CATEGORY

FSAS Presents: The Home that Held Us, opening 16 July

2 July, 2025

We are delighted to present the second annual Fire Station Artists’ Studios residents exhibition, FSAS Presents The Home That Held Us, curated by Clara McSweeney. Participating artists: Emily Waszak, Kian Benson Bailes, Alice Rekab, Evelyn Broderick, Paul Hallahan, Samir Mahmood, Mieke Vanmechelen, Day Magee and Sorcha McNamara.

This exhibition of works takes place across the public, communal spaces of Fire Station Artists’ Studios, celebrating the building’s long held function of providing home and shelter to it’s residents.

Curated by Clara McSweeney, the exhibition opening reception will take place on Wednesday 16 July at FSAS from 6pm. The exhibition will be on view daily until Tuesday, 22 July.

About the Artists:

Emily Waszak is a Donegal-based visual artist of Japanese-descent working in sculpture and textiles. With a background in industrial weaving, her work is concerned with ritual, ruin and landscape. As a widow, themes of grief and loss are ever present in her art. 

Waszak’s work has been exhibited in Ireland and internationally. Recent exhibitions include: Enchanting, and Then What Sorrow, Courthouse Gallery, Clare; URGENCIES, CCA, Derry (2025); Thresholds to the Unseen, Solstice Arts, Navan (2024); The Land and Others Including the Dead, Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin (2024); Grief Weaving, Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny (2023); Shadow and Fold, Arts Itoya, Japan (2023); To Guide Shadows, Old Church Grangegorman, Dublin (2023). Her work was also exhibited in IMMA as part of the RDS Visual Arts Awards exhibition. Waszak is currently a resident artist at Fire Station Artists Studios.

Kian Benson Bailes is an Irish artist from the northwest of Ireland and currently based in Dublin. His multifaceted practice explores rural Ireland, visual language and identity. Recent exhibitions include ‘Culchie boy, I love you / Grá mo chroí thú, mo chábóigín féin (21 Angels and Then Some…)’at Mermaid Arts Centre 2025,  and ‘Staying with The Trouble’ at IMMA 2025. 

Alice Rekab is a visual artist based in Dublin. Their practice is concerned with expressions and iterations of complex personal and cultural narratives. Rekab takes their own mixed-race Irish identity as a starting point from which to explore experiences of race, place and belonging. Their work centres processes of collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange from which they develop film, performance, print, text, and sculpture—creating new intersectional objects for exhibition. Recent Projects include Mehrfamilienhaus, Ricochet #14, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2023; Family Lines Project, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2021-22; Truth Flags Identity, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 2020; The Nomoli/Father talk, VERY Project Space, Berlin, 2019, and The Open Object, Stanley Picker Gallery, London, 2018.

Rekab’s work is held in the collections of Trinity College Dublin, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Cathal Ryan Trust and The Arts Council of Ireland. In 2023 they published their first artist monograph Alice Rekab: Mehrfamilienhaus with Museum Villa Stuck and Distanz Verlag Berlin.

Image: What is a Nomoli? 2022 Archive Version. Commissioned by The Douglas Hyde and supported by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon through a Project Award.

Evelyn Broderick is a visual artist, maker and ceoltóir. Her praxis MAKING|THINKING is an open dialogue that evolves through the interactions of the communities she engages with. Evelyn develops socially engaged structures to weave and bind sculpture, printmaking and sound together in order to question the role making has in a both social and collective context. In 2020 Evelyn was artist in residence at UCD’s Parity Studios at the College of Social Science and Law. She completed an 18 month residency at Studio 468 as part of Common Ground’s Radical Imagination community based residency. In 2023 Evelyn received the Create Artist in the Community Bursary. Evelyn was 2023’s recipient of the inaugural FSAS Residency Award for Artist with a Socially Engaged Art Practice. Evelyn is currently  working with HAN Housing Action Now supported by Create – national development  agency for collaborative arts Artist in the Community project realisation award 2025.

Paul Hallahan’s artistic practice primarily focuses on painting, but commonly brings in moving image and sculptural elements to his works and projects. Hallahan’s work is based in the abstracted interpretations of the world around him, delving into various subjects but mainly exploring human interaction and relationship with nature and civilisation.

Over the years, Hallahan has exhibited his works extensively, winning the Golden Fleece Award in 2018. He has exhibited his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions with recent solo exhibitions including Hang Tough Contemporary (2023), The Dock (2022), The Complex (2020) and Roscommon Arts Centre (2020).

Samir Mahmood’s work explores experiences of identity, migration, and spirituality. He uses the queer body to consider human vulnerability and assess its connection to the world as an attempt to offer a liberating new reality. He blends religious references in his work which hint at the experience of migration and the necessity to come to terms with new, old, and similar ideas and qualities represented in different cultures. Samir’s recent exhibitions include a solo show Of Other, and Possibility, curated by Rachel Botha (2023), and Braid at Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, Cork (2022). Recent awards include Next Generation Artist Award (2023) and Visual Arts Bursary Award (2024) from The Arts Council, Ireland.

Mieke Vanmechelen is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores nature, identity, and lived experience. Born in Belgium and raised in rural 1980s Ireland, she developed a strong connection to the land. As both an artist and a farmer, her work is rooted in the physical and sensory, touching on themes of belonging, resilience, and the human condition. Her recent film Hungry Hill, co-directed with Michael Holly, reflects the landscapes and stories of the Beara Peninsula. Their latest project, Immrám, is an experimental nonfiction film funded by the Arts Council. It explores Ireland as a place of indigenous European culture, focusing on language, place, and modern life. The film will premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh this July.

Day Magee is an artist, performer, and writer based in Dublin. Exploring the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the intersections of queerness, illness , and religiosity, their work engages phenomenology as an enactive creative material via performance-centred multimedia and workshops. Their work has been commissioned by and appeared in TULCA Festival (2019); Arts & Disability Ireland (2021); Pallas Projects/Studios (2022); Limerick City Gallery of Art (2022); 126 Gallery (2023); Rua Red (2023); the Hugh Lane Gallery (2023) and Mirror Lamp Press (2024). Their transdisciplinary practice is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Sorcha McNamara’s practice engages with deconstructive methods of painting, framing, language, and image-making, often expressing these methods through the means of site-responsive installation and a sense of resourcefulness with repurposed material.

Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Echo/Locate, Linenhall Arts Centre (2025), Fathomless Arms, Ballina Arts Centre (2023), (dis)attachments, The Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo (2022) and Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin (2022). Selected recent group exhibitions include VISUAL Carlow (2024), Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2024) and The LAB, Dublin (2023). Sorcha has previously undertaken residencies at Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2024), Zaratan Arte Contemporanea, Lisbon (2024), Totaldobze Art Centre, Riga (2022), and Tangent Projects, Barcelona (2021). Her practice has been jointly supported through the Arts Council of Ireland and Mayo County Council Arts Office. She holds an MA in Art + Research Collaboration from IADT Dún Laoghaire (2024) and a BA in Painting from Limerick School of Arts & Design (2019).

About the Curator

Clara McSweeney, is a curator, producer and artist from County Cork, now based in Dublin. She holds a BA in Fine Art Painting and Contemporary Practice from Limerick School of Art and Design and a Postgraduate Diploma in Cultural Event Management from IADT Dun Laoghaire.

She recently completed the ARC-LAB Curatorial Scholarship, which spanned 18 months and concluded in January 2025. This scholarship involved working part-time with the Dublin City Arts Office and The LAB Gallery under the guidance of curators Margarita Cappock, Julia Moustacchi and Arts Officer Liz Coman. Additionally, as part of the scholarship, she was a fully funded student in the IADT Art Research Collaboration Master’s program. She continues to work as a freelance curatorial assistant at the LAB Gallery since January 2025. 

Her current research interest lies in the peculiarities of certain vacant spaces in Dublin City, the potential dystopian future stemming from the housing crisis and the anthropomorphosis of inanimate objects. She currently presents her research through a variety of mediums, including writing, sound, curation, and performance.