Conamara Sea Week 2026
Interface has loads of events at the festival this year, browse and book here below or check out the full Sea Week programme here
Panel Discussion: Becoming Water, Becoming Other
2pm, Saturday 17th October – Interface Inagh H91VW58
Craig Ferguson, Chief Scientist on the EMFAF sea survey aboard the RV Tom Crean with Ann Conmy
This panel brings together marine science and contemporary art to explore how we understand, represent and relate to water as conductor and connector of biomes. To also remember through deep time wet beginnings.
Marine Institute scientist Craig Ferguson, Chief Scientist on the EMFAF sea survey aboard the RV Tom Crean, will discuss the aims and objectives of mapping Ireland’s continental shelf: identifying and classifying marine habitats, collecting baseline data, and ground-truthing what exists on the seabed. He will touch on the surveys use of a remotely operated vehicle to explore the seabeds hundreds of meters below.
This research helps inform marine spatial planning and raises important questions about how human activities, including fishing, can coexist with the habitats and species already present. It also compares areas with heavy trawler activity with areas relatively free of this to identify how the fauna and biome are affected.
Artist Ann Conmy is presenting her interim PhD Fine Art exhibition “becoming water, becoming other” during Connemara Sea Week at Interface Inagh. She underwent fieldwork as resident artist on the EMFAF sea survey in July 2026. Craig introduced her to the many research tools aboard to collect data from the seabed. The intersection of science and art has created diverse and layered artistic outcomes.
This fieldwork exposed her to scientific methodologies which translated into artistic methodologies. She will speak about how her fieldwork influenced and informed the making of this body of work.
She approaches the ocean through the lens of a posthuman paradigm influenced by Astrida Neimanis and Luce Irigaray’s ideas of bodies as bodies of water that are materially entangled with other humans, more than humans and the inescapable wetness of life. Monstrosity and alterity have long been associated with ocean depths. Exploring how ideas of the other have historically been established within gender and the more-than-human world. Her practice considers the ocean as an interconnected biome where all life is sustained by and made in water. Drawing on mythological figures such as Sedna alongside contemporary ecological concerns to both examine the wisdom and critiques within the paradigm’s we understand both gender and ecocide.
Together, the panel will consider what happens when scientific sea bed research and artistic research encounter the same underwater world. While their methods differ, both ask a fundamental question: How can kinship be understood as vital?
Two Exhibition openings
4pm, Saturday 17th October – Interface Inagh H91VW58 – Book here
becoming water, becoming other – Ann Conmy
Ann Conmy is undergoing a PhD through Fine Arts practice at L.S.A.D. She is an artist living and working in Mayo. Her practice explores watery spaces as sites of entanglement, where bodies, beings, and matter intra-act. Societies and industries relate to water routinely through an extractive paradigm. The aim of her research is to convey water as an embodied relational material that can sustain wildly varied life and matter forms. There is a focus on redefining the lens to which we view and understand the other in all its watery, benthic and gendered forms. Ann has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the Marine Institute aboard the Tom Crean Vessel during a Sea Shelf Survey in July 2026 to understand the processes employed in ocean conservation. Here she further explored concepts of water as relational rather than objective. The exhibition will be a response to her expanded knowledge base after fieldwork and continued autoethnographic enquiry.
Caith sí an lá ag Cladoireacht – Lelia Ní Chathmhaoil
Lelia Ní Chathmhaoil is a multidiscplinary Artist from Inverin in South Connamara, living and working in a bilingual community. She has a degree from ATU in Art and Design. In the early days of living in Inverin, she was working as a handweaver and the beauty of the landscape found its way into her work and continues to do so.
In her work she is interested in ecology, our environment and the care we take of it. Her choice to use discarded materials from the seashore evidences her concern with environmental degradation in her surroundings. The wide variety of materials she gathers allows for greater spontaneity and ultimately informs what she makes, the materials direct her.
www.lelianichathmhaoilartist.weebly.com
Two poets and cello – Nicola Geddes and Fiona Hanley
An evening of poetry and music with supper at Lough Inagh
Sunday 18th October at 7pm 2026 – Lough Inagh Lodge Hotel H91 E3Y8
€45 – Booking essential – Book here
An evening of poetry with supper at Lough Inagh Lodge – poet and musician Nicola Geddes and poet Fiona Hanley.
Nicola and Fiona will share some work developed during their recent residencies at Interface. During this time, Nicola explored the life and journey of the Arctic Char – an endangered glacial relic species found in Lough Inagh – through her poetry and musical compositions.
Fiona’s research and poetry circles around the archetype of the lone woman and the poem as an act of collaboration. One subject of this has been storyteller, bean feasa, cailleach, farmer and out and out character Bina McLoughlin
Nicola Geddes is a poet and musician born in Scotland, based in Galway, a founding member of Luminosa, Galway’s professional orchestra. Publications include The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Crannóg, Southword, The New Ulster, The Blue Nib, Vox Galvia, Skylight 47 and Poethead, and internationally, on the Extinction Rebellion Global Creative on-line hub, in the Pinch journal (USA).
Fiona Hanley is a poet and dancer interested in convergences between the body, somatics and writing and using movement/dance as a way of more deeply embodying imagination. Her work is rooted in a conversation with the more-than-human world and with her aim is ultimately to increase her capacity to listen. Publications include Skylight 47, The Storms Journal and Howl: New Irish Writing. And she was the winner of the Bere Island Poetry Competition, selected by Enda Wyley, 2024.
Interface is an artist led studio and gallery based in a former salmon hatchery in the Inagh valley.
www.interfaceinagh.com/members/nicola-geddes/
Documents of Contemporary Art – A Panel Discussion
Sunday 25th October at 12 noon – AV Centre, Letterfrack
A conversation between Galleri Verkligheten and Interface. Accompanied by a performance by Olivia Hasset.
Galleri Verkligheten is a small artist-led gallery with 8 members in Umeå, in the North of Sweden, celebrating 25 years since foundation. Interface is a 9-year-old artist-led gallery and studio space with circa 190 members in the Inagh Valley.
Members of these two organisations are engaged in a collaborative project centred around the collection of essays Documents of Contemporary Art: Oceans. The group meets online to discuss and explore the essays and their resultant artistic directions. Interface is hosting a visit by the Verkligheten group in Connemara during Conamara Sea Week 2026 and will facilitate the first leg of an exchange exhibition at Interface during Conamara Sea Week 2027.
Olivia Hassett is a performance artist and collaborator based in Dublin. Her practice explores ritual and our relationships with the more-than-human world. Drawing on ancestral memory, land-based knowledge and Irish traditions. Through performance and collaboration, her work explores how memory, ritual and embodied knowledge might offer new ways of caring, connecting and finding resilience in a rapidly changing world. Hassett will present a short performance and video work created during a three-week residency at Interface Inagh. During the residency, she spent time co-creating at mountain and lake sites in the locality, drawing on the idea of Tenalach, a deep connection between land, water and human presence. Her explorations centered on calling across water, from Lu Island on Lough Inagh, and Derryclare Lough towards the surrounding mountains. Drawing on these embodied experiences, the works reimagine these encounters through personal and contemporary lenses.
Share: