Audio-Described Tour: Joseph Heffernan exhibition with curator Aideen Quirke

This tour takes place as part of the 2026 Bealtaine Festival, Ireland’s national festival celebrating the arts and ageing.

Join us for a special audio descriptive tour of ‘where oxlips and the nodding violet grows’, a solo exhibition of work by Joseph Heffernan at GOMA Waterford, led by by the exhibition’s curator Aideen Quirke. This tour takes place as part of the 2026 Bealtaine Festival, Ireland’s national festival celebrating the arts and ageing.

Audio descriptive tours are designed to make art accessible to everyone. In this tour, Aideen will guide visitors through the exhibition with rich, detailed verbal descriptions of the works, bringing the visual world of the show into vivid focus for visitors who are blind, have low vision, or are experiencing difficulties with their vision. As well as describing the works themselves, the tour will offer insight into their artistic and thematic significance, providing a deeper understanding of Heffernan’s layered and symbol-rich practice.

Aideen Quirke is independent curator and artist from Co Tipperary, based in Cork City.

All welcome | Free admission

‘where oxlips and the nodding violet grows’ runs at GOMA Waterford from 9 May – 6 June 2026

About Joseph Heffernan: 

Joseph Heffernan is an Irish artist based in Backwater Artist Studios, Cork. Working across painting, drawing, text and assemblage/installation his practice is concerned with identity, rituals, performance and how memory is constructed.

Heffernan’s sculptural work uses found, antique and reclaimed materials to examine how objects can carry meaning. They are often devotional in nature and question how we chose to assign significance to things in order to construct and poeticise personal narratives. These assemblages and installations provide a theatrical setting for his paintings, drawings and texts.

His current body of work and upcoming exhibition ‘where oxlips and the nodding violet grows’ imagines a speculative narrative dominated by a game referred to as ‘The Ceremony of the Flowers’. While the rules of this game are only alluded to they seem to be an abstract synthesis of poetry, mathematics and esoteric knowledge that envisage the world as an abstruse place full of elaborate rituals involving obscure signs and symbols. It functions as an intercessor of sorts between the mundanity of the world and the quasi divine. In the process the work asks questions about belief and the things that we chose to put our faith in.

Image: ‘I have looked at it so long I think is a part of my heart, oil on linen, 50 x 40cm, 2025