“Transcend Dualism and Binaries:” An interview with Irish artist Niamh Coffey about SIÚNTA

 Coffey alongside Incisor Imposter (2024) to their left (our right) Pallas Projects/Studios. Photography by Serhii Shapoval.

BY EMMA CIESLIK September 18th, 2025

This past September 4th, Dublin-based artist Niamh Coffey’s SIÚNTA opened at Súil Gallery, Ennis. The exhibition explores the intersections of ecology, queer theory, and Irish folklore, visualizing imaginative ]ecological relationships. The exhibition takes its name from the Irish word for seam or joint, given Coffey’s work in textiles, alongside drawing and sculpture, and how this exhibition weaves together diverse narratives. 

SIÚNTA pulls from a 1937-1939 project of the Irish Folklife Commission, where primary school children gathered local histories from their families and friends. The preserved handwritten accounts document how the boundaries between human and non-human and human and nature blur. This exhibition features drawings based on these stories of interspecies interactions, which were further solidified into textiles. Like Sarah-Joy Ford, Coffey uses textiles because of its history with communal storytelling and connotations of gender and queerness.

Shortly after the exhibition opened, I sat down with Coffey to learn more about queer theology, a concept at the heart of this exhibition which sheds the biases of human exceptionalism and anthropomorphism and instead sees us as threads within a wider textile of living things. During a time of intense anti-trans violence--part of a growing wave of gender-based violence in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States, Coffey’s exhibition reminds us that harm against one thread, one community, one person, challenges us all, and that we are, as queer people, part of an ancient part of folklore and the natural world.

 Moon Pickers (2024), Pallas Projects/Studios. Photography by Serhii Shapoval.

Cieslik: Would you mind introducing yourself however you feel comfortable?

Coffey: I am a visual artist from Ireland. I make tufted and textile work about imagined ecological relationships. I work with ideas from ecology, queer theory, and Irish folklore. I studied sculpture at the National College of Art and Design and graduated in 2016, and have just begun working in textiles in the last two years or so. My first solo show SIÚNTA has just opened in Clare. This show was previously shown in Culture Belfast and in Palace Project in Dublin, and next year, it will be shown in Custom Gallery in Westport and GOMA in Waterford.
 

Installation view, Pallas Projects/Studios. Photography by Serhii Shapoval.

Cieslik: What led you to create the art in this exhibition? And how did you find out about the 1937-1939 project of the Irish Folklife Commission?

Coffey: The idea for the art in this show came about when I was already being drawn to make work about absurd, imagined, bodily relationships and systems and I came across the National Folklore Archive Schools Collection. It’s an archive that houses--so in 1937 to 1939, the Irish Folklore Commission asked fifty thousand kids to collect folklore from their parents, their grandparents, their neighbors, it’s their notebooks and copies of these interviews transcribed. They collected folktales, legends, cures, riddles and games,  oral history and topographical information

Reading through this archive, I began noticing that there were many instances of metamorphosis, and that the relationship between human and nature seems much more fluid at this time. The stories I was reading had so much visceral, feral, fleshy descriptions and tales around plants, nature and animals and the imagery in these stories connected to my practice at the time, so it seemed like a natural jump to start making work about this archive.

This archive also informed the methodology of my work, I was drawn to this idea of collective storytelling, how these stories were told, how this folklore was passed down, how some change and evolve over time, wondering what could be the original seed of truth that other flair and lore and story is built up on.

Because this archive is digitized, you can search for the same subjects, and you’ll come across some stories in different versions. It’s interesting to see the variations, what people had added or taken away or exaggerated. Even the way that it was transcribed-through a Meitheal programme of crowdsourced transcription – that's another set of people who have left their mark and interpretation on these stories. This porous nature of folklore felt like a luring invite to go ahead and use and change and collage these stories in my own practice.

 SIÚNTA (2025) on the right with the textile Metamorph (gemini season) (2025) hung on the back wall, Pallas Projects/Studios. Photography by Serhii Shapoval.

Cieslik: What does your artistic process look like, from seeing one of these handwritten exercises or stories to visualizing this as a drawing and/or textile?

Coffey: I spent days reading this archive, searching for images and instances of metamorphosis, or binary blurring. I would note them down, zoning in on the details that were visually exciting to me. I would then make ink drawings. They’d be more kind of illustrations or diagrams and at this stage, primary drawings. Once my studio wall was full of these black and white ink drawings, then I would begin a more creative process of secondary drawings where I would look and see what connections I could make between these ink drawings, what happens to this drawing if I let this one extend, what if I borrowed this element and put it into this one. If I multiply this, what happens? How can these two interact, what if these subjects met, can I emphasise this part, would I slow this down? Should I swap this beginning for an end?

From there, the drawings begin to cluster together. I start seeing more and more links and seeing what can be drawn together into a new narrative or moment or imagined relationship. I usually then focus on colour through cut-out collages or oil pastel drawings. A couple of them are in the show as they are. Then, they’re kind of translated from that textile format, but then even in optics, it’s not a direct translation. It’s seeing what works with the medium and what will kind of speak to the piece or contrast it. Tufting is quite a sculptural medium, you're creating contrast and perspective and shape not just through colour and line, but through texture and pile-height and whether you use a loop-pile or cut-pile gun.
 

Installation view, Pallas Projects/Studios. Photography by Serhii Shapoval.
 

Cieslik: What did you choose these mediums, considering the name of this exhibition translates to the Irish word for seam or joint?

Coffey: The name is a reference to the overlapping stories that I am drawing from, and it refers to a ragtag kind of intuitive approach to piecing these stories together because that was the physical way I originally began making the work, through textile appliqué. This medium, using found and second-hand fabrics, spoke to the collaged nature of what I was doing. These first appliqued works are in the show and called 'Rootin', Tooting', Hirsootin', Night Blinkers and Moon Pickers. After this, I stopped making these collages - I moved from a hot desk studio space into a larger private studio, taught myself how to tuft and moved towards less modular, tentative, less pack-uppable-at-the-end-of-the-day kind of work.

I find tufted work so alluring and wanted that allure on the side of the gross, fleshy, absurd imagery in my practice. I think, with tufting it's easy to be drawn into these soft, colourful, fluffy objects and then feel more receptive to what's happening in them, to have an embodied connection to that imagery.

The way I install the work serves to enhance this embodied reaction as well. I played a lot with scale in this exhibition. Incisor Imposter is a two-meter mouth that towers over the head of the viewer in a razzmatazz pink. You have to crane your head, open-jawed to see the top of it, but then with pieces like Night-Blinkers, where these clay eye details are the size of fingernails, you have to hunker down and squint. In the back of some of the freestanding works there are fabric pockets filled with drawings that you have to squeeze behind the frames to see. There were cracks and crevices where I put little cutout drawings and clay blackberries. With the installation, I wanted the viewer to have to peer and explore and look from different angles.
 

 SIÚNTA (2025) Pallas Projects/Studios. Photography by Serhii Shapoval.

 Bó-Tied (2025, right) and Rootin’ Tootin’ Hirsootin (2023, left), Pallas Projects/Studios. Photography by Serhii Shapoval.

Cieslik: How do your art (and these stories) capture elements of Irish folklore about the blurred lines of human and non-human interactions?

Coffey: With each work, most of them reference maybe 10 or 12 folklore stories each. Incisor Imposter pulls from tales and folkcures surrounding teeth, frogs, mouths. To cure a toothache, you’re meant to hold a frog in your mouth and squeeze it until it screams. In one story a man had fallen asleep drunk by boggy land and woke up with a killer stomach-ache. He was told he had tadpoles swirling around in there and was advised to return to the bog later that week, lay face down, mouth open and when he did so, dozens of frogs leapt free from his open mouth. Ew! And he was cured.

In Eye! Sore!, goose berry bushes will heal your sore eyes so you may become evil-eyed and curse anyone unfortunate enough to annoy or attract you. In Favourite of Seven, a captured merwoman's tail is hidden by a possessive husband. Her seventh child tells her where it is hidden. She grabs it and runs down to the shore, diving straight in and taking the child with her and turning the other six, who try to stop her, into stone. In Siúnta, there is an Irish folk cure for headaches--ribbons tied by weavers on a Tuesday and there are some fishing tips by foxes too that inspired the images of the stuck, face down furry heads.

Cieslik: I love this so much! Can you share one story in particular that you love and explored in this exhibition, or the story behind your favorite work of art in the show?

Coffey: My favorite stories are in B­ó-tied (Bó is Irish for cow). They reference stories about milk thievery and hares. Farmers were always worried about their cows' milk being sucked dry by witches, so to stop this from happening, they'd tie a ribbon around the cow’s tail to stop witches from stealing the milk. One account tells that the fairies are stealing and hiding the milk on the moon via 'moon-ladder'.

In another story, witches were able to change into hares--hares being witches' familiars, so they'd turn into hares and steal the milk. In one story, a farmer sees a hare, shoots her in the paw but she keeps running from him, leaps and disappears through a tiny window in a stone cottage. The farmer throws open the door to try and finally catch this hare only to find an old woman grinning at him and stirring a massive vat of milk, her arm pumping blood.

Cieslik: What is queer ecology, and how does it affect our understanding about our place within the wider world? For me, personally, your art showcases the rich existence of queerness within the natural world, and in doing so, defies that queerness is unique to humans and new in any sense of the world. Queerness has existed ever since humans have, and even earlier among other animals. Queerness is a key part of natural ecology, and reconnecting with our queerness as human beings is a form of innate healing and connects us to nature.

Coffey: Through the lens of queer ecology, all living things are considered to be connected and interrelated. Queer ecology seeks to move away from individualism to collectivism. It rejects ideas of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism that state that humans are unique and special and more important than the non-human. Queer ecology emphasizes perspectives that transcend dualism and binaries, such as the human and non-human, natural and unnatural, living and non-living. Queer ecology asks us to see humans as part of complex interwoven systems whose patterns and processes are different from our own. WM

The official launch of SIÚNTA will take place on Saturday, September 13th. SIÚNTA will remain on display until October 4th, which will be celebrated with a free drawing workshop.