Garter Lane Arts Centre presents body electric, an exhibition of new paintings by Irish artists Billie Adele and Cristín O’Loughlin, curated by Eamonn Maxwell.
body electric explores contemporary notions of the body, identity, and human connection in the digital era. The exhibition’s title references The Sisters of Mercy’s 1982 track Body Electric, a dark post-punk meditation on alienation, voyeurism, and technology’s intrusion into intimacy, while also echoing Walt Whitman’s poetic celebration of the human spirit and the embodied self.
For this exhibition, Billie Adele presents a new series of paintings that explore the body as a site of transformation amid the pressures of contemporary life. Through layered, glitched and amorphous figures, she investigates the grotesque as a hopeful and generative condition, reflecting on how organic experience adapts and persists within an increasingly digital world. Cristín O’Loughlin continues her investigation of the figure and self-representation through fragmented compositions that shift between observation and constructed imagery with recent work extending to paintings on copper. Together, their new works advance each artist’s distinctive approach to material, form, and emotional resonance within the contemporary image field.
About the artists
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Billie Adele (BA Fine Art, Crawford College of Art) is a Cork-born painter whose large-scale figurative works fuse organic and mechanical forms. Drawing on grotesque theory and the “monstrous feminine,” Adele creates hybrid bodies and mythic self-portraits that challenge traditional beauty norms and reclaim the body as a site of power and defiance Her ritualistic imagery combines humour and horror to subvert oppressive ideals. Adele graduated with first-class honours from MTU Crawford in 2025, and has earned multiple awards (including the Backwater Ciarán Langford Memorial Award and a Swerve Magazine Residency). Her work has been selected for exhibitions such as the Royal Hibernian Academy’s 195th Annual Exhibition and the RDS Visual Arts Awards.
Cristín O’Loughlin (MA Fine Art, NCAD) is a Wexford-based artist whose vibrant mixed-media paintings and collages interrogate digital culture and self-identity. She often appropriates images of women from social media, layering fluorescent colour and translucent paper to blur the line between the physical and virtual self. In her series ‘Identifying the Self(ie)’, for example, O’Loughlin traps neon colour within sheets of translucent paint to punctuate the space between reality and online spectacle, observing the choreography of Instagram selfies. Through these works she invites viewers to question polished online imagery and the ways female identity is constructed and consumed.
Eamonn Maxwell is an internationally renowned curator and arts advisor with over two decades of experience. Maxwell has organized more than 100 exhibitions in the UK, Ireland and Europe. Notably, he curated ‘Please Adjust: Corban Walker’ at the 2011 Venice Art Biennale and brought the first solo show by American artist Dan Graham to Ireland. His career includes roles at Lismore Castle Arts, VISUAL Carlow and University of the Arts London.
Exhibitions at Garter Lane are kindly funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, Waterford City & County Council, and the Department of Social Protection.
