Monday to Sunday 11am to 6pm (last entry 5pm)

Print Out

St Carthage Hall

25 Apr - 14 Jun, 2026

25 Apr - 14 Jun, 2026

St Carthage Hall, Lismore Co. Waterford

Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays, 12 - 5pm

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Print Out

Christiane Baumgartner, Kaye Donachie, Cecily Lasnet, Catriona Leahy, Ryan McClelland, Ciara Phillips, Small Night Projects (with Marian Balfe, Fiona Banner, Husk Bennett, Noel Hensey, Mark Leckey, Asha Murray, David Sherry, Philipp Timischl).

Curated by Paul McAree

Lismore Castle Arts is delighted to present Print Out, a group exhibition reflecting on the ways artists are pushing the boundaries of contemporary printmaking, and exploring the vitality of print as a means to address issues of image making and process today.

With historic associations of process and dissemination, printmaking today operates as a critical site for experimentation and inquiry. In an era dominated by digital imagery and rapid circulation, contemporary artists are increasingly returning to a myriad of print processes to question how images are produced, mediated and understood. Printmaking’s inherent qualities of repetition, translation and transformation make it uniquely suited to examining the reliability of images and the systems through which they circulate. Print Out foregrounds print not only as a medium but as a conceptual framework: a way to interrogate the authority of images, the politics of reproduction and the physicality of display.

Christiane Baumgartner utilizes a contrast of techniques, from using one of the oldest printing techniques, namely the woodcut, and modern technology, namely videos and video stills, bringing digital technology back to an analogue state. In doing so, she depicts contemporary motifs, including vehicles, traffic scenes, flying objects, wind turbines in nature or pure landscapes. Her works present the contrast between speed and standstill. Through the arrangement of linear structures, the images evoke the illusion of flickering: they seem to move and constantly change. Sunken Treasure - Diamonds IV, 2024, is a large-scale woodcut of a seascape. Although it may first appear as a peaceful meditation on the natural world, it marks a tension between nature and human conflict. The artist began this body of work in 2022 when she first heard news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the outset of her career Baumgartner’s woodcuts were informed by her experience of growing up in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall; over thirty years later, the artist has described the same feeling of paralysis experienced in her youth in Cold War Germany. The Sunken Treasure prints form part of Baumgartner’s ‘inner world’ and are also intended to present a view from below. The artist, who has often critiqued material culture and human consumption in her practice, names the variants in this series after precious stones. Sunken Treasure – Diamonds IV, is depicted in vivid colour, as the artist grapples with human ideals of beauty and value, compared with the limits and constraints of global growth.

Kaye Donachie is a painter known for her muted, figurative paintings. Throughout her work, she interprets Avant-Garde women, using history and biography and an archive of found and personal imagery to conjure up characters and tableaus that are at once mysterious and deeply evocative. Often the paintings are a description of time and place that drift between dream and reality, an echo of the past re-imagined in the present. Her prints extend the atmospheric and painterly qualities of her paintings, layering memory, portraiture and landscape. Through delicate tonal fields and subtle figuration, Donachie constructs poetic visual narratives that evoke forgotten or marginalised histories. For Lismore, she has produced a limited edition made onsite in our newly established print studio, and is the first in a series of yearly print commissions. Using litho, she brings a delicacy of touch to this new work, at once evocative of an Avant-Garde poster or nostalgic film advert.

Cecily Lasnet is a London-based artist who uses painting, drawing and writing as media for recording moments in time, and time passing between moments. Her work focuses on how personal memories are experienced, held within, and how they can change or slip away. In considered, diorama-like compositions, Lasnet uses the dramatic potential of still life to create theatres for experiences, feelings and thoughts. The Poetic Steps of Eulogised Space focuses on the poetics of the everyday, emotion, grieving, journeys and space. Presented on a custom made freestanding shelf, this series of screen prints is laid out like the pages of a book, inviting us to study, compare, and take a moment in the subtlety of the work.

Catriona Leahy’s Rupture I and Rupture II form part of her ongoing research into the degraded peatlands in the midlands of Ireland as a result of industrial extraction. The work draws on the relationship between bog and photographic darkroom to speak of the hidden yet precarious state within which both bog and image are held. In its pristine condition, the bog can be thought of as a natural darkroom, with powers similar to those of photography. Just as the photographic negative is kept safe in a latent state within the black box of a camera, so too does the bog remain preserved against time’s relentless march until it is exposed and, in the process, undergoes an irreversible transformation. While on one hand, Leahy aims to underscore this slow violence inflicted on the landscape, her sensitive handling of material suggests a practice that invokes care. As we face the realities of ecological collapse, how might we collectively tend to our ailing Earth, to suture the wounds and allow time to heal?

Ryan McClelland’s works practice has been grounded in appropriation and replication, investigating how images and objects circulate culturally and what transformations occur when they are re-used, manipulated, or re-made. His work begins with what already exists found images and objects subjected to processes of deconstruction, reassembly, and translation. He translates digital low quality images into slow, labour-intensive analogue processes such as woodcut. This slow process highlights the instability between disappearance and persistence. Labour becomes central: carving, printing, and layering foreground the embodied, durational presence often erased in digital circulation. There’s a Ghost in My House takes two estate agent images of Mark E Smith’s house, put on the market after the musicians death, and are here presented as monumental linocuts. The work serves to negate our desire to devour immediacy and celebrity, and acts as a form of witnessing that preserves and distorts memory, foregrounding the fragile imprints through which cultural memory persists.

Recognising the links between printing, propaganda and social activism, Ciara Phillips uses printmaking to prompt discussion around current social and political concerns. Her prints are not rigidly designed; though she sets out with ideas in mind, she allows the process of making to develop or interrupt these. Using a range of techniques – including screenprinting, photo-etching, woodcut, and relief printing – she combines non-figuratuve elements with text, figurative motifs, and her own photographs. Phillips also creates context-specific installations which foreground exhibition spaces as places for collective making, as well as discussion and display. She often works collaboratively, re-conceptualizing the norms of gallery spaces and involving other artists, designers and local community groups in her practice. Phillips draws much of her inspiration from Corita Kent (1918/1986), a pioneering artist, educator and activist famous for her reinterpretations of advertising slogans and imagery relevant to 1960s consumer culture.

The collaborative initiative Small Night Projects functions as both a publishing platform and an evolving exhibition format. Bringing together artists including Marian Balfe, Fiona Banner, Husk Bennett, Noel Hensey, Mark Leckey, Asha Murray, David Sherry and Philipp Timischl, the project explores the possibilities of print as a site of experimentation and circulation. Their publications and printed works blur the boundaries between artwork, document and edition, emphasising print’s role as a medium of distribution and collective production.

Together, the artists in Print Out reveal printmaking as an experimental field, one that is continually moving between analogue and digital processes, individual authorship and collective practice, image and object. By examining how images are produced, reproduced and displayed, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the authority and instability of the visual world around them. Print Out highlights the continuing importance of printmaking as a critical tool for thinking about images and the world around us.

The exhibition features a new print edition by Kaye Donachie, the first of a new series of print commissions made on site at Lismore Castle and are for sale at the castle gallery shop space.

Open Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays, 12 – 5pm, 25 April – 14 June 2026

Join us for the launch of two shows on Saturday, 25 April:
3pm: Print Out at St Carthage Hall
4pm: Salon at Lismore Castle Arts

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Images:

Christiane Baumgartner, Sunken Treasure - Diamonds IV, 2024. Unique woodcut on Kozo paper. Paper: 193 x 150 cm – Image: 172.5 x 130 cm. Courtesy the Artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery.

Ryan McClelland, Mirrors Image (There’s a Ghost in My House), 2025. Relief Print, Lithographic Ink on Kozo Paper. 2 Panels @ 90 x 125 cm each (Edition of 5 + 2 AP) 2025. Photo by Dean Brannagan. Courtesy the Artist.