Joseph Heffernan Residency

Joseph Heffernan is a Cork-based visual artist, primarily a painter but also working in sculpture and assemblage. His work explores the ephemeral nature of memory, identity and fantasy and how these things are intertwined to form augmented fictions. It can best be understood as a mapping of interior mental spaces as well as an attempt to reconcile the real exterior world with those spaces. The work takes the philosopher Gaston Bachelard's seminal text ‘The Poetics of Space’ as a model through which to explore the ability of objects to act as totems of personal meaning. In 2023, he received an individual artist bursary from Cork City Council and presented a solo show “A Thousand Years” in Studio 12 Gallery, Backwater Artist Studio. He has exhibited extensively, including in the Lavit Gallery, RUA RED and RHA.

This residency will offer Joseph the opportunity to consolidate a new body of work in a new context and develop further solo exhibition opportunities, at a critical juncture in his career.