Go Leor

19/11/2025

🌿 New Feature: Bob Speers - Thin Place 🌿

In Issue 5 of Go Leor, we step into the atmospheric world of artist Bob Speers, whose latest exhibition Thin Place explores the mysticism, history, and fragile ecology of Ireland’s peatlands.

Blending peat, cloth, salvaged timber, and fragments of everyday life, Speers creates paintings that feel both ancient and startlingly present - artworks that seem to breathe with the land itself. His practice is rooted in the idea of the thin place: those rare landscapes where the physical world and the unseen feel impossibly close.

Working alongside long-time collaborator Colin Agnew, Speers digs deep into material memory, environmental urgency, and a lifelong connection to the bogs he knows so well. Each painting becomes both record and resistance - a way of keeping threatened landscapes alive through art.

His exhibition Thin Place is currently showing at The Braid, Ballymena, with a special in-conversation event featuring Speers and Professor Jonathan Pilcher.

📍 Thin Place - now at The Braid
🖼 Read the full feature here: https://go-leor.co.uk/bob-speers-and-the-quiet-magic-of-irelands-bogs/

Immerse yourself in Bob’s world of soil, sound, and the quiet magic of the bog.

15/11/2025

✨ New in Issue 5: Beverley Healy Artist - Each Green Breath ✨

In our latest feature, we sit down with artist and educator Beverley Healy, whose work moves gently between painting, prayer, and the quiet spaces where creativity becomes connection.

From leading community arts workshops across Northern Ireland to developing deeply contemplative portraits and imaginative pieces she calls “visual prayers,” Beverley’s practice is rooted in stillness, symbolism, and care.

Her work invites us to slow down - to breathe, to reflect, and to look again. Whether she’s layering egg tempera with meticulous patience, guiding beginners through their first watercolour, or exploring the deeper questions of faith and fragility, Beverley brings a sense of presence to everything she creates.

In Issue 5, we explore:
🎨 Her contemplative painting process
🙏 How prayer and creativity intertwine in her studio
🖼 Her shortlisted portrait Sibling Travellers
📖 Her international collaborative project Prayer Book
🌿 And the evolving symbolism shaping her recent work, including Each Green Breath and Serenity

It’s a beautiful, thoughtful piece about art as space-making - for reflection, for healing, and for hope.

Read the full article now in Go Leor Issue 5.
👉 https://go-leor.co.uk/faith-and-colour-the-genuine-art-of-beverley-healy/

09/11/2025

🌿 Go Leor - Issue 5 is here.

Our latest issue moves through the themes of land, light, and creative resilience - exploring how artists across Ireland connect material, meaning, and memory.

This edition features:
🎨 Bob Speers - Thin Place, a powerful reflection on Ireland’s boglands as sacred, threatened ground.
🌾 Tricia Kelly (Ócar) - uncovering the story of red ochre, a pigment sixty million years in the making.
🖌️ Beverley Healy - on faith, portraiture, and painting as a form of prayer.
📸 Hernan Farias - tracing a journey from Chile to Northern Ireland through the language of light.
🖼️ Ruairi Mooney - exploring resilience, routine, and the search for an authentic artistic voice.

Together, these stories form a portrait of creativity deeply tied to place, process, and care.

✨ Read Issue 5 now via the link below.
And if you’d like to help us grow this work - sustaining independent arts coverage rooted in community and culture - you can support us on Patreon.

Our members are printed in every issue, and higher tiers receive Go Leor monthly in both print and PDF.

👉 https://go-leor.co.uk/
👉 https://www.patreon.com/GoLeor

10/10/2025

From the trauma wards of Belfast to the tidal shores of Cushendall 🌊

In our latest Go Leor feature, we meet Denise McAuley - trauma coordinator at the Royal Victoria Hospital and the creative force behind Moneyvart Ceramics.

Balancing nursing, motherhood, and a thriving ceramics practice, Denise’s story is one of resilience, care, and creativity. Her small-batch pottery, inspired by the landscapes of the Antrim coast and the rhythms of the Shipping Forecast, captures both strength and fragility - “vessels to be treasured and passed down through generations.”

Her latest project, Materia Medica, explores emotional wellbeing through form and glaze - a reflection of her experience in healthcare and art. Now accepted into the Royal Ulster Academy exhibition, her work stands as a quiet triumph of dedication and vision.

🌀 Read the full interview: https://go-leor.co.uk/from-trauma-wards-to-ceramics-denise-mcauleys-authentic-creative-journey/
💻 Explore her work: https://moneyvart-ceramics.sumupstore.com/

📸 Follow Denise: Moneyvart Ceramics

From the trauma wards of the Royal to the shoreline of Cushendall, Denise creates small-batch ceramics that carry memory, resilience, & the rhythms of the sea.

04/10/2025

From Belfast libraries to Guinness World Records and global awards - Liz shows how stories, shared with care, can enchant, connect, and heal.

19/08/2025

🌙 From canal banks to celestial skies - Enagh Farrell’s work invites us to look again.

Her illustrations trace the wild in the everyday: signage along the Grand Canal, winter tree cards, and drawings that ask us to slow down and notice what’s living right beside us.

✨ Her art also graces the cover of Go Leor Issue 3 - capturing the quiet wonder and layered care that runs through the entire issue.

In our full feature, Enagh reflects on weeds, stars, signage trails, and working with writer Michael Harding. It’s a rich, grounded conversation about nature, print, and the ecology of attention.

📖 Read it now in Issue 3 of Go Leor
🔗 [link in bio]

17/08/2025

🌾 Way-finding from the cracks between climate, care, and kinship.

In our latest issue, we speak with writer and campaigner Alena Walker about food systems, motherhood, and the memory of wild things.

From the call of the corncrake to greenwashing in supermarkets, Alena’s work asks how we reconnect - with land, with language, and with each other.

🛶 Her stories flow between the practical and poetic: growing food, raising a daughter, noticing fewer insects, and refusing to let biodiversity loss go unnamed.

It’s a feature full of quiet force and regenerative hope.

📖 Read the full piece now in Go Leor Issue 3
🌱 [link in bio]

15/08/2025

🪡 Hand-stitched pages. Homegrown trees. Quiet craft.

Meet Rosanne Cecil, the thoughtful bookbinder behind Willow Leaves Handmade Books.

In a stone studio near a rewilded field, Rosanne binds books by hand, prints on cork, and plants birch, hazel, and rowan to restore what’s been lost. Her work is quiet, sustainable, and deeply rooted.

🌿 She’ll be opening her studio this Saturday as part of - come by to see her process up close, browse her handmade books, and soak in the stillness.

Read the full profile now in Issue 3 of Go Leor.
📖 [link in bio]

09/08/2025

🌱 Issue 3 of Go Leor is live! 📖

This issue brings together four beautifully grounded voices - women whose work grows from care, craft, and quiet resistance.

✨ Rosanne binds handmade books in a rewilded corner of the countryside.
✨ Enagh Farrell draws stars, nettles, and the quiet richness of her Dublin streets.
✨ Corrina Askin invites us into dreamlike worlds shaped by mythology, nature, and wonder.
✨ Alena Walker writes from the edge of activism and motherhood - naming loss, but sowing hope.

From sketchbooks to signage, stinging nettles to storytelling, these are voices that root us back into what matters.

📚 Read the full issue → https://go-leor.co.uk/issue3/