Join us for an illustrated talk online as part of the Basic Talks programme.
Join us for Basic Talks with Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. Ní Fhlaibhín is an artist from Wexford and completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019 with Distinction and her BA at NCAD Dublin in 2013. She is the recipient of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin Staff Prize Bursary, the Goldsmiths Graduate Almacantar Bursary 2019, Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award 2020, Arts Council England Developing Creative Practice Award 2021 and Arts Council of Ireland Bursaries. Laura was a studio participant at Conditions Programme London and at Firestation, Dublin.She is a Gilbert Bayes Royal Sculpture Society Awardee 2024 and was twice shortlisted for the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award U.K, 2023 and 2024. Laura’s work features in the Arts Council of Ireland collection and private collections. Laura undertook a research residency at The Henry Moore Research Institute Leeds in 2024 and is the Derek Hill Scholarship Residency recipient at The British School of Rome, 2025.
Solo and two-person exhibitions include Britta Rettberg Gallery, Munich (2024), The Complex Dublin (2024), Commonage, London (2024), Belmacz London (2023) Palfrey London (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Hollybush Gardens London (2025) and ‘Footfalls’, curated by Yara Sonseca, Britta Rettberg Gallery, Munich (2024). Later this year Laura will exhibit at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and at Ormston House/EVA international.
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín works with materials related to healing and nourishment, both ecological and autobiographical. Sifting stories, materials and traces associated with site, memory, narratives of care and the casting of spells, she creates complex but pithy material scenarios. Her practice makes space for the more than human within the art-institution setting, white cube spaces becoming incubators for living beings such as earthworms, leopard slugs and willow trees. Working across sculpture, installation, writing and drawing, embodied care is both represented and inscribed in the material and narrative improvisations that are interwoven in her sculptural assemblages. She builds installations that operate as symbiotic ecosystems; sculptural assemblages giving structural and biological support, such as a network of soil pipes filled with worm bedding materials or a medicinal, and warming alcoholic tincture offered to gallery visitors over the course of an exhibition. Her assemblages function as nourishing hosts for growth and invite guardianship from the art-institution hosts. The looming threats of the environmental crisis and biodiversity loss echo through the work, and in her attention towards the material entanglements of our worlds, across species and things, she points to vibrant and nourishing kinships that can emerge from such alliances. The political charge and potential of art making to co-exist as an ecological type of caregiving is a constant motivation.
Free, booking essential on Eventbrite. Those who book will be automatically sent the Zoom meeting details.
Basic Talks is a series of talks with leading contemporary practitioners, taking place at the Hugh Lane Gallery. Curated by Basic Space in partnership with Hugh Lane Gallery, BASIC TALKS is a platform for lectures, workshops, presentations, and performances. Speakers include artists, curators, writers, and critics who will generate discourse on producing, framing and exhibiting art. BASIC TALKS is a collaboration between Basic Space and the Hugh Lane Gallery, exploring alternatives in the dissemination of contemporary art and its discourses.
