MFA Fine Art 2nd Year (Part B) Artist Talks Conor Lecture Theatre 1.15 pm – 3.15 pm. Belfast School of Art. BA-01-009
(Images clockwise: Ben Cole, Surbhi Jangra, Anna McKinstry, Jonathan Pratt, Janice Cherry)
As is now a tradition near the start of their 2nd semester, the MFA 2nd year students present their series of Artist Mini-Talks. All Welcome!
Group B: Week 2. Thursday 1st Oct Ben Cole Surbhi Jangra Anna McKinstry Janice Cherry Jonathan Pratt
The MFA Fine Art Course was founded in 1979. Over the last 40 years, more than 400 emerging artists, 23 staff and over 270 visiting artists have exerted their individual and collective influence on the shape and direction of this program of study. The course’s vision remains as radical and cutting edge as it was in 1979 – asserting networked relevancy, criticality and quality in today’s contemporary art world.
Its current final year students will introduce us to their practice as they take the MFA into the next stage of its history.
Opening on Thursday 1st October at 6pm, Arcade Studios and Gallery presents new paintings and sculptures by Dougal McKenzie and Henry Ward:
“We worked on this over the summer, talking about things like Philip Guston, Roy Oxlade, Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists, Hanna-Barbera cartoons and Wile E. Coyote. A conversation between two painters about the things that enter into our paintings: objects, images, jokes, materials, memories, influences and the work of other artists. Philip Guston’s table became a starting point for a shared investigation into what surrounds painting, what prompts it, and what happens when those things move between conversation, object and image.”
Reconstruction III (2026). Colour gliclee print, 150cm x 210cm. McIntyre & Anderson
Reconstructions: A Room for Mike Kelley is a series of collaborative works by artists Mary McIntyre (MFA 1990) & Robert Anderson (MFA 2009), made in response to live performances by the late artist Mike Kelley (1954 –2012) produced during the late 1970’s and early 1990’s.
When artists Mary McIntyre and Robert Anderson first encountered the performance works of Mike Kelley (1954 – 2012) it was through a series of small black and white photographs. Disconnected from their original context, Kelley’s performance documentation constituted a bemusing series of images, which left them intrigued.
The discovery of these photographs led McIntyre and Anderson to a growing fascination with the act of recording the ‘live event’ and how a photograph, with the primary function of faithfully documenting such an event, when divorced from context or supporting information, can take on an altogether different set of possibilities.
It is that proposition which forms the basis for their collaborative project, ‘Reconstructions: A Room for Mike Kelley’. Over a period of 10 years, McIntyre and Anderson have studied Kelley’s performance documentation and set about meticulously reconstructing the studio environments in which Kelley enacted his live works, from the basic plywood door that sits ajar, to the exact positioning of an odd collection of objects that lie strewn on the studio floor.
These objects, constructed to mimic those found in Kelley’s performance documentation, which range from the strange to the familiar, from the plausible to the bizarre, act as potential cultural signifiers that can be read as both significant and mundane.
However, in McIntyre and Anderson’s series of reconstructions, the figurative elements present in Kelley’s performance documentation, have been omitted. Without a protagonist, their possible interpretation has been left deliberately open to allow for fluid shifts in meaning, depending on their perceived status, cultural context or individual readings stemming from viewer experience.
In ‘Reconstructions: A Room for Mike Kelley’, McIntyre and Anderson present an empty stage, ready to come alive with myriad fictional histories, potential narratives and associations, made possible in the viewer’s imagination.
A Feeling in the Blood by Belfast based artist and fiddle player Susan Hughes (MFA 2021) is an exhibition across a range of media including video, sculpture and installation.
Susan has travelled across Ireland having conversations with musicians, dancers, singers, researchers and archivists gathering stories from the rich and complex world of Irish music, song and dance. This exhibition presents some of the mystery, myth, obsession and collective transcendence she has encountered along the way.
Displayed within the exhibition are a range of loaned objects from members of the public who responded to a call for artefacts and belongings which had a history relating to a personal experience of traditional Irish music over the years.
Also present is a purpose-built stage which will be activated by ad-hoc performances by visiting musicians to the Fleadh, as well as a curated programme of performances throughout the run of the exhibition.
The title ‘A Feeling in the Blood’ is sourced from an archival recording of fiddle player Néillidh Boyle from Dungloe, Co. Donegal.
“If you notice every note seems to have a sad, a crying effect. That note has to be embellished. It’s done with a slight grace note which can’t be seen with the movement of the fingers. It’s done with a feeling in the blood. It can’t, this thing can’t be written and it’s very hard to explain it on paper.” (1953)
Exhibition by Dan Shipsides (inc. Shipsides & Beggs). 14th Sep – 4th Nov. Reception Friday 18th Sep. 6-8pm (Culture Night)
How to find the gallery: https://maps.app.goo.gl/hopR7Rr8AaJukTSY7 Ulster University Art Gallery is located at the entrance to our main building, the McCracken Building (aka Block BC) on York Street.
Navigating by kaleidoscope.
Dan Shipsides (MFA 1997) – (inc. Shipsides & Beggs).
This show brings together older work which came at flux times in Shipsides’ practice. It marks developing tendencies, changes in thinking and expanding methods, for example, moving from direct ideas of rock-climbing as art to encompassing the wider collaborative worlds which circulate that experiential activity. It also marks shifts in artistic license, in becoming confident to follow the creative attention and process in more open and less controlled ways and often with humour. This led to personal insights as to how art, for artist and audience, operates with different logics which involve an unfolding through doing, and itself a kind of creative adventure without a prescribed outcome or predetermined take-away knowledge set.
All the works draw on specific contexts and subject matter in ways where elements act as motifs rather than fixed signifiers. In Zombie Line (2015) the bicycle wheel and wire become motifs which draw out ideas of mobility and boundaries across personal, political and historical trajectories, touching on the Avant-garde and the rise of militarised far right in the early 20th century.
Questions around the fidelity of language occupies a key flux, where language fails as a coda for communicating experience or reliable meaning and becomes a malleable material itself. The original ZONA Di RIFUGIO (2009) sign was found in avalanche debris in the Italian Dolomites. Unsure of its intended meaning, the sign became open with potential, especially as Shipsides and Beggs escaped a near fatal lightning strike on the highest summit. The reformulated sign perhaps acts as a form of votive as well as an invitational welcome to refuge.
Another encounter, with Charles Oakley’s small, beautiful and beguiling gouache ‘A Coast Structure’ (c1970), featuring a curious geometric shape under a full moon, led to realising the depicted form in cast concrete structures Ouroboros (2012) which act like sentinels, and conveniently, as seats.
Cultural influences range from avant-garde energies (especially that of ‘pata-physics where within ‘pata-perception’ Shipsides describes a perception infused by imagination) to prehistoric cave art, where the encounter is utterly compelling yet meaning is ultimately unknowable and mysterious.
A more recent flux, back to direct tree drawing in Belfast’s greenspaces, as a ‘kalos-eidos-scopeō’ practice of being and engagement through embodied, sustained looking and drawing, prefigures the question of what ‘knowledges or experiences are encountered through such drawings?
As this exhibition is in an institutional place of learning and knowledge acquisition, it feels important to state that for artists and audience, art knowledge and learning often operates in very different modes than more conventional subject areas. Here other knowledge also comes through doing or being with things and the transmission of it occurs in the encounter rather than primarily purely the reading of things.
Bio Exhibiting internationally, Dan Shipsides is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist based in Belfast where he is also the Course Director of the MFA Fine Art. Some of the work here comes from within the Shipsides and Beggs partnership (since 2004), an ongoing collaboration crossing over individual practices.
MFA Fine Art 2nd Year (Part A) Artist Talks Conor Lecture Theatre 1.15 pm – 3.15 pm. Belfast School of Art. BA-01-009
(Images clockwise: Alex Sheridan, Ronan Lunney, Aoife Kearney, Madison Henry)
As is now a tradition near the start of their 2nd semester, the MFA 2nd year students present their series of Artist Mini-Talks. All Welcome!
Group A: Week 1. Thursday 24th Sep
Alex Sheridan Ronan Lunney Aoife Kearney Madison Henry
The MFA Fine Art Course was founded in 1979. Over the last 40 years, more than 400 emerging artists, 23 staff and over 270 visiting artists have exerted their individual and collective influence on the shape and direction of this program of study. The course’s vision remains as radical and cutting edge as it was in 1979 – asserting networked relevancy, criticality and quality in today’s contemporary art world.
Its current final year students will introduce us to their practice as they take the MFA into the next stage of its history.
Opening: – Thursday 30th July (6-9pm). Top Floor of the Blackstaff Mill, 59 Springfield Road, Belfast, BT12 7AD.
Includes works in painting, photography, sculpture/installation & video.
Artists:
Emma Quin Kyle Ó Léanacháin Emma Brown Caroline Murphy Doire Mullen Áine Crawford Sonnie Winter Robáird Doherty Alice Gamble Jodie Morrow Michael Flavin Kerry Whelan Mason Shevlin Amy Sherry Melanie Donnelly Erin Graham Charlotte Willis Áine Hill Michael Winchester Casie Bonner Donnelly
The show is a group exhibition of works on response to the show title/theme of ‘Take Take Take’
Sponsors include: Inspiring Belfast Bull House Brewery
Show Opening: 30/07/26 (6-9pm) Run time: 01/08/26 – 11/08/26 (11-4pm)
In additional to our MFA awards, we work with local and national professional art organisations to establish and maintain graduate awards for our students. Thanks to everyone involved, these are wonderful partnerships that the course values immensely. These external awards are an excellent recognition of our students and offer fantastic support for the post-education phase of these emergent artists careers. It’s a really crucial boost to the students to be eligible to apply for or receive these awards and they really benefit enormously from them.
This year our external award winners are:
CCA-UU Graduate Awards MFA Natalie Gibson MFA Áine Crawford BA
Alice Berger Hammerschlag Award Ben Cole
Friends of F.E. McWilliam Gallery Graduate Award Clodagh Laffan
Siobhan McQuade Memorial Painting Award Nicola Gilmore Micheal Flavin
University of Atypical Graduate Award Peter Carrington
General opening times: Monday – Thursday, 10am – 5pm
Which One Are You?brings together a cohort of first-year MFA students from Belfast School of Art, presenting a dynamic and exploratory body of work that reflects the culmination of creative and academic development they have undertaken thus far.
Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, videography, ceramics, and conceptual practices, Which One Are You? invites viewers into a space of questioning—of recognition, insight, and materiality of evolution.
The title acts as both provocation and reflection. It suggests a multiplicity of self, asking not only who we are, but how we are seen, how we present ourselves, and how we shift across contexts. In a time shaped by rapid cultural, social, and technological change, identity feels increasingly fluid—constructed, performed, and constantly revisited. This exhibition embraces that sense of instability rather than resolving it.
The works on display resist easy interpretation. They don’t offer clear answers or stable positions, instead circling around questions, contradictions, and partial perspectives. Different materials and approaches are used not to illustrate ideas, but to challenge and complicate them. Across disciplines, the artists demonstrate a passion to test boundaries, and engage critically with both personal and collective experience.
There is no single way into the exhibition. Viewers may be drawn to particular works or perspectives, yet the underlying question persists. Which one are you? Are you the observer, the participant, the subject, or something in between? The exhibition encourages an active encounter, where meaning is not fixed but formed through engagement.
As an early-stage presentation of emerging practices, the exhibition also foregrounds process over resolution. The works reflect a moment of development—of ideas in formation, experimentation, and risk-taking. In this sense, the exhibition is as much about becoming as it is about being. It offers insight into the evolving concerns of a new generation of emerging artists, each navigating their own position within a broader cultural landscape.
Presented at Queen Street Studios, a space rooted in artist-led practice and community, Which One Are You? situates these emerging voices within an ongoing dialogue about what art can be and do. The exhibition does not seek to provide answers, but rather to open a field of possibilities—inviting reflection, conversation, and perhaps even a reconsideration of the self.
Ultimately, the question remains open. Which One Are You?
