Cuimhne agus Séadchomhartha | Memory and Monument

Image of folded and intertwined jade fabric on a grey background
Irish artist Richard Malone presents an ambitious site-specific installation alongside a curated selection of contemporary visual art, craft, and photography. Installed across the Justus Lipsius Atrium, the Europa Building, and adjoining corridors and rooms, the exhibition unfolds as a layered environment of making, memory, and material expression.

Working with artists from across the island of Ireland, north and south, the project brings together a range of practices in dialogue, reflecting a shared creative space shaped through collaboration and exchange.

At its centre, Cuimhne agus Séadchomhartha (Memory and Monument) draws on the spaces where people gather - the market, the square, the theatre, the tent, the home - places that are temporary yet essential, shaped by use, movement, and shared experience. These references become a way of thinking about how communities form and how culture is made visible over time.

Fabric runs throughout the work as a unifying material; a surface that holds traces of labour, identity, and exchange. It speaks to shared histories of making, where textile traditions connect personal experience with wider cultural and historical narratives.

Throughout the installation and accompanying works, stitch, pattern, and textile-based practices highlight both Irish craft traditions and their connections across cultures through trade, movement, and making; methods of making that are consistently overlooked as valuable and vital to collective and artistic histories. In this way, the exhibition reflects a cultural landscape shaped through shared knowledge, evolving practice, and ongoing exchange.

At its heart, the work presents memory not as something fixed, but as something continually made - through material, through place, and through people creating together.