about us

Throughout her career Elaine Garde has worked primarily on environmental related art projects with a focus on education. Her body of work is broad as are her mediums and she has been part of many creative campaigning projects with an emphasis on justice and change. Her work has included a Labyrinth at Cork’s Crawford Gallery for Capital of Culture 2005, minting of the Sovereign Earth Bond Coin in 2011 and Portal map to Abundance launched at Dublin Culture Night 2012. She has had some very successful solo shows in Cork’s Tigh Fili and was awarded the title of ‘Working Class Hero’ for Cork in 2013.

She attended a 10 day Erasmus programme in Amsterdam on ‘The Art of Change-making in 2014. She currently delivers biodiversity workshops through the Heritage Council and has spent many of her recent years developing the award winning Eco project ‘Future Orchard Cork’

Garry has been making musical sculptures and musical instruments and installations for private commissions, schools, children’s museums, public parks, private homes, and disability resource centers in Australia, Ireland and the US. He has also, since 1975, been a musician and composer for solo, small ensemble and orchestral performances and influenced by an eclectic range of sources, including Irish, jazz, and classical. He has performed his work in three continents. A major motivation of Garry’s life has been to facilitate music-making for people who don’t normally have access to it, such as those with physical and intellectual disabilities, are economically disadvantaged, in eldercare homes, and prisons, or those who believe they have no musical ability. He is passionate about bringing music-making installations into public parks and schools and other places of everyday life, where people can interact with others musically and communicate through a different language.

Mary P O Connor studied at the Crawford College of Art Cork, the Royal College of Art London & The San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited widely in Europe and the USA and her work is held in many private and public collections. She has received numerous awards both for Art & Photography including from GPA ( Guinness Peat Aviation), Elizabeth T Greenshields, Madame Tussauds, RHA ( Royal Hibernian Academy) & RA ( Royal Academy)

Mary is represented by Treadwells Gallery in Vienna & Berlin and Pyms Gallery in London. Marys work has always been concerned with social and political themes and pushing her audience to react. In 2007 she became a Buddhist nun and her work has gradually become more reflective, concerned more with inner emotions, change making and sense of place within the broader human family. Her spiritual practice feeds into her artistic practice & visa versa

Mary Co founded Shandon Studios together with Jess Sweetnam as a community engaged creative hub in Corks historic Shandon area. 

Elida Maiques is an Ireland-based artist with roots in Guatemala and Spain. Her work, often in collaboration with different groups, has been exhibited in museums and art centres like CentroCentro Cibeles (Madrid, Spain), IVAM (Valencian Museum of Modern Art), (València, Spain), the LAB Gallery (Dublin, Ireland), Alliance Française (Dublin, Ireland), and others. Her work has a strong line in drawing and comics and has co-edited award-winning publications with collectives Polen (Spain) and Stray Lines (Ireland) among others.

In recent years she has explored the boundaries of drawing with other disciplines such as dance and music. Since 2015 her long-term project I Am a Forest includes botanical drawings, seed-gathering, tree propagation and art/wildlife workshops with her local school and other communities. In 2021 her research focused prominently on birdsong, music anthropology and archaeology. It became a non-hierarchical forest performance by professional musicians and others. The filmed performance was made into short film I Am a Forest, in the Official Selection of the Morelia Film Festival (México), 2022.

Eleni Kolliopoulou (1980, Athens) is a mixed-media visual/ performance artist and researcher particularly interested in the intersection between performance and philosophy. Eleni was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy for her practice-based PhD research at Ulster University (Northern Ireland) in March 2020. Eleni is currently pursuing a post-doctoral fellowship hosted by Ionian University, Department of Audio-visual arts (GR) pursuing practice-based research on the embodiment of time in mixed-media installations informed by Butoh notation.

Ann Ensor’s practice explores through sculpture a dynamic materialism that flows within and through all forms of life. The work considers our need to revaluate our androcentric world to a world of shared spirituality with other milieus. Ensor has been researching soil and in particular mycelium, which is the vegetative part of a fungus. It consists of a mass of branching hyphae fibres feeding on debris underground. They have the ability to digest all forms of materials from flesh, plants, rocks, waste of all sorts, pollutants, and even radioactive material. Fungi have been around the planet long before humans and have been working at rebalancing the planet by helping to clean up human caused degradation.