SETU Waterford and Garter Lane Arts Centre presents, First View | Expanded Studio
The 4th year Visual Art Degree Students from SETU|Waterford invite you to explore the role of presenting artworks for exhibition and how conceptually and physically this is taking form in the lead up to their final year exhibition in May 2026.
First View|Expanded Studio offers audiences an early insight into the concepts, materials, and methodologies currently being explored by the BA Visual Art students. The exhibition is a work in progress. It reveals a dynamic spectrum of emerging practices, research, and experimentation as artists test ideas and refine their studio processes.
Themes addressed in the work span contemporary life and lived experience, including chronic illness, landscape, the psyche, sensory perception, gay love, heritage, world-building, and the complex intersections of motherhood and artistic identity. Together, these perspectives offer a compelling lens through which to consider the present moment and the concerns shaping our cultural landscape today.
Students taking part this year are:
Adam McEvoy, Alana Doyle, Ancuta Musina, Aoibh Flynn, Artimis Higgins, Callum Mernagh, Charles Jacob, Ciara Meagher, Daire Dowling, Diane Vakal, Eimear Power, Rionach McCafferty, Sadhbh Daly.
Special thanks to all the support staff at Garter Lane: Sandra Kelly, Ruth Hogan, Larry Conlon, Martin Browne, Marco de Sante.
Image credit: Sadhbh Daly
About the Students
Adam McEvoy
Adam McEvoy is a Gay Irish artist currently based in Waterford city but is from County Laois and spent 2 years living in Dublin city. Adams hobbies include traveling, gym, gaming, studying, film, skiing, and of course art. He is a multidisciplinary visual artist who is currently primarily focused on Printmaking. The current overarching theme of his work is Homosexual Love whether that be a platonic love between best friends, a romantic and or sexual love between lovers, or an instinctual and natural love that is seen in both humans and animals alike. As a gay man his depictions of homosexuality is often inspired by a lived experience but also from the world around him. As an artist Adam has also worked with drawing, painting, sculpture both ceramic and plaster, photography, film, and performance art. More about the artist can be found on his Instagram, @adam_mcevoy_artist.
Alanna Doyle
My name is Alanna Doyle , an emerging artist from Wexford currently studying at SETU Waterford , and my work is rooted in an exploration of human behaviour, emotion, and identity. I am drawn to the complexity of the human face and the subtle ways expression can reveal inner experience. Using charcoal and paint, I merge the immediacy of raw, gestural mark-making with the slower, layered process of building colour and form. This combination allows me to capture both the intensity and vulnerability present in the people I portray.
Portraiture becomes a space where I investigate how emotions shift, how behaviours emerge, and how individuals communicate without words. My work aims to create an intimate connection between viewer and subject, inviting reflection on the shared emotional threads that shape our lives. Through each piece, I hope to deepen my understanding of the human condition while encouraging others to pause, observe, and empathise.
Ancuta Musina
Ancuta Musina is a Romanian visual arts student based in Ireland. Navigating multiple cultures, she channels her sense of divided belonging into her creative work. Her practice is driven by a sustained interest in the complexities of the mind, exploring identity, its fragmentation, and transformation. She examines the interplay between emotion and thought, revealing the layered, dynamic nature of the self.
As a multidisciplinary artist, she works fluidly across drawing, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, and digital media. Her current body of work, titled The Crowd Within, examines the human psyche and its multiplicity of identities we carry within us through large-scale charcoal drawings, creating a visual manifestation of memory, emotion, and thought merging into one another. She chooses charcoal and paper for their delicacy and volatility, to echo the unstable nature of inner life, where creation and dissolution coexist, inviting viewers to confront the layered nature of human consciousness.
Aoibh Flynn
My artistic practice is one that centres around fabric, textiles, sculpture, photography, installations, and a simple colour palette. My work is often inspired by nature and animals. Through the use of thread and fabric I explore these ideas by creating abstract sculptures. The pieces often featuring a specific soft beige fabric, wire and cardboard to create the frame of the piece. Hand stitching is used to aid to sculpt the pieces, sewing supplies such as pins and safety pins to connect certain pieces to one and other. My artistic practice combines the historic and the abstract. By using a historic craft medium like sewing and combine that with abstract art I create pieces that explore themes of history and nature. Sewing allows me to be very hands on with my work, problem solving through my hands to create my sculptures.
Artemis Higgins
Artemis Higgins in their final year of college has started to explore and experiment with stained glass. As a type 1 diabetic, their work revolves around chronic illness and the body. Artemis uses solvent-based paints on glass to create textures that appear like blood once it is outside the body. The work itself is very messy and imperfect to reflect their feelings towards having this condition. The pieces of glass are soldered together with rough edges and gaps to create a harsh representation of what the outcome of having this condition could be. Their art is focused on expressing and deconstructing their experiences with diabetes and feeling betrayed by their own body at times.
Callum Mernagh
Callum Mernagh is a fourth-year student currently studying Visual Art at South East Technological University in Waterford. His art uses a wide range of mediums, including painting, sketching, and photography. In recent work however, he has begun to experiment with the possibilities of creating artworks using found objects, specifically exploring how an individuals personal possessions convey messages to others.
The aim of his art is to draw the viewer into studying his artworks in order to piece together its story. By assembling and displaying objects and possessions in such a way as to encourage audiences to linger over the details, piecing together the underlying stories within each work. Whether working with traditional media or unconventional objects, his practice is driven by a desire to create an experience that rewards a viewers curiosity and observation.
Charles Jacob
My childhood holidays were spent by the Atlantic Ocean, turning over rocks at low tide, searching for life. I explored the mountains, constructing shelters from stone, bracken, and heather. I learned about the clouds, watching how they alter our perception of landscape. These experiences of collection, construction, and careful observation continue to shape how I see and make.
My artistic practice exists at the intersection of memory and material transformation. Working as a polymaterialist, I excavate, recombine, and reimagine found objects and fragments—corroded metal, weathered wood, discarded ephemera—that carry embedded histories. Each work resists singular narrative, instead offering fragmented glimpses that honour both personal recollection and the material memory inherent in objects themselves. My work is stubbornly, insistently physical—real, remembered, and accumulated through the collision of construct, object, and memory.
Ciara Meagher
Ciara Meagher is a textile artist living in Waterford with her husband and their five children. Homeschooling and creating side by side with her children are central to her daily life, and these shared moments naturally guide her artistic practice. Her work explores the lived complexity of motherhood—the tenderness, the exhaustion, the resilience, and the constant negotiations between self and others. The soft textures and slow processes of textiles like weaving and felting help her express feelings that are difficult to speak aloud. Ciara looks at the real complexity of motherhood, showing both its tenderness and its challenges. She tries to captures honest, everyday moments that are often overlooked.
Diane Vakal
Diane Vakal creates installations with cardboard and found materials. Cardboard is accessible, versatile and familiar which makes it the perfect material for Diane, as it grants a sense of comfort for the viewer. She creates different worlds through cardboard, combining the cardboard with other familiar objects and materials. The materials she uses have a common theme of comfortability to make the viewer more welcome within the space.
She sets to create experiences and show a story through world building within installation. She looks through her experiences within life and creates different worlds within them. She longs to nurture the world developing within her mind and express her inner self through installation. Diane works with installations to immerse the viewers within her universe.
Eimear Power
Eimear Power is a visual artist whose practice is rarely confined to a single medium. With an interest in the capabilities of the body in motion, Eimear dances through a use of drawing, photography, video, installation, and performance in an attempt to dissect and document the components of movement as an entity itself. Her explorations stem from the principle that the body is incapable of ever truly being still. She looks at how our small uncontrollable movements present and appear in contrast to our bigger and more intentional movements. Furthermore, she considers how the natural balance and tension between these different types of movement mirrors the dynamic inner workings of our thoughts. Eimear actively encourages her subconscious mind to have authority over her creative process. The artist merges her value for an intuition led practice, with her passion for aerial arts, to create striking figurative work.
Rionach McCafferty
[Photo to be added]
My work is based on the complicated issues surrounding matter of identity, faith, and memory. I explore how the visual language of Catholicism influenced my early childhood and my early perception of myself and the world around me. I work in a range of different media and materials such as clay sculpture, oil pastel, oil paint, and digital video. Since I was a young child, I was very aware of the religious constraints around me, rituals could be both grounding and suffocating. I interact with the symbolism of clay and how its like the earth, I can fold it to my own will. I can create forms that are durable and delicate, reflecting the conflict between sense of self and the burden of inherited beliefs. My oil pastel drawings and paintings continue this exploration through colour, motion, and texture, associated with nostalgia and abrasion through softness and abrasion. With exploring the complexity of faith, control, and personal memory, my work is a place for contemplation. Understanding who I was, who I am, and who I am becoming is very important to my work.
Sadhbh Daly
Sadhbh Daly (she/her) is a Waterford-based artist and animator, whose work playfully expresses the human fascination with movement and colour present from birth. She makes use of materials such as scrap fabric, acrylic on paper, buttons, plasticine, knitted pieces and blu-tack to create colourfully atmospheric stop-motion animations. This economical use and re-cycling of materials ties in to the thematic nature of Daly’s work, which often features scenes from nature that the artist observes to be vanishing in the modern day.
Gallery Opening Hours: Tue-Sat 11-5.30, free entry
