials which have traditionally been connected with healing and nourishment. Sifting stories and traces associated with site, memory, and the casting of spells, Ní Fhlaibhín creates complex but delicate sculptural scenarios.

She frequently introduces living beings into white cube environments that are typically purposed for the display of inanimate objects. While previous artworks have involved earthworms, leopard slugs, and willow trees, the family of sculptural assemblages presented here are made from chunks of mineral salt and ash wood.

The creation of these sculptures has involved the co-authorship of horses, who have licked the salt crystals into biomorphic forms. The ash tree is sacred in Irish mythology and is seen as possessing talismanic power. The equine kingdom is also referred to in the cosmological work of Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh. His Speculative massage tools for a family of Donkeys (2022) incorporates