Extended Run
Bailieborough Library, Bailieborough, Co Cavan

An Act of Madness is a collaboration between writer Martin Towey and photographic artist Suella Wynne, inspired by the few details known about his great-grandmother, Bridget Towey (née Flanagan), and her committal to Connaught District Lunatic Asylum in 1914. Suella’s images provide a visual context for the story, exploring Ireland’s history of mental health care, wrongful institutionalisation, and societal attitudes toward postnatal depression and mental illness.

The project aims to spark dialogue about how mental health is understood and discussed today, confronting the silence and stigma that have persisted across generations. Originally launched as a book and exhibition in 2019, the work continues to evolve — Martin is currently rewriting it as a play under the title A Dangerous Lunatic.

With text panel designs by Elena Duff.

Supported by Cavan Arts, Cavan Library Services and Bailieborough Creative Hub

‘Shroud’ by Suella Wynne

IOVA Photography Collective host The Four Elements exhibition in Gallery X, Hume Street, Dublin 2 opening at 6pm on Thursday 5 February and running until Saturday 14th February. Open Tuesday to Sat 1-5pm.

The Four Elements is a group exhibition exploring Earth, Air, Fire, and Water through contemporary photography. Moving beyond documentation, the show invites artists to treat the elements as emotional, symbolic, and lived spaces shaped by memory, movement, and change.

‘Shroud’ is a mixed media piece combining photography and site specific ‘finds’. Stitched over reeds is found baler’s twine while the sky is filled with the remnants of a decaying blue and white plastic bag. In this image I explore the idea that brokenness holds its own kind of beauty, and that restoration need not conceal damage but can instead highlight it with care and intention. The resulting work is a gesture towards empathy with the land –  a document of resilience, vulnerability, and the traces we leave behind.

Curated by Patrick Murphy
Venue: Solstice Arts Centre, Navan (in collaboration with Droichead Arts Centre & An Táin Arts Centre)

I’m pleased to share that two of my self-portrait photographs have been selected for Surveyor 2025, Solstice Arts Centre’s fourteenth annual open exhibition.

Organised in collaboration with the North East Network, Surveyor highlights the breadth of contemporary visual arts practice across Meath and Louth. This year’s exhibition brings together artists from the region, offering an engaging overview of current work and creative dialogue within the local arts community.

Curated by K:art Studio × Yiming Pi
Venue: Pie Factory Margate Gallery, UK
Dates: November 12–18, 2025

I’m delighted to share that my work, A Joining of Self, will be included in Chronicles of Intimacy — a group exhibition exploring the many layers of intimacy through fable, symbolism, and narrative.

Featuring artists from around the world, the exhibition reimagines intimacy as a dynamic, collective experience — one shaped by emotion, power, vulnerability, and connection across human and more-than-human realms.

Artists include:
Alena Saakian, Caijing Kuang, Chen Ren, Dora Siafla, Fanglin Luo, Fù Miàn, Gina Torchia, Jianjian Zixi Liu, Jingjing Xu, Julieta Tetelbaum, Lou Croff Blake & Madelyn Byrd, Manze Guo, Martina Licalsi, Milo Masonicic, Najme Kazazi, Olha Kalika, Qingyu Zheng, Pante’A Rezaei, Sadie Hennessy, Shenlu Liu, Suella Wynne, Valentina Sepúlveda, Valeria Solari, Valeriia Burliuk, Valentin Sismann, Vera da Costa, Ylenia-Gaia Dotti, Yuna Ding, and Yvette Yujie Yang.

Very happy to have been selected to show the above image in Beneath the Veil in The House of Smalls, Edinburgh, Scotland from 3 October – 1 November 2025). Coinciding with World Mental Health Day on 10 October, this exhibition focuses on the work of artists using visual art as a means of expression, exploration, connection, release, and recovery.

6th Annual ÍOVA Culture Night Exhibition
Venue: Reds Gallery, Dublin
Presented by: The ÍOVA Photography Collective

I’m pleased to share that my photograph Unhappiness is included in I Live Here, the 6th annual Culture Night exhibition by the ÍOVA Photography Collective.

This year’s theme, I Live Here, reflects on the many places and spaces we inhabit — in our minds, our bodies, our homes, and our communities. It asks us to consider how these inner and outer worlds shape who we are, and how we, in turn, shape the world around us.

Featuring work from over 50 photographers, the exhibition offers a wide-ranging and personal view of life in contemporary Ireland — exploring belonging, identity, and the ways we find meaning, stability, and connection amid constant change.

Bailieborough Creative Hub’s Summer Exhibition takes places in The Courthouse, Bailieborough, Cavan from Saturday 19 July (opening at 2pm) until Saturday 2 August 2025

‘Dystopian Billboard’ examines the fragile boundary between nature and human culture, using decaying billboards as symbols of both resilience and impermanence. The work reflects on how our constructed landscapes are inevitably shaped and reclaimed by natural forces, revealing the intertwined narratives of humanity, environment, and time.

My environmental work explores the fragile and shifting relationship between humans and the natural world, often through landscapes where the traces of human presence are being weathered, reclaimed, or quietly absorbed by nature. Using photography and site-responsive practices, I focus on the points where growth meets decay, and where the constructed and organic overlap — revealing a space of both tension and transformation. I’m drawn to places marked by erosion, neglect, or abandonment — sites where the effects of time, weather, and human intervention converge. These locations speak not only to environmental disruption but also to the potential for repair. Natural elements and found human debris become materials through which I consider how damage might be acknowledged rather than erased, and how beauty can be found in what has been altered or broken. Central to my practice is the belief that restoration doesn’t have to mean concealment. Instead, I aim to highlight fragility with intention and care, creating work that acts as a quiet form of empathy—for the land, for the passage of time, and for the unresolved traces we leave behind.

I had the pleasure of exhibiting 6 of my images last weekend in the ReVerve Artist Collective group exhibition during the Hinterland Festival in Kells. The exhibition’s theme and the Collective’s theme is the environment.

Dúisigí which is the Irish for Wake Up! was our visual call out to viewers to pay more attention to our world, to what we are doing to our world and the consequences of these actions. My own images explore the fragile and evolving relationship between humans and the natural world, using materials and processes that echo both intervention and care. Through photography and site-responsive practices, I reveal subtle interactions between presence and absence, growth and decay, the natural and the human-made.

I have stitched natural elements and found human traces into these photographs in order to explore themes of disruption and repair. By working with landscapes marked by weather, time, and human debris, the tensions we inherit and the ones we create, as well as the possibilities for rejoining what has been separated are revealed.

Central to my practice is the idea that brokenness holds its own kind of beauty, and that restoration need not conceal damage but can instead highlight it with care and intention. The resulting works are gestures toward empathy with the land—documents of resilience, vulnerability, and the traces we leave behind.

The exhibition took place from 26 – 29th June 2025 in the Blue Chapel, Kells.

Happy to announce that two of my photos have been selected for inclusion in ÍOVA Photo Group’s exhibition Lucid Visions: Dreaming Through the Lens.

‘Dreams are fragmented, shifting, emotionally charged experiences which at their essence have an ephemeral, elusive quality. The show ‘Lucid Visions: Dreaming Through the Lens’ represents an opportunity for artists to manifest their dreams in all their splendour, reflecting on their own internal worlds and how they shape their waking lives.’

Opening Night: April 10th 6-9pm
Gallery X, Hume Street, Dublin 2

Exhibition Dates: April 10th–April 27 Gallery Open: Tuesday-Saturday, 1 – 5pm

I’m thrilled that my piece ‘Unheimlich’ has been included in Hamilton Gallery‘s ‘Bloodroot’ exhibition which was exhibited in Pulchri Studio, The Hague for St Brigid’s Day in early February and will open in Sligo on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2025.

‘Bloodroot’ is an exhibition of 110 artworks by women which were created in response to four poems by Annemarie Ní Churreáin from her collection, Bloodroot (2017, Doire Press)

The selected poems are as follows:

Six Ways to Wash Your Hands (Ayliffe, 1978) for the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, 
Bog Medicine 
Sisters
Market Prayer

Inspired by these four poems women artists working throughout Ireland submitted 419 artworks for Bloodroot. 110 of these artworks are included in the final selection for the exhibition.

Read more about ‘Unheimlich’