Jess Franklin

Founder & Co-ordinator

Jess Franklin is an artist and the founder and coordinator of The Fold, a group established to bring artists and geologists together through shared inquiry, dialogue, and fieldwork. She holds a PhD in Geology and has ten years’ experience in public engagement. She is also Communications and Development Support Manager at Backwater Artists Group, where she manages organisational communications and coordinates the Members Programme, supporting artists’ professional development, peer learning, and exchange among artists. Her own artistic practice includes collage and installation, and she is a member of Cork Collage Collective.

Carol Anne Connolly

Visual Artist

Carol Anne Connolly's work examines the development of current cultural, civic and social ideas relating to place. She employs a variety of media, strategies, and techniques to produce work that reimagines or represents ideas about contemporary landscapes and environments. Her approach to making work develops into interdisciplinary, public engagement and collaborative projects and has involved working with diverse communities and individuals ranging from ghost estate residents, physicists, NGOs, farmers to music producers.

Brian Mac Domhnaill

Photographer

Brian Mac Domhnaill is a photographer, interdisciplinary artist, arts professional, and former archaeologist based in County Cork. In his artistic practice he follows investigative lines of enquiry to gain insight into a subject. Projects vary from long-term landscape studies to short-term investigations of marginalised environments that require negotiated access and mediation. He shoots almost exclusively on film, and supplements this, where appropriate, with field recordings (sound). Earlier and ongoing projects have included digital photography and video, as well as archival outputs. He holds an MA in Art & Process (CIT Crawford College of Art & Design, 2014), an MSc in Palaeoecology (Queen's University Belfast, 2001), and a BA in Archaeology and Celtic Civilisation (University College Cork, 1997). Brian is Director of Lavit Gallery, Cork (2022-) and previously worked at Sirius Arts Centre and Backwater Artists Group.

Pat Meere

Structural Geologist

Pat Meere is an academic structural geologist at UCC's School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences. His research focuses on the Munster region, and he has authored field guides to the geology of Ireland and Skellig Michael.

Kevin Sanderson Beecher

Sound Artist & Programmer

Kevin Sanderson Beecher is an experimental sound artist and programmer based in Cork. His practice is rooted in deep listening, field recording, and improvisation, building imagined soundscapes and live performances that respond to the natural world. Kevin often collaborates with Jess Franklin, most notably on Source, an immersive sound installation that merges geological storytelling with experimental sonic practice.

Aoife Desmond

Artist

Aoife Desmond makes performance, film and visual art for gallery, cinema, theatre and off-site locations. She prioritises embodied knowledge and explores materiality, site and human/non-human relationships. She works in response to environmental crisis and rupture with an emphasis on restorative practices. Based in Cork, Aoife works locally, nationally and internationally on solo and collaborative projects. Bury Our Hearts At The Bend Of The River is her second feature film, and she has made numerous short films which have screened in festivals and galleries internationally.

Susie Walsh

Contemporary Artist & Educator

Susie Walsh is a contemporary artist and educator based in Cork City. In her visual art practice Susie works with photography, printmaking, moving image and darkspace installation. Using digital and analogue projection devices to explore the materiality of light, Walsh creates immersive physical and psychic spaces in which she explores themes of planetary dysphoria, time passing, memory and grief. ‘Where traditional photography represents a final image and fact, with my constructs for camera I propose a speculative fiction’. With a diploma in Youth and Community work from UCC and qualifications in Fine Art, Art Facilitation and Art Therapy from CCAD, Susie has 26 years of experience as a youth and community arts practitioner. Susie is currently pursuing a Masters in Contemporary Art Practice in Crawford College of Art and Design (CCAD) Cork.

Helle Helsner

Bronze Caster, Researcher & Lecturer

“My practice explores material ethics through the interplay of line and matter. I am interested in the relationship between extractive practices, the landscape, and the ethics of material use. Drawing on prehistoric technology and storytelling.”

Helle Helsner exhibits regularly nationally and internationally. Her specialised bronze casting practice has led to diverse professional collaborations, including projects with archaeologists in Denmark and Ireland, and ritual bronze casting in New Mexico. Her most recent solo exhibitions include “Faultline” at Lavit Gallery, Cork and “Core” at the O’Connell Gallery, West Cork (2025), both pertaining to her ongoing research. Her work is represented in the Danish State Collection, the Office of Public Works (OPW), and the RTÉ Collection. She lectures in Crawford College of Art and Design.

Irene Murphy

Artist

Irene Murphy is a visual artist whose work is process based, inspired by context and conversation, often collaborative, and develops through improvisation, play and chance procedures. She uses sound, sculptural, structural and object-based installations, drawing, food and hosting as part of her practice.

She is one of the Domestic Godless trio, who have pursued absurdist adventures in a culinary landscape and published a book called the food, the bad & the ugly. She joined with sound artists Danny McCarthy, Anthony Kelly, David Stalling and Mick O’Shea to form Strange Attractor, creating improvised sound and visual performances that have toured Ireland and internationally.

She is a founder member and director of The Guesthouse Project, an artists’ residency space, workspace and meeting point for Irish and international artists which supports collaboration, community, trans-disciplinary and hybrid practices.

Leah Murphy

Artist

Leah Murphy's studio practice centres on painting alongside illustration, photography, and large-scale wall works. Collaboration and facilitation are integral to her projects, which often involve community-led workshops and collective making.

Peter Nash

Artist

Peter Nash is a visual artist based in Cork. He is a studio member of Backwater Artists Group and Assistant Lecturer at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design. Peter has exhibited widely throughout Ireland and the UK, including recent solo shows at LHQ Gallery, Cork Printmakers, Garter Lane Arts Centre, Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group and group shows at Crawford Art Gallery, The Glucksman, Sirius Arts Centre and Lismore Castle Arts.

He holds an MA in Art & Process from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design and a BA Honours degree in Fine Art (Sculpture) from Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Nash’s work is held in the National Collection of Ireland, University College Cork and numerous private collections. Recent awards include Artist Bursary Awards from Cork City & County and numerous funded residency awards within Ireland and the EU.

Jonathan Crean

Sound Artist

Jonathan Crean is a sound artist and composer based in Co. Mayo. He completed a Masters in Experimental Sound Practice at University College Cork in 2024.

His current work explores ideas of relationality and agency in order to glimpse, mingle and play with other-than-human materials and forces. His practice is mainly focused on improvisation, experimental score-making and instrument crafting.

He has presented solo and group performances nationally and internationally. He has released a number of sound works including the trees have something to say (2025) and practical magik (2026). He is a founding member of the radio art collective Celtic Reflections and the experimental sound group NuuN. His work has been supported by Mayo County Council and the Arts Council of Ireland.

Fiona Kelly

Visual Artist

Fiona Kelly is a visual artist and PhD candidate at NCAD, Dublin (2021-2027) investigating fallowness as a necessary action to navigate an epoch of urgency and overproduction. Recent exhibitions include: Allow to Fall Low, Allow to Fallow, Luan Gallery; In Land: Living Roots Awaken, Highlanes Gallery; Radical Archaeologies: Unearthing Landscape in Contemporary Irish Art, GLUCKSMAN Gallery, Cork; At first, I was Land, Studio 12, Cork; A Demarcation of Time, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (Solo); The point of truth, knowledge & beauty, Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Germany; The Space We Occupy, Solas Nua, Washington DC & Irish Arts Centre, New York, USA; and A Temporary Iteration, Sirius Arts Centre (Solo).

Fiona Kelly’s work is housed in the public collections of the National Gallery of Ireland, the Crawford Art Gallery, UCC and in the Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland. Her current research is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland (2025).

Kim-Ling Morris

Artist

Kim-Ling Morris works mainly with materials and objects that are being discarded, treasuring the marks and traces of their individual histories. For Kim-Ling, imperfections are a fount of interest. Railing against transience, the work allows the discarded to hold onto their existence, to tell their tales through layers of stain and scratch and fissures, and sometimes purely by their obsolescence. There is a line between waste and viability, adaptation and resilience. These are emotional and material points.

Each material has its own character. The way it reacts to bending, folding or stitching can show unexpected quirks, often arising from how it was made. Rather than working with one medium, Kim-Ling is motivated to understand the rescued materials in order to find ways of adapting them to alternative applications or processes. These have included computer and electrical cables, vertical blinds and fabric from broken umbrellas.

Rónán Ó Caoimh

Sculptor & Geologist

Rónán is the Technical Manager of the National Sculpture Factory. His work investigates the uses of minerals and metals throughout history. With a background in experimental archaeology, he explores metalworking, ceramics, bronze casting and metal smelting techniques. He frequently undertakes mineral collection and exploration field trips around Ireland and internationally.

Harrison Connally

Artist

Born in Texas and raised in a forest, Harrison Connally grew up with boredom and imagination as companions, and much of that early inspiration for art came from playing in the forest. As a young adult, Harrison chose to return to a forest setting and lived off-grid in a yurt for two years, where re-integrating with nature inspired the core of the practice today.

The work is motivated by that same intimacy with site-specific nature. Now living in Ireland, Harrison is establishing new relationships with Irish nature through its botany and specific sites near home.

Bernadette Tuite

Artist & Sculptor

Bernadette Tuite is a ceramic artist based in Cork, Ireland. Her sculptural vessels are inspired by the Irish coastline and informed by her background as a former boat captain. Journeying by sea to remote coves along the Cork coast, she gathers materials and inspiration directly from the shore. Using found coastal clays and sediments, Bernadette creates tactile, contemplative forms that reflect the textures and energy of place. A graduate of the Pottery Skills and Design Course, Kilkenny, and Crawford Art College, where she formerly lectured, she is now Head Potter at Muckross House Pottery in Killarney National Park. She works from her studio at Backwater Artists’ Studios, in Cork City.

Susan Bone

Artist

Susan Bone received a Master of Fine Art from the University of Ulster, Belfast in 1992 and a BA (Hons) in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 1991, and attended Yale University's summer art programme in Connecticut, USA in 1990.

After a long hiatus, Susan is enjoying painting again, working on panel or canvas with acrylic and oil, and at the moment playing around with imagery, staying open and exploring new territory. Earlier work was abstract, drawing on the forms, structures and colour that could be found by zooming in on the surface of vegetal litter and the debris left behind after laying down compost: seeing what happens as different relationships form and play out, as though within an arena.

Trevor Boyle

Artist

Working primarily with experimental moving image, Trevor Boyle is interested in the ways things drift from their original form or purpose. His practice moves between found footage, image manipulation, obsolete technologies and everyday observation, with an ongoing interest in time, decay and transformation. Embracing the possibilities of imperfect images and ageing technology, he works across different formats and approaches to moving image. Alongside this work, he maintains an open-ended practice of documenting daily life, collecting fragments and moments that catch his attention. These recordings form a kind of diary without a destination, an accumulation of images whose significance may or may not become apparent. Rather than directing the viewer towards a fixed interpretation, his work invites a more fluid engagement, allowing space to drift, return and find personal points of connection.

Ed Jarvis

Lecturer, UCC BEES

Ed Jarvis is a geology lecturer based at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences (BEES) at University College Cork.

Richard Unitt

Petrography & Mineralogy Specialist

Dr Richard Unitt is a geologist at University College Cork specialising in petrography and mineralogy, with a strong interest in geoscience imaging and Raman spectroscopy.

Valentina Rossi

Post-doctoral Researcher & Palaeontologist

Valentina is a post-doctoral researcher and palaeontologist based at University College Cork. She works on the preservation of pigments and soft tissues like skin and internal organs in fossil vertebrates. With a bachelor and master degree in geology, she has been always fascinated by how our planet works and in particular about its history, a story that only rocks and fossils can tell!

Thomas Heising

Science Communication Researcher

Thomas Heising has worked with graphic design and video for over 15 years, and has mixed this with his academic background as a geologist. Originally from Denmark, he is now living and thriving in Cork working with visual science communication at UCC while trying to get out exploring on the bicycle as much as possible. Along with a geologist at UCC, he co-created and co-launched Hardcore Cork: Geology in the City - a website highlighting and promoting Cork city's geology for the general public. This led to the creation of geological heritage content for Cork City Council and an annual geology city tour personally hosted by himself as part of Heritage Week from 2021. Other projects include animation videos on local geology and science history with websites on air quality and environmental research projects.

Bill Sheppard

Geologist

After graduating from TCD, Bill Sheppard deferred a desired geological career of global travel to complete a Ph.D. on the Avoca Mine, Co. Wicklow, followed by 6 years of base metal and gold exploration in Southeast Ireland and Co. Tyrone.

Thereafter, Bill's projects took him to numerous countries in Europe, Australia, East and West Africa, Vietnam and the Philippines, including wondrous landscapes in particular in Greenland and Mauritania. His major focus was drill core project work unravelling 3D geological realities/models at the mine and prospect scale. His geological input was key in the case of four currently operating/developing mines.

Currently, Bill focuses on areas including Geology in Art, Medieval Stonework, 'Scuba Diving the Landscape'©, Geology in Sense of Place and communicating geology by lecture and fieldtrips, including trips to the RHA Annual. He is pleased to be expanding these areas in association with The Fold.

Hannah Vogel

Geologist

Hannah Vogel is a geologist and bookbinder, combining a background in Earth sciences with a longstanding connection to the traditional craft of hand-bound book binding. Her work explores the relationship between geological materials, landscapes, and the passage of time, drawing inspiration from the natural forms and textures encountered through her fieldwork and experience imaging geological materials using X-ray tomography and scanning electron microscopy. She is currently pursuing a PhD in geology at University College Cork.