A preview of the art exhibitions Lismore Castle Arts has planned for 2025

As 2024 draws to a close, Lismore Castle Arts have announced their first two exhibitions of 2025.

Lismore Castle Arts will celebrate 20 years by first presenting an exhibition dedicated to the theme of 'Kunstkammer', which will be curated by art historian and writer, Robert O’Byrne.

Kunstkammer is a form of museum in which strange or rare objects are exhibited together, also known as a Cabinet of Curiosities. Once widespread throughout Europe, these private museums were renowned for featuring a broad range of objects.

Drawing on themes of display, O’Byrne’s curated works will invite audiences to engage with contemporary art in an accessible way, referring to one of the original ambitions of the Cabinet of Curiosity to foster learning through encounter.

The exhibition runs from March 22 to October 26.

Starting from March 22, Nicole Wermers will present ‘Marathon Dance Relief’, a large-scale installation in response to the castle and the space at St Carthage Hall.

Working with sculpture, photography and collage, the work will embody themes which reflect her continued interest in invisible labour and the ‘body-economic’, drawing on the phenomenon of marathon dance competitions in Depression-era America.

By reconfiguring familiar objects and infrastructural elements into new forms, Wermers examines hierarchies of materials while addressing systems of social actions and relations. Her works frame and transform their environment, prompting us to consider how materials and design read as societal and cultural indicators.

The artist has recently started sculpting figuratively by hand, using the canonical trope of the reclining female figure to dissect politics of consumption and display the invisible labour of maintenance workers.