SUBSTRATA a curated exhibition of four artists – Claire Halpin, Katherine Sankey, Maree Hensey
and Sohrab Uduman as part of The Five Lamps Arts Festival 2025 at The Substation, Dublin
Port in March 2025.
Each artist will create ambitious new artworks for this exhibition responding to the architecture,
physical space, unique and significant infrastructure of The Substation and its wider historical,
industrial, environmental and social heritage and context of Dublin Port.
As mid-career artists working in a range of media from painting, drawing, sculpture, print to video
projection and installation. The exhibition and installation will be site responsive in the form,
materials and materiality of the artworks from the three artists. Both reflecting their interest in the
substructure of the original 18 th century boundary sea wall – once serving to protect from flooding
and as catalyst for land reclamation and the unique architectural form of preservation embedded in
the building through the reflective glass floor.
Claire proposes to innovatively use the very physical format of the tea crates as substrate for her
paintings responding to the social history of port and docks as site of transit, migration and
immigration, cargo, mechanisation, labour, trade routes and post-colonial mapping – opened out,
deconstructed, unfolded crates, free standing within the space as outposts.
Katherine’s proposed work concerns framing the agency of the sea in the midst of climate chaos.
She will propose connecting two water syphoning apparatuses, that of a tree and of plumbing, in a
sculptural installation concerning the ingenuity of apparatuses of life and humanity. Using these brut
materials to engage with the theme of human – and all life’s – dependence on water and electricity.
This work considers how we are psychologically and physically entangled with our supply systems.
Maree’s work concerns the act of preserving, documenting, layering of meaning. material and
matter in surface tension. Exploring how what has been stable and familiar becomes uncertain,
perhaps profoundly uncertain and our future unknowable through drawing, print and video. She is
currently working on a collaborative film project with UK composer and musician Sohrab Uduman,
with the proposed work as a video projection with sound, the building structure, reflective glass floor
and underground layering of the Substation as an important consideration for the multi-sensory
experience for the viewer.
In association with FIVE LAMPS ARTS FESTIVAL 2025 and DUBLIN PORT COMPANY.
29th March to 16th April
10 am to 4pm
Monday to Saturday
The Substation, Dublin Port, Alexandra Road, North Wall, Dublin 3
