Join us for a conversation between visual artists Laura Fitzgerald, Geraldine O’Neill, filmmaker Pat Murphy; chaired by the writer and visual artist Sara Baume, as they discuss a lifetime of making art and navigating life as an artist across countries, cities and country-sides.

Sara Baume
Sara Baume was born in Lancashire and grew up in County Cork, Ireland. She studied fine art and creative writing, and her fiction and criticism have been published in anthologies, newspapers and journals such as the Irish Times, the Guardian, the Stinging Fly and Granta magazine. She has won the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, an Irish Book Award for Best Newcomer, the Kate O’Brien Award, the E.M Forster Award and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.

Her debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. A Line Made by Walking, her second novel, was shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize and her first work of non-fiction, handiwork, was shortlisted for the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her third and most recent novel, Seven Steeples, was published in 2022 and subsequently shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. In 2023 she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She is based in West Cork where she works also as a visual artist.

Laura Fitzgerald
Laura is a visual artist working in drawing, painting, installation, video, animation, text and audio. She is graduate of both the National College of Art & Design, Dublin and Royal College of Art, London. She received a Markievicz Award in 2024 and a Golden Fleece award in 2020. Recent exhibitions include: Labour of Love, The Glucksman Gallery; Staying with the trouble, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Car Wheels Going Around, with Lorna Corrigan at KCAT Art Centre.

She has completed residencies at the Institute for Studio & Curatorial Studios (ISCP), New York; Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and more recently at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, in Omaha, Nebraska, USA in 2023.

Her writings have been published by Paper Visual Art (PVA) Journal, Bog Bodies Press and Onomatopee (NL). She teaches art part-time at TUS, Limerick School of Art & Design and is currently a board director for EVA International.

Laura’s solo exhibition The Gecker Ones, a new body of work in response to the work of filmmaker and poet Flora Kerrigan, is on view at Lismore Castle until 10th August 2025.

Pat Murphy
Pat Murphy is a film maker who works across a range of practices. Her art studies began at the Ulster College of Art and Design and continued at Hornsey College of Art where she graduated in Fine Art. She received an MA in Film and Television from the Royal College and won a scholarship to attend the Whitney Museum Independent Study Programme in New York.

She has participated in a number of exhibitions including P(ages) at City Gallery Limerick, “The Muybridge Solo” at Vehicule Art, in Montreal and Film As Film at the Hayward Gallery in London. In 1992, she made a film installation for the Strokestown Famine Museum in County Roscommon. In association with the IFI, Pat curated a number of film programmes to accompany From Beyond the Pale (1994) and The Event Horizon (1997) at IMMA.

Maeve, her first feature for cinema was screened in competition at a number of international festivals including Venice and won the Best Irish Film Award in Cork 1981. Anne Devlin, her second feature was completed in 1983. Both films were distributed internationally and broadcast on television. Nora, starring Ewan McGregor and Susan Lynch, was an international co-production Awards include the First Prize at the Trieste Film Festival, Best Script at the Abruzzo Festival and the UIP Director’s award in 2000. Documentaries include Sean MacBride Remembers and This is us we’re talking about….

A founder Board Member of FILM BASE and the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland. Pat is also a member of Aosdána. Over the past three years she has been Associate Arts Professor on the Graduate Film Program at NYU Tisch Asia in Singapore. In July 2011, the IFI presented a retrospective of her work.

Geraldine O’Neill
Geraldine O’Neill (b1971) is one of Ireland’s most recognisable artists. She is a member of the RHA since (2013) Aosdána (2015) and the Artists Collective Shell/ter (S/TAC) which she co-founded in 2020. A graduate of NCAD, she completed her MFA in 2008. She has exhibited extensively in Ireland and abroad.

Recent solo and group exhibitions include Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Curated by Hettie Judah in collaboration with Hayward Gallery, VISUAL Carlow (2025), Magic and Loss, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2024), In a Dream in a Happy House, with the S/TAC collective, Limerick City Gallery of Art (2024), The Ties That Bind, with the S/TAC collective, GOMA Waterford (2024),The Sunset Belongs To You, a socially engaged portrait project with Mick O’Dea, The Model, Sligo, (2023-2024), The Ladder is always there, S/TAC with 10 emerging artists, Draíocht Arts Centre. (2023-2024), Shelter, with the S/TAC collective, The Print Gallery, National Gallery of Ireland (2023), It Took a Century, women artists and the RHA, The National Gallery of Ireland (2023), Portrait Lab, The Model Sligo (2022-23), Solastalgia, Solo exhibition, Kevin Kavanagh, (2022), Meat and Potatoes, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2022), Golden Fleece Award 21 Years, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan (2022), Ground_Zero_ 360, Museum of Biblical Art, Dallas, USA (2021), New Perspectives, National Gallery of Ireland (2021).

O’Neill has given many guest lectures and is an external examiner with Atlantic Technological University, Sligo. O’Neill’s work is collected by the country’s leading cultural institutions including The National Gallery of Ireland, Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Model, Sligo, Crawford Gallery, Cork, OPW, The Arts Council and the European Central Bank. Geraldine O’Neill has long responded to the increasing confrontation with human engagement and relationship with the ecosystem, in particular the Anthropocene whose traces are now embedded within the geological layers of the Earth’s structure. She-makes what she calls “Slow Art” mostly painting but sometimes expanded paint, sculpture and print using traditional materials that is counter cultural to this fast paced disposable world that we now inhabit.