VISUAL is pleased to present Mycelium, an exhibition by Kate O’Shea.

O’Shea is a socially engaged artist whose practice embraces a wide spectrum of mediums and processes. Mycelium represents a cross-section of her work that is by its nature fragmentary, improvisatory and subject to change. This nature speaks to the complexity and multi-layered relationships, contexts and ways of working that O’Shea embraces; the title Mycelium alludes to mycelial networks of fungi that are understood to communicate with each other across vast distances and disparate environments; acting as a metaphor for alternative modes of communication and collaboration essential to O’Shea’s practice.

In the Main Gallery, we see a selection of textiles gathered during O’Shea’s recent time living and working on Whadjuk Nyoongar Boodjar, Western Australia. These were hand-printed on over recent months in Cork Printmakers. These are brought together in an installation that marks some of the concerns and subjects of O’Shea’s work: among them LAND, IMPERIALISM, NETWORKS OF SOLIDARITIES. These themes are the starting point for myriad questions with knotty answers: in this case, HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

The works here weave through many contexts: Ireland, Scotland, Australia, Palestine and other places where O’Shea’s collaborative networks extend. O’Shea’s whole practice might be understood as an expanding and morphing archive, one which acts as a repository of histories. These are personal, social, communal and political. O’Shea’s engagement with them is rooted in social engagement, and a practice of relationships, radical friendship and hospitality. Works change and move exactly as the relationships and histories that inform them do. In some cases works await a new collaborator to realise or activate them – visitors are invited to wear a series of cloaks made from printed and hand-painted textiles hung on the gallery walls. The mycelial network is also reflected in a new sound work, playing in the gallery and realised by O’Shea and vocal artist and composer Siobhán Kavanagh.

Also included in Mycelium is a freestanding room dedicated to O’Shea’s printmaking. Again we see a multiplicity of methods and styles, with an emphasis on the use and reuse of existing materials. Overlapping and butting up against each other, the viewer can traverse them from the outside or the inside, moving across or through an ever-evolving catalogue. In the centre of the room is an audiovisual work that focuses on a handwritten newspaper created by Irish political prisoners on a ship bound for Walyalup, Fremantle, Western Australia in 1867. The collaborative work, featuring archival footage and fragments of conversations, demonstrates just one of the many connected threads that O'Shea's work follows across people, places and time. Nearby, O’Shea’s own archive continues in a collection of artist books containing a partial archive of O’Shea’s printmaking, which visitors are invited to explore.

O’Shea’s generous, generative approach to art-making is reflected in the positioning of Mycelium in relation to this season’s complementary exhibition Artworks 2026: Hold This, an open call exhibition that O’Shea was involved in selecting. The exhibitions share a space, and the lines between the two blur and soften. Visitors are encouraged to move from one to the other and back again, making their own contributions through looking, thinking, discussing and carrying away with them an expanding network of artworks and ways of being in the world.

Mycelium includes new and existing collaborative work made with Elize de Beer, Ron Bradfield Jnr, Tom Collins, Siobhán Kavanagh, Justine McKnight, Janine and Mladen Milicich, Enya Moore, Aideen O'Donovan, Katie Mooney Sheppard and Padraig Stevens.