Latest GOMA Waterford exhibition is launched
General. Photo: John Power
GOMA Waterford (Gallery of Modern Art) is delighted to present At Night the Hens Stand and Dream, an art exhibition by Niamh Coffey.
The exhibition was launched this week, with crowds given their first glimpse at the spectacular work by the Dublin-based artist from Laois.
This exhibition combines two bodies of work, Siúnta (2023-25) and Clodhoppers (2025-ongoing).
Taking its name from the Irish for a seam or joint, Siúnta is described as weaving together past narratives to imagine new ecological relationships.
Clodhoppers takes its name from how the celestial characters, Sphinx, Moon and Godwoman, refer to the earthbound subjects in Marina Carr’s play The Boy.
In this exhibition, forms of flesh, fur, flower and feather mingle and merge. Subjects create symbiotic and antagonistic relationships, exhibit absurd actions and explore neoteric habits together.
In 1937-39, the Irish Folklore Commission asked primary school children to collect local history from their relatives and neighbours.
Nestled in exercise copies, between thousands of stories detailed in meticulous handwriting, lie their tales of hares becoming milk-hungry witches, needy children turned to stone, gooseberries transforming sore eyes, tadpoles swirling in boggy bellies.
Siúnta uses these instances of metamorphosis as departure points to wriggle further into absurd and imaginary realms.
These archives show that in an earlier Irish imaginary world, the boundaries that separate us from nature and other entities were not so separate and fixed, but porous and blurred.
The exhibition was made by gathering these stories of binary-blurring between humans and non-humans and making drawings based on them.
In Clodhoppers, wider historical, alchemical and folkloric beliefs of human connection to the universe inspire and mix with these narratives.
Niamh Coffey is a Dublin-based artist from Laois, working with textiles, drawings and sculpture.
Their work experiments and collages ideas from ecology, queer theory and Irish folklore to create imagined relationships.
Niamh graduated from NCAD in 2016 with an honours degree in Sculpture and Expanded Practices.
Their debut solo exhibition was held in Cultúrlann, Belfast in March 2025 and shown again in Pallas Projects, Dublin and Súil Gallery, Clare.
Upcoming solo exhibitions include Custom House Gallery, Mayo, GOMA, Waterford and The Arthouse, Laois.
The latest exhibition is available to view now at GOMA Waterford.
