As part of our public programme for the exhibition Skin / Deep: Perspectives on the Body, join us for an in-depth talk with featured artist Pádraig Spillane. Pádraig will discuss the background to his extensive practice, his inspirations and the evolution of his work, as well as the collages included in the exhibition.

About the artist: Pádraig Spillane works with photography, collage, object-based assemblages, and installation. He explores desire through the intersections of imagery and mass-produced cultural forms. He views images as unstable, to be waywardly rearranged beyond their intended meanings and functions. His works are constructed using visual references from commercial display and collective imaginaries, exploring how images generate desires through their complex entanglements. Reorienting the drives and relations from aesthetic elements to consider suggestive potentials, his works perform as assemblies of disruption and appeal. Spillane lectures at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork. As well as exhibiting widely, his work features in the Arts Council of Ireland Collection, UCC Art Collection, and private collections. His work is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

About the exhibition: Skin / Deep brings together challenging artistic perspectives on the body in contemporary Irish photography and lens-based media. The featured artists take an expanded view of the social, psychological, and material realities of embodiment – of being a ‘body’ in the world. Through their individual practices, they call into question many fundamental assumptions about how gender, sexuality, and selfhood are manifested in and through the body.