10 RESIDENCIES FOR 10 YEARS: GOMA’s 10 Year Anniversary Programme Launches
Over the past decade GOMA has grown within Waterford’s generous and vibrant artistic community, shaped by the artists and audiences who make this space what it is. This programme is our way of marking that milestone by staying true to what GOMA has always stood for: giving artists the time and space to take risks, develop ideas, and go deeper into their work.
Each selected artist receives a month-long residency including a studio space at GOMA, a €1,000 bursary, and accommodation. There is no requirement to produce a specific outcome or exhibition; the focus is on process, research, and sustained engagement with practice, alongside connection to GOMA’s studio community and our wider programme of talks, workshops and events.
Congratulations to all ten artists selected for this special residency programme:
Niamh Coffey, Tara Keegan, Róisín O’Sullivan, Ríon Duffy Murphy, James Wellwood, Sophie Hutchinson, Artem Trofimenko, Paul Mac Cormaic, Ben Reilly and Sarah Long.
We can’t wait to welcome you into the studios!
Niamh Coffey they/them
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.
Instagram: niamhnomilktwosugars
Website: niamhcoffey.ie
Róisín O’Sullivan she/her
Róisín O’Sullivan is a Cork-based visual artist working from Backwater Artists Group. Working primarily in painting and woodcarving, her practice explores experiences of landscape through abstraction, intuition, material exploration, and studio-based mark-making.
Recent highlights include being shortlisted for the Golden Fleece Award (2026), receiving the GOMA 10 Residency and Cow House Studios Residency (2026), and presenting A Deeper Well, a solo exhibition curated by Rachel Botha at Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group (2025). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at BienCuadrado Gallery, Barcelona, Triskel Arts Centre, Rathfarnham Castle, Butler Gallery, and an exhibition at the Lavit Gallery, Cork, curated by Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. Previous residencies include the Tony O’Malley Residency and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. Her work is held in the Office of Public Works collection and private collections internationally.
Instagram: @roisinosullivanart
Website: www.roisinosullivan.com
Image credit: Thalia Greaux
Tara Keegan she/her
Tara Keegan is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in County Clare, working across soft sculpture, installation, drawing, sound and social practice. Her practice explores the body as a site of lived and embodied experience shaped by processes of growth, decay and transformation. Through textiles, found objects and mixed media she constructs forms through stitching, binding, knotting, stretching, cutting and layering. Where making becomes a record of continual internal change rather than fixed bodily states.
Grounded in embodied experience her work investigates how physical conditions are formed, altered and held within material. Her recent body of work, Artefacts of Her Body, creates surreal, fragmented sculptural forms through textiles and found materials that evoke uncanny bodilyremnants. These works make invisible transformations materially present, reflecting on shiftingexperiences of feminine embodiment.
Keegan has exhibited throughout Ireland and internationally, including at 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Artlink, Trinity College Dublin, Haus-A-Rest, Cista Arts London, and Benches for Europe, a permanentpublic commission in Strasbourg, France.
Instagram: @keegan6402
Website: http://www.tarakeegan.art/
Ríon Duffy Murphy they/them
Ríon Duffy Murphy (they/them) is a socially engaged visual artist, working primarily with textiles. Their practice centres queerness, play, storytelling, intimacy, and neurodivergence. Their most recent work consists of interactive, human-scale soft sculptures, featuring rich colour and texture. Ríon was previously co-director of gender.RIP, a visual art collective focused on hosting queer creative spaces and platforming trans and nonbinary artists.
Ríon holds a BFA in Textile Art & Artefact from NCAD, and an MA in Gender Studies from UCD. They were awarded the Arts Council Agility Award in 2023, and Create’s AIC Artist Mentoring Award in 2024. Their debut solo exhibition, SQUISHY!, was held in the Project Arts Centre as part of Disrupt Disability Arts Festival 2025. They have also hosted events and exhibited work in venues including the RHA, NCAD Gallery, 126 Gallery Galway, Centre Culturel Irlandais, and Mermaid Arts Centre.
Instagram: rionduffymurphyart
Website: www.rionduffymurphy.com
James Wellwood He/Him
James Wellwood (b. 1999) is a Kilkenny-based visual artist. His practice documents everyday experiences and his immediate surroundings, with a particular focus on rural spaces. Through painting, drawing, and sculptural processes, his work captures quiet, intimate moments and fragments of daily life that might otherwise go unnoticed.
He graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art (Painting) from Limerick School of Art and Design in 2024, but in recent years, his practice has become increasingly multidisciplinary. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at The Hunt Museum and Ormston House (Limerick); Outset Gallery and 126 Artist-Run Gallery (Galway); GOMA (Waterford); Dunamaise Arts Centre (Portlaoise); and iP12 House (Chania, Crete).
In 2025, he undertook a three-month residency with Breaking the Patterns in Chania, Crete. That same year, he was awarded a Kilkenny Arts Office Arts Act Grant, followed by the Artlinks Bursary Award in 2026.
Instagram: @james_wellwood99
Sophie Hutchinson she/they
Sophie Hutchinson is a dance artist and movement practitioner originally from Waterford City, now based in Cork. A graduate of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, she works across live performance, moving image, and installation. Informed by Body-Mind Centering® and Authentic Movement, her practice explores embodiment, place, and our relationship to the world we inhabit. As one half of Hutchinson | Kemp, she collaborates with audio-visual artist Billy Kemp to create interdisciplinary works across dance, moving image, sound, and installation. Their film Nothing Exists Until It Moves (2025) has recently been developed into an installation for presentation at CineDans Festival 2026 at the EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. She is currently in the early stages of developing a new collaborative project with Surface Area Dance Theatre (UK) in partnership with Dance Limerick and with the support of Arts Council of Ireland and Arts Council England.
Instagram: @hutchsophie @billy_kemp
Website: https://www.billykemp.info/ https://www.dancerocklands.com/
Photo credits: Natalia Ziętara
Artem Trofimenko he/him
Artem Trofimenko is an Irish-Ukrainian artist based in Cork and a studio member at Sample-Studios, working across analogue film, sound, performance, and installation. Central to the work are questions of perception, transmission, and displacement; how signals travel, how memory sediments in material, how meaning emerges at the threshold between presence and absence.
He has received Arts Council Agility Awards (2021, 2024), the ‘Sample 15’ Artist Bursary, and the Cork City Council Artist Bursary (2026). Recent work includes f/XILE, commissioned by Sirius Arts Centre and presented at Lavit Gallery as part of Cork Fringe 2026. He is currently developing Radio Silence, a cross-border research project between Ireland and Finland supported by NEMO.
At GOMA, he will develop a body of research exploring listening, interference, and the visual residues of sound; working with Super 8 film, analogue darkroom processes, and scored action. The residency will include community engagement and public events as part of the research process.
Instagram: @artem_golden
Website: https://artemgolden.com
Paul Mac Cormaic he/him
MacCormaic was born in Dublin, in 1961 and grew up in Finglas, a working class suburb on the edge of the city. He continues to live and work in the capital. As a mature student, he read History of Art at UCD graduating in 2005. Since then, he has worked as a professional artist with some part-time teaching. Paul has won many prestigious awards and has shown 12 solo exhibitions.
Paul uses realist painting and collage to communicate his ideas and his idiosyncratic view of contemporary life. Much of his work is imbued with humour as he makes sometimes frivolous, sometimes profound, social comment. As well as direct observation, much of his source material is filtered from mass media, especially glossy magazines and TV. He has a wide range of interests for subject matter; food supply and eating trends, body shape and image awareness, ethics, health and wellbeing.
Instagram: @paulmaccormaic
Ben Reilly he/him
Ben Reilly Graduated Crawford College of Art and Design, 1987; Completed a BA in Archaeology, University College Cork, 1995;
Received a MA in Fine Art Sculpture, Winchester College of Art and Design, 1999. He has worked consistently as an Artist since 197 and has had solo exhibitions across Ireland and in Germany (Berlin/Munster). Ben has participated in group shows in Europe, China and America. He has been in recite of a Department of Education Scholarship award, Irish Arts Council Bursary, and Materials Grant, Claremorris Open Adjudicators Award and a Culture Ireland Grant. In addition to his artistic work, Ben has worked as a film projectionist e.g. Cork Film Festival (1988/1995) and as an Archaeologist (1991/2002). He is at present a full time Fine Art Lecturer in the Department of Creative and Performing Arts at Waterford Institute of Technology.
“Although I am fundamentally someone who works in sculpture, drawing, research and observations are core to my working methods. As with the practical process of cutting, fitting and shaping, so, the same applies to the logic of the research. The information gathered gets topped and tailed.
This approach of constant adaptation; whether working in sculpture, film, drawing or print, is the same. I stick things together; cutting, erasing, scraping, refitting and reforming until all elements come together in resolution, or not, as is more often the case! This process of continual reworking and research is central to my way of putting work out there.” Ben Reilly
Website: https://benreilly.ie/
Photo credits: Eric Vogel
Sarah Long she/her
I am a visual artist based at Backwater Artists Group. My practice focuses on suppressed female archetypes, the politics of representation, nationhood and myth through the lens of feminism. I engage in visual fictioning across painting, installation, performance, sound and writing as material. In particular, I use these mediums to embody, transmit and express my persona Mary. Mary is a little bit of me, a little bit of you, a lot of us and a reimagining of the Mother Ireland figure. Mary You I identify reverberations in Irish culture and combine these references with personal stories and motifs. I view this rearranging and reinterpreting of histories and visualities as an act of feminist fictioning, highlighting moments and ideas that haunt, shape and subjugate our collective consciousness, specifically our notions of the Irish nation.
Mary The work We I Mary seeps outwards to prickle and poke at cultural ideas of the landscape and how society is constructed.
Instagram: @sarahlongartist
Website: www.sarahlongartist.com
Photo credits: Celeste Burdon