Bealtaine | Place, Pace & Practice: A lifetime of making

Join us for a conversation between visual artists Laura Fitzgerald, Geraldine O’Neill, filmmaker Pat Murphy; chaired by the writer and visual artist Sara Baume, as they discuss a lifetime of making art and navigating life as an artist across countries, cities and country-sides.

Sara Baume is a writer and artist based in West Cork. Her fiction and criticism have been published in anthologies, newspapers and journals such as The Irish Times, The Guardian, Stinging Fly and Granta. Awards include Davy Byrnes Short Story Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, an Irish Book Award for Best Newcomer. Novels include Spill Simmer Falter Wither (Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize) and A Line Made by Walking, and non-fiction work handiwork. Her third and most recent novel, Seven Steeples, was published in 2022 and subsequently shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. In 2023 she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Laura Fitzgerald is a visual artist working in drawing, painting, installation, video, animation, text and audio. She received a Markievicz Award (2024) and Golden Fleece award (2020). Recent exhibitions include: Labour of Love, The Glucksman Gallery; Staying with the trouble, IMMA, and Car Wheels Going Around, with Lorna Corrigan at KCAT Art Centre. She has completed residencies at the Institute for Studio & Curatorial Studios (ISCP), New York; Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. She has been published by Paper Visual Art (PVA) Journal, Bog Bodies Press and Onomatopee.

Pat Murphy is a film maker who works across a range of practices. Exhibitions include P(ages), City Gallery Limerick, The Muybridge Solo, Vehicule Art, Montreal and Film As Film, Hayward Gallery, London. In July 2011, the IFI presented a retrospective of her work. Maeve, her first feature for cinema was screened in competition at a number of international festivals including Venice and won the Best Irish Film Award in Cork 1981. Anne Devlin, her second feature was completed in 1983. Nora, starring Ewan McGregor and Susan Lynch, was an international co-production Awards include the First Prize at the Trieste Film Festival, Best Script at the Abruzzo Festival and the UIP Director’s award in 2000. Documentaries include Sean MacBride Remembers and This is us we’re talking about….

Geraldine O’Neill is one of Ireland’s most recognisable artists whose work responds to the increasing confrontation with human engagement and relationship with the ecosystem, in particular the Anthropocene whose traces are now embedded within the geological layers of the Earth’s structure. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Curated by Hettie Judah in collaboration with Hayward Gallery, VISUAL Carlow (2025), Magic and Loss, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2024), In a Dream in a Happy House, with the S/TAC collective, Limerick City Gallery of Art (2024), The Ties That Bind, with the S/TAC collective, GOMA Waterford (2024),The Sunset Belongs To You, a socially engaged portrait project with Mick O'Dea, The Model, Sligo, (2023-2024), Shelter, with the S/TAC collective, The Print Gallery, National Gallery of Ireland (2023), It Took a Century, women artists and the RHA, The National Gallery of Ireland (2023). O’Neill’s work is in the collections of The National Gallery of Ireland, Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Model, Crawford Gallery, OPW, The Arts Council and the European Central Bank.

Bealtaine is Ireland’s national festival celebrating the arts and ageing. The festival is run by Age & Opportunity, the national organisation working to enhance wellbeing for older people through participation in sport and physical activity, arts and creative engagement, personal development, community collaboration and active citizenship.