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Isabel English, Sibyl Montague & Liliane Puthod create new work in response to the unique space at St Carthage Hall, and in consideration of each other’s practices.
Sometimes Words celebrates the dialogue between artworks, quietly revealing the interconnections between individual practices and collective meaning. The artists challenge the traditional boundaries of sculpture, shifting between the industrial, the organic, the domestic and the commercial.
The exhibition is accompanied by a commissioned text by Rachel Donnelly.
Join us for the exhibition launch on Saturday, 3 October 2026, 3 – 5pm.
Open Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays, 12- 5 pm (during exhibitions) & other times by appointment. Admission Free.
St Carthage Hall, Chapel St, Lismore, P51 WV96
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Isabel English approaches artistic practice as a site of autofiction. Working in the combined mediums of photography, textile and sculpture, she draws on the architecture of the home to fuse sites of personal significance with the politics of psychology. In her contextually sensitive installations, body and building become analogous, with the body acting as a building that houses an emotional interiority and the building as a body that protects what is inside and those who dwell in it. The gestures of covering, protecting, layering and armouring are significant processes in her work, where concealment and exposure remain in continuous tension. As viewers, we stumble upon an undisclosed intimacy, encountering forms of human experience that remain protected and concealed beyond the limits of language. Her work occupies a space between the private and public – the boundaries of both fraying, and hovering between the tangible, the elusive and the not yet known.
Sibyl Montague works across sculpture, moving image and textiles. Her practice explores counter narratives that deconstruct popular iconography and language, making work that reflects on inter-species relationships and human connections to land and resources. Combining everyday ‘poor’ material sources with the hacking and disassembly of commodity goods and media, ongoing series such as 'Handheld' or 'Blankets' use thrifted, found matter and digital detritus, that is re-shaped to form new hybrid compositions. Her work focuses on disruptive, dissident and intimate processes of making, that remediate and re-root mass material to its base as extractive, sentient and ecological. Looking to Irish language as a source, her recent work uses song and modes of story telling that re-centre knowledge gathered from rural and ancestral communities, geological and mythological sites. Montague's practice has at its heart an expression of fite fuaite - the concept of interconnectedness, interwoven and the inextricable mix between fibre and being.
Liliane Puthod works in the style of an ad-hoc archaeologist, excavating and revealing stories embedded in everyday consumer objects – whether found, repurposed or fabricated. Working in sculpture, installation, drawing and site-specific interventions, Puthod uses a comedic graphic language to bring cultural artefacts to life, deconstructing the visual language of advertising into something more humorous, yet melancholic and uncanny. Through her work, she reflects on the daily commodification of objects and materials, considering what should be preserved, held or contained based on how, when and why they have been made. Engaging with experts and specialists in many disciplines, her practice explores different experience of labour – its relationship to the body, and the values that connect or undermine the handmade versus the machine-made.
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Image: Liliane Puthod, added bonus, 2026 tin, lead, antimony, 2 x 3 cm. Courtesy the artist.
