National Sculpture Factory

22/12/2025

Open call for sculptors - The Memory of the Irish Hospital in Saint-Lô and Tribute to Samuel Beckett.
Deadline January 31 2026
Led by the Arts et Architectures à l’Ouest Association, and in partnership with the City of Saint-Lô and Usine Utopik, a Regional Cultural Relay, the call for projects focuses on the creation of in-situ sculptures within the Saint-Lô area. This call for projects is part of the 80th anniversary of the Irish Hospital of Saint-Lô.

https://www.usine-utopik.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/APPEL-A-PROJET-Festival-Irlande-Anglais.pdf

21/12/2025

Evening Echo by Maddie Leach

Sunset - Sunday 21st December 2025
Shalom Park, Gas Works Rd & Albert Rd, Cork, Ireland.

Lighting Sequence
9th Lamp on : 4:14pm
Sunset : 4:24pm
9th Lamp off : 4:54pm

Evening Echo is a public artwork by New Zealand artist Maddie Leach. It is sited on old gasometer land gifted by Bord Gáis to Cork City Council in the late 1980s. This site was subsequently re-dedicated as Shalom Park in 1989. The park sits in the centre of the old Cork neighbourhood known locally as ‘Jewtown’. This neighbourhood is also home to the National Sculpture Factory.

Evening Echo is an art project generated as an artist’s response to the particularities of place and locality. Now in its fifteenth year, the project continues to gather support from the Cork Hebrew Congregation, Cork City Council, Gas Networks Ireland, (formerly Bord Gáis) and its local community. The project is manifested in a sequence of custom-built lamps, a remote timing system, a highly controlled sense of duration, a list of future dates, an annual announcement in Cork’s Evening Echo newspaper and a promissory agreement. Evening Echo is fleetingly activated on an annual cycle, maintaining a delicate but persistent visibility in the park and re-activating its connection to Cork’s Jewish history. Intended to exist in perpetuity, the project maintains a delicate position between optimism for its future existence and the possibility of its own discontinuance.

This year the last night of Hanukkah is Sunday 21st December 2025 and offers the only opportunity to see the tall ninth lamp alight until next year. The cycle begins 10 minutes before sunset, which occurs this year at 4:24pm, and continues for 30 minutes after sunset when the ninth lamp is extinguished.

Maddie Leach’s work is largely project-based, site responsive and conceptually driven and addresses new thinking on art, sociality and place-based practices. She seeks viable ways of making artworks in order to interpret and respond to unique place-determined content and she is recognised for innovatively investigating ideas of audience spectatorship, expectation and participation in relation to art works.

Photo by Claire Keogh

18/12/2025

Congratulations to Clara McSweeney, NSF Curatorial Resources Development Manager, who is joint winner of the 2025 RDS Taylor Art Trust Award, alongside Vicky Ochala. Judges praised both artists for ‘Theatrical Work’ and ‘Masterful Blend of Art and Science’

Clara’s research informs both her curatorial and artistic practices, examining pressing social issues in Irish society, including the housing crisis, climate change, vacant properties, and injustices faced by women. Her current work focuses on the peculiarities of certain vacant spaces in Dublin, exploring dystopian futures shaped by environmental and social crises and the anthropomorphosis of inanimate objects.
Her process begins with research through observation, discussion, reading, and mapping, which informs layered historical, speculative, or fictional narratives. These narratives are realised through performance, sound, writing, speculative fiction, curation, and the activation of objects. Collaboration is central to her practice, and she frequently works with other artists and practitioners to develop projects into cohesive, critical explorations of contemporary social concerns.

"Now Listen Closely, Fellow Humans", responds to the peculiarities of three distinct buildings located in Dublin City. She imagines the experience of vacancy from the perspective of these buildings. They have each confided to Clara their deepest fears, anxieties and confusions. Using these confessions she has scripted monologues and, with the help of voice actors, recorded them for a human audience. "My Third Floor" speaks from the viewpoint of an ignored vacant space above a shop on Talbot Street. "A New Urban Future" is based on a building in the Docklands, set in a future where the climate crisis has intensified and flooding has occurred. "Best to Last" focuses on a state-of-the-art office block in Smithfield Square that has been left vacant for over a year.

RDS RHA Gallery Limerick School of Art & Design TUS The LAB Gallery IADT

16/12/2025

Helle Helsner has joined us again on the Factory floor, developing a new body of work for a solo show in summer 2026.

"My practice engages with the relationship between extractive practices, landscape and material use. It considers how these factors can join in a reciprocal relationship between maker, material, and outcome. Drawing from prehistoric technology and storytelling, I examine how my furnace can become the communal firepit from where both objects and new material ethics may emerge.
We live in a time of large-scale extracting practices, in particular pertaining to metal. We also live in a time where deeply seeded ideas in indigenous thinking are becoming increasingly important as knowledge systems that may offer new ways of thinking with the landscape, rather than just extracting from it. Thinking through my materials, I feel responsible and accountable to a “making” where these count as kin."

All images courtesy the artist.

11/12/2025

Nicolas Deshayes is working at NSF for the autumn and winter, experimenting with pâte de verre, wood carving and bronze casting. Some of his experiments will be shown in the two person exhibition Pillow Talk with Paloma Proudfoot, at Quench, Margate, UK opening on the 23rd of January.

Nicolas’ sculptures draw on the the form and materiality of bodies and their environments - he makes sculptures that move between soft and fluid to the hard and mechanical. Working predominantly with casting techniques, he explores forms that resonate with both biological systems, plumbing networks and the decorative structures that shape everyday life. Recent solo exhibitions include Fondazione Sandra e Giancarlo Bonnollo, Thiene, IT (2025); Modern Art, London, UK (2025); Monteverdi Gallery, Castiglioncello del Trinoro, IT (2024) and Le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire, FR (2022).

Img 1: Fountains, 2018, cast aluminium, stainless steel and water
Img 2: Gretel, 2023, photo by Gert Jan van Rooij
Img 3: Gargamel, 2021
Img 4: Glissements, exhibition view, 2021

09/12/2025

Our friends at Cork Midsummer Festival are seeking applications for the role of Festival Manager. Closing Date for applications: Thursday 18 December 2025

Cork Midsummer Festival is now seeking applications for the role of Festival Manager - a senior leadership position within the organisation, working in partnership with the Festival Director to deliver the strategic vision and objectives of the festival.

Deadline for applications is Thursday 18 December - full details on the role, and how to apply, on our website: www.corkmidsummer.com/news/seeking-applications-for-festival-manager

04/12/2025

As part of the Joseph Higgins: Life and Legacy Symposium this Saturday 6th December, National Sculpture Factory are excited to collaborate with Cork Public Museum, Cork Arts Office, and Cork City Libraries, to present a panel discussion with artists Alan Butler and Vivienne Roche. This discussion between two renowned contemporary artists, chaired by NSF Director Helen Carey, will be a one-off event that examines the shape of the future of sculpture.

Saturday 6th December | 1:30pm - 5:30pm
Cork City Library, Grand Parade

Over the last decades, Vivienne Roche has worked in large-scale bronze, glass, steel, sailcloth, stuccodore plaster, and reconfigured landscape. Drawing, watercolour and photography have also been central to her work. Her artistic themes derive from site-specific dialogues between architecture and sculpture, the emotional resonances of the coastal landscape in which she lives, relationships between male and female, archaeology sites and their artefacts, and between music and the visual.
Her most recent solo exhibition was Abridged, a major show of works including drawing, sculpture and video, at the main gallery of the RHA, September- November 2024.

Vivienne Roche, Baby Teeth in Perspective, Abridged exhibition, 2022 – 2024, Cast bronze, plaster, steel, photo courtesy RHA Gallery & the artist, Photography by Ros Kavanagh

03/12/2025

As part of the Joseph Higgins: Life and Legacy Symposium this Saturday 6th December, National Sculpture Factory are excited to collaborate with Cork Public Museum, Cork City Arts Office, and Cork City Libraries, to present a panel discussion with artists Alan Butler and Vivienne Roche. This discussion between two renowned contemporary artists, chaired by NSF Director Helen Carey, will be a one-off event that examines the shape of the future of sculpture.

Saturday 6th December | 1:30pm - 5:30pm
Cork City Library, Grand Parade

Alan Butler works with traditional and new media as a means to explore subjects and ideas related to digital culture and their role in the formation of realities. With a production modality that utilises materials and media from the history of image-making, the body of work often examines how 3D graphics, video game and cloud technologies function both ideologically and politically.
Butler’s solo show, ASSETS, opened at green on Red Gallery, Friday 7 November, to coincide with CAGA’s Dublin Gallery Weekend 2025. ASSETS, an umbrella term which refers to information or the objects in a database which are appropriated and transformed into new forms and assemblages. ASSETS, in how they relate to Butler’s practice, are part of a logistical image-production pipeline and the works in which the show reflect the vast array of approaches to art production from the artist’s studio. In Butler’s practice, ASSETS are not something that should be considered or fixed, but nodes on an undulating planetary network composed of data infrastructure, organic matter, dirt, decay and culture; all potential tools or media at play.

Image: Alan Butler, ASSETS exhibition shot, photo courtesy Green on Red Gallery & the artist

Cork City Libraries Cork City Council Cork Arts

02/12/2025

Joseph Higgins: Life and Legacy Symposium
Saturday 6th December | 1:30pm - 5:30pm
Cork City Library, Grande Parade

Cork Public Museum in collaboration with Cork Arts Office and Cork City Libraries, with the Higgins Estate, commemorates the Artist with a dedicated programme of events, beginning on Saturday 6th December, featuring a lecture by Peter Murray, curator and art historian, ‘In Conversation’ with art historian, Vera Ryan and sculptor, Matthew Thompson, and a panel discussion in collaboration with the National Sculpture Factory, with artists Alan Butler and Vivienne Roche, chaired by NSF Director Helen Carey.
All welcome - no booking necessary. Lunch provided

On Tuesday December 9th a new exhibition opens at Cork Public Museum
Best known for his mastery as a figurative sculptor, Joseph Higgins – was a both a painter and a sculptor, a carver in wood and stone. His small body of surviving works are both deeply personal but also evocative of the contemporary politics of the time in which they were made. Above all, they are an exquisite testament to the relevance of the artist, one hundred years after his premature death at 40 years.

National Sculpture Factory are excited to collaborate with Cork Public Museum, Cork City Arts Office, and Cork City Libraries, to present a panel discussion with artists Alan Butler and Vivienne Roche. This discussion between two renowned contemporary artists, chaired by NSF Director Helen Carey, will be a one-off event that examines the shape of the future of sculpture.

Img 1: Portrait of the artist Joseph Higgins
Img 2: Above: Vivienne Roche, Installation view, Abridged, RHA Gallery, Dublin, Photo: Ros Kavanagh
Below: Alan Butler, ASSETS exhibition shot, Photo credit: Green on Red Gallery

27/11/2025

Congratulations to our founding member, Eilis O'Connell, ahead of the opening of her new exhibition HAPPENSTANCE', running from November 29th 2025 to April 12th 2026 at The Glucksman.

This solo exhibition thematically links across O’Connell’s distinguished career to her newly created works; tracing an on-going dialogue with material, form and making across steel, bronze, stone and wood. Her sculptures display a quiet emergence; etiolated shapes that stretch and search like living matter seeking light. Other works explore pattern and balance, reflecting a tension between interior and exterior worlds. Throughout the exhibition, there is an unfolding of organic and geometric form which produce a glimpse of something, an unusual way of seeing.

HAPPENSTANCE is curated by Katie O'Grady and is supported by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, University College Cork and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.

Image: Spores, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.