Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s art explores anxieties of the present while acknowledging the past …
Image; Ailbhe Ní Bhriain at the exhibition opening of The Dream Pool Intervals at Hugh Lane Gallery © Naoise Culhane Photography 2025.
Who or what was instrumental to your artistic journey?
My parents. They gave me vast amounts of freedom growing up. They just trusted us to figure things out. When I decided I wanted to go to art college, it was in my final year of school. This felt like a terrifying thing because I had no portfolio, looming Leaving Certificate, and making-skills much shabbier than my academic ones. But my parents let me take two months off school, take over the kitchen table and get to work. I stopped for the odd break and trip to Galway for materials, but otherwise I just worked for weeks on end. The work I made was nothing to shout about, but I was never happier.
“This basic permission to follow your instincts and to risk failure is so fundamental to making a piece of art. And it’s something I was given in spades growing up.”
How do you describe your artworks?
I work across collage, tapestry, print, installation, film and CGI. So, there are lots of material shifts and crossovers. The work repeatedly returns to themes of industrial and imperial legacies, but uses a heightened and dreamlike visual language. For me, tilting the imagery toward the surreal is a way of side-stepping the familiar takes and false binaries attached to these burdened subjects. Instead, I want to draw them into a territory that’s more uncertain and unnerving. The work always tries to pull the viewer into a multi-layered and disorienting world where everything is connected, but fixed narratives no longer hold.
What was the inspiration behind your new body of work?
The title of the show is “The Dream Pool Intervals.” This is a reference to a book called The Dream Pool Essays that was first published in 1088, written by a Chinese polymath called Shen Kuo. It covers a huge range of subjects, but among them is what is considered to be the first recorded observation of climate change. My work is in no way an illustration of this text; it’s more about using this nugget from the ancient past to connect to the contemporary moment, and in the process reconsider points of familiar history. It’s about trying to tune into the sheer existential weirdness we face at the moment as we grapple with climate disaster.
What is the symbolism of these works?
The exhibition is anchored by five monumental Jacquard tapestries which share three main strands of imagery, all of which are overlaid and combined through collage. Most immediately striking is the series of archival photographic portraits. These are mostly Victorian era images depicting portraits of upper and middle class western families. They date from the height of the industrial and imperial projects, and are in many ways coded with the symbolism of these ideologies.
The second visual strand focuses on contemporary imagery of destroyed buildings: the tragically familiar backdrop of architecture destroyed by war and climate disaster. For me, these scenes of destruction symbolise the ongoing legacy of the forces of industrialisation and colonialism – forces that shaped and continue to shape the world we know today.
The third visual strand in the tapestries features imagery of caves and tunnels. These underground spaces symbolise a much more ancient register of time: the deep-time of geology that immediately shrinks all notions of human progress and dominance. The caves also link to ideas of the underworld – myths and narratives used across so many cultures to frame the fear of death and the unknown.
“We find ourselves profoundly confronting the unknown again, both despite and because of the speed of progress. So, we return to these ancient underworld-fears.”
How and where do you work?
I work between my kitchen table and my studio with Backwater Artists Group in Wandesford Quay in Cork. But I’ve always been able to work on the fly and with any amount of distraction around me. It’s an accidental skill that has saved me over the years as I juggled jobs and small children, plus the usual pressures on time. There’s actually a kind of porousness that I really enjoy between making art and getting on with the chaos of ordinary life.
I’ve never done an artist’s residency and suspect that a totally uninterrupted spell might just send me into shock. That said, I do travel a lot for aspects of production, where for weeks I think about nothing but how to achieve the precise shade of burnt orange in a tapestry, or how to generate the perfect amplitude in a CGI water ripple. The rest of the time, my family patiently navigates the bits of in-progress art scattered across our home!
Need to know: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s “The Dream Pool Intervals” curated by Head of Exhibitions Michael Dempsey runs at Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin until September 28. Admission is free. www.hughlane.ie
Images; installation view Hugh Lane Gallery, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain: The Dream Pool Intervals. Image © Hugh Lane Gallery, 2025.
