Ultraviolet Art Talks

Closing Season 18 a wonderful, super positive chat with artist Àjàó Babátúndé Lawal in 2024. Always curious about what's is like to be inside an artist's studio? Watch full interview here.

Àjàó is a Nigerian-born Irish artist whose work is elementally about his African heritage and the influence of his adoptive home country, Ireland.

After exploring several career paths, including business, social care, and nursing, Ajao ultimately pursued his passion for art education with the encouragement of newly made friends and loved ones.

Àjàó’s body of work reflects a diverse range of themes. His painting explores various aspects of life as the author has experienced them and as they still exist in the modern world. These themes encompass ordinary daily events, history, personal experiences, and imagination.

Àjàó’s art serves as a platform for celebrating the vibrant African culture and the inherent beauty it encompasses. It is an artistic expression and a narrative of his African heritage, life, and traditions.

Àjàó utilises his art to convey hope and inspiration to families worldwide. Ajao’s art is deeply rooted in the life experiences of actual black individuals. Themes of love, hope, nature, culture, rituals, traditions, courage, humility, and serenity characterise his work.

Àjàó’s artistic portfolio encompasses a diverse range of subjects, such as figurative art, portraiture, nature, abstract art, and more. Ajao’s unquenchable passion is to preserve and promote African culture, while also advocating for equal representation for aspiring artists in our diverse and multicultural society.

Àjàó’s work has been featured in several group exhibitions over the past few years such as at Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in March 2024 as part of the 2023 RDS Visual Art Awards.

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For more information, follow Àjàó on Instagram @skenkious_art
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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to Artist and Curator Sharon Murphy in her studio in 2024. Curious about what is like inside an artist studio? Watch full episode here!

Sharon Murphy is a visual artist and curator based between Dublin and Paris whose practice encompasses photography, video and installation. Drawing on a background in theatre and informed by psychoanalysis and magic realism, her work provokes viewers to question what they are seeing, bringing their own histories and narratives to ‘complete’ the meaning of the image. Balancing the theoretical and the experiential (including that of the viewer), Murphy is especially drawn to the inherent binary nature of photography - the tensions of the medium between its real/indexical nature and its unreal/constructed nature. The photograph is simultaneously both record/truth and constructed/staged subject to multiple interpretations, perceptions and distortions by both maker and viewer.

Murphy investigates the boundaries between real and fictive spaces within the pictorial frame: concentrating on recurring motifs of theatre curtains; outdoor carousels; circus tents; performative sites; city parks; and empty stages. These scenes become the point of departure for a wider exploration of the tension between hidden and revealed, negative and positive, illusion and disillusion, the uncanny and the unremarkable.

Recent exhibitions: Photo Museum Ireland, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, GOMA, Waterford, Limerick City Gallery, Draíocht, National Gallery of Ireland, RHA, Golden Thread Gallery Belfast, Halftone, PhotoIreland, Loop Festival, Barcelona.

Current exhibitions 2025/26: Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (solo), University Gallery UMAss Boston.

Murphy is a co-founding member of Shell/Ter Artist Collective (S/TAC). Her work is held is in private + public collections. She works between Dublin and Paris.

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For more information, follow Sharon Murphy on Instagram @sharon_murphy_atelier @sharon_murphy_curator
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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Niamh McCann at her studio (Temple Bar Gallery and Studios)I n 2024. Always curious about what is like to be inside an artist studio? Watch full Instagram episode here.

Niamh McCann’s work is a considered, individual voice in contemporary Irish art; effortlessly correlating strands of three-dimensional work, painting/drawing and installation. This in itself is unpredictable and frequently humorous, as evidenced in the playful use of appropriated political figuration in her body of work, Furtive Tears. Layering and re-coding the given image, figure or cultural trope, a quasi-deified equilibrium is achieved when juxtaposed with globalised cultural imagery.

McCann is recipient of the Norman Houston Commission Award, Washington DC and RHA Stephen McKenna Studio Fellowship. Commissions include Bile Buadha a large scale outdoors sculptural work at Termini Complex, Sandyford and PAVILION/MOTHER’S LAMENT an outdoors sculptural work at National Museum of Ireland, Museum of Country Life. In partnership with Logan Sisley and National Museum of Ireland, McCann co-curated the exhibition Tableaux Vivants at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane looking at collection artworks as totemic messengers. The exhibition was centered around a series of McCann’s work acquired by the Hugh Lane.

Artist residencies include Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris, Fire Station Studio Production Residency, Dublin, Penthouse Artist Residency, Brussels, Cemeti Arthouse, Indonesia and HIAP residency in Helsinki, Finland.

Solo exhibitions include Hairline Crack [a dialogue] at the Rudolf-Scharpf-Galerie des Wilhelm Hack Museum, Germany, Furtive Tears at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane,La Perruque (Protest Song) at MAC Belfast and Just Left of Copernicus in Visual Carlow. Group exhibitions include: Future Perfect, Rubicon-Projects Brussels and Changing States, BOZAR, Belgium.

Niamh McCann works are currently exhibiting on the 25th Biennale of Sydney (14 March - 14 June 2026). The Biennale of Sydney is one of the leading international contemporary art events. It plays an indispensable role in Australia’s engagement with the world, and a meaningful role in the life of the nation.

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For more information, follow Niamh McCann on Instagram @niamhmccnn
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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Vanessa Jones at her studio in 2024. Always curios about what an artist studio looks like? Watch full Instagram interview here.

Born in Tennessee, Dublin-based artist Vanessa Jones received her BA in Fine Arts in 2003 from the George Washington University in Washington DC. In 2021, she completed her MFA at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin.

As a graduate, Vanessa was shortlisted for the RDS Art Prize in 2021 and received the R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award and the RDS Mason, Hayes & Curran LLP Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award. Her portraits have been shortlisted in the Zurich Portrait Prize at the National Gallery Ireland in 2020, 2021 and 2022 where her work was awarded Highly Commended in 2021.

She has her work included in Art Jakarta 2022; Mata Irlandia 2022 in the World Trade Centre, Jakarta; the OPW exhibition Person Presence Perception, Portlaoise; Páipéar at Hangtough Contemporary, Dublin; Prosopopoeia at Molesworth Gallery, Dublin; and Draíocht’s you breathe differently down here curated by Amanda Coogan, Blanchardstown. She was also the winner of the inaugural self-portrait Sequested Prize, 2021 based in London. Her work is in the OPW National Collection as well as private and corporate collections in both Ireland and abroad.

Vanessa is also one of the 2022 Next Generation Artists Awardees from the Arts Council Ireland and is currently a part-time lecturer in the Painting Department at NCAD.

For more interviews, follow Ultraviolet Art Talks on Instagram @_ultravioletarttalks_
For more information, follow Vanessa Jones on Instagram @vanessaleejones81

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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Stephen Taylor on his studio in 2024. Always wanted to know what an artist studio looks like? Watch full Instagram interview here.

Stephen Taylor is an Irish artist based in Dublin. He studied visual arts practice at IADT, and combines his work as an artist with working as part of the team at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Stephen’s paintings and drawings explore the strangeness of our optical experience, with ideas drawn from popular culture, memory, observation and imagination, cast a meticulous and mischievous eye on urban, suburban and domestic scenes that might otherwise go unnoticed.

His subjects are dogs and their walkers, urban foxes, horses, trees, buildings, plants – all given an equal non-hierarchical respect and attention. His work has been acquired by collectors including the Office of Public Works, the Beacon Hospital, the British Embassy in Dublin, and Nova UCD.

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For more information, follow Stephen Taylor on Instagram @stephentails
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