At Night the Hens Stand and Dream | Niamh Coffey

This exhibition combines two bodies of work, Siúnta (2023-25) and Clodhoppers (2025-ongoing).Taking its name from the Irish for a seam or joint, Siúnta weaves together past narratives to imagine new ecological relationships. Clodhoppers takes its name from how the celestial characters, Sphinx, Moon and Godwoman, refer to the earthbound subjects in Marina Carr’s play The Boy. Clodhoppers widens these imagined relationships to include cosmic connections. In this exhibition, forms of flesh, fur, flower and feather mingle and merge. Subjects create symbiotic and antagonistic relationships, exhibit absurd actions and explore neoteric habits together.

In 1937-39, the Irish Folklore Commission asked primary school children to collect local history from their relatives and neighbours. Nestled in exercise copies, between thousands of stories detailed in meticulous handwriting, lie their tales of metamorphosis and binary-blurring. Hares become milk-hungry witches, needy children are turned to stone, gooseberries transform sore eyes, tadpoles swirl in boggy bellies. Siúnta uses these instances of metamorphosis as departure points to wriggle further into absurd and imaginary realms. These archives show that in an earlier Irish imaginary world, the boundaries that separate us from nature and other entities were not so separate and fixed, but porous and blurred.

The exhibition was made by gathering these stories of binary-blurring between humans and non-humans and making drawings based on them. These drawings then played together, created links and found connections, they were collaged together, their elements were extended and emphasised, their actions sped up and slowed down, their beginnings swapped with their ends, subjects up and left one story for another. Narratives eventually emerged from this process and were brought into a textile world, a medium used because of its rich history with collaborative story-telling, connotations to gender and queerness and ability to physically join separate elements together.

In Clodhoppers, wider historical, alchemical and folkloric beliefs of human connection to the universe inspire and mix with these narratives. In the textile collage To Fix in a Waxy State, disembodied leatherette hands diligently knit, sew and prepare skin suits from kneeling wool donors as animal eyes wait from a star-lit sea. Soft swollen constellations of blackberries spit, gurgle and glisten. Worms wriggle in wonder among glittering moon rays. In The Twirlers, a hand-drawn wallpaper, subjects twist into wheels and perpetually spin from the sky, down and down a dug path, trowels and watering cans in hand and foot as they whirl through peeping cow-trodden piles of upturned earth.

These imagined narratives offer a humorous invitation to envisage new ways of interacting with and existing within the larger matrix of nature and the earth. This work is guided by the concept of queer ecology, which asks us to abandon ideas of human exceptionalism and anthropomorphism and instead asks us to see humans as part of a complex and interwoven system, whose patterns and processes are different from our own.

This work was kindly supported by a Laois Co. Council Arts Act Grant, Bród na Gaeltachta’s Ceangal residency and GOMA’s Ten Year Anniversary residency.

 About the artist:

Niamh Coffey is a Dublin-based artist from Laois, working with textiles, drawings and sculpture. Their work experiments and collages ideas from ecology, queer theory and Irish folklore to create imagined relationships. Niamh graduated from NCAD in 2016 with an honours degree in Sculpture and Expanded Practices. Their debut solo exhibition was held in Cultúrlann, Belfast in March 2025 and shown again in Pallas Projects, Dublin and Súil Gallery, Clare. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Custom House Gallery, Mayo, GOMA, Waterford and The Arthouse, Laois. They have received funding from Laois Co.Co from 2024-26.

Curated by Jenna Whelan

Artist’s Website: niamhcoffey.ie

Instagram: niamhnomilktwosugars