Artist Insights: Caoimhín Gaffney | TULCA 2025
Artist Insights is an ongoing interview featuring artists participating in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Through short filmed conversations, the series offers insight into artistic processes, thematic concerns, and the ideas shaping each edition of the festival.
Caoimhín Gaffney
Caoimhín Gaffney is an artist working with film, photography and writing, whose work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally. Gaffney graduated from the Royal College of Art (MA Photography and Moving Image) in 2011 and received their PhD from Ulster University’s School of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences in 2022. Solo exhibitions include the Crawford Art Gallery, Block 336 in London, Contemporary Art Institute (CAI02) in Sapporo, and a national touring exhibition of new work from the Butler Gallery to the Highlanes and Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre.
The works on view are drawn from All at Once Collapsing Together, a series of medium-format photographs that act as mirrors to the healing that the natural environment can offer. Text fragments, infused with climate anxiety, interrupt and reframe these scenes as fleeting and fragile. The series poses questions from an unnamed protagonist who considers the potential of the natural world as a site for recovery from trauma. Strands of queer thought are threaded through the series, unsettling conventions of nature writing and intertwining with fantasies of destruction and transformation. Together, these elements invite reflection on the traces we leave on the earth, and on the porous boundaries between body, environment, and disintegration.
Video documentation: Laura Griffin