Joseph Heffernan is a Cork-based visual artist, primarily a painter but also working in sculpture and assemblage. His work explores the ephemeral nature of memory, identity and fantasy and how these things are intertwined to form augmented fictions. It can best be understood as a mapping of interior mental spaces as well as an attempt to reconcile the real exterior world with those spaces. The work takes the philosopher Gaston Bachelardʼs seminal text ‘The Poetics of Space’ as a model through which to explore the ability of objects to act as totems of personal meaning. In 2023, he received an individual artist bursary from Cork City Council and presented a solo show “A Thousand Years” in Studio 12 Gallery, Backwater Artist Studio. He has exhibited extensively, including in the Lavit Gallery, RUA RED and RHA.

This residency will offer Joseph the opportunity to consolidate a new body of work in a new context and develop further solo exhibition opportunities, at a critical juncture in his career.

Triskel Sample Project Space is a new partnership between Triskel and Sample-Studios that will provide a visual arts project space for artists, especially emerging and mid-career artists, to test ideas and to develop new work that can be seen by the public. This offers tangible career development and audience engagement opportunities to artists on their ‘home turf’ where they have a safe space to develop new ideas, within which risk-taking is possible.

See more »