An in-conversation event with artist Ciara Rodgers and curator Aideen Quirke, discussing Paper Façades make Tender Follies. Bringing her experience as a curator, facilitator, and collaborator working across contemporary art, collective care, and activist methodologies, Quirke will join Rodgers in a discussion expanding on the themes of the exhibition. These include architecture, gendered experiences of urban space, precarity, and the contradictions embedded within the contemporary built environment. Through installation, material experimentation, and spatial intervention, Rodgers’ practice examines how cities shape bodies, movement, and belonging, drawing connections between psychogeography, capitalism, and everyday acts of navigation and resistance. The discussion will offer insight into the conceptual and material processes underpinning the exhibition, and the role of contemporary art in responding to the spaces we inhabit.
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Biography:
Aideen Quirke (she/her) is a curator and artist from Co. Tipperary based in Cork City. She holds an MA Museum Studies from UCC and a BA Fine Art from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design. Aideen has a background working in curatorial, education, facilitation and production roles. She collaborates with artists to produce new work: contributing, facilitating and participating in theory (reciprocal knowledge production, research and writing); and hands - on practice (fabrication, installation, display methods and mediation). She also works as a facilitator, using textiles and printmaking to make art about collective care and activism.
Ciara Rodgers is a visual artist based between Cork and Waterford and works across drawing, installation, performance, and Polaroid photography. Her practice explores the entanglement of body and building, tracing how power, gender, and capitalism shape our physical and psychological experience of space. Through walking and material reconfiguration, she constructs fragile yet defiant assemblages and situations that expose the quiet contradictions and resistances embedded within urban environments. Looking between what shelters, confines or controls, Rodgers’ work occupies the threshold between the poetic and the political, the embodied and the architectural.
She holds a First-Class Honours MA in Art & Process from MTU CCAD (2018). A studio member of Backwater Artists Group and Cork Printmakers, she was awarded a Visual Art Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2020 and an Agility Award in 2021. Her work has been exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally, and often unfolds through collaboration and site-responsive research. Solo presentations include Folly | Façade at GOMA, Waterford (2024), Green Mouth at SIRIUS, Cork (2023), A City of Beautiful Nonsense at Studio 12, Cork (2022), Monuments II at Garter Lane, Waterford (2020) and Monuments of Abandoned Futures at LHQ Gallery, Cork County Council (2019).
Recipient of Cork Midsummer Festival’s Jane Anne Rothwell Award 2026, Rodgers has recently written for JAWS: Journal of Art & Writing and Source and is completing a practice-based Ph.D at SETU Waterford
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