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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. This exhibition marks the first time these three distinctive practices have been brought into dialogue together. The exhibition is accompanied by a commissioned text by Rachel Donnelly.
The artists challenge the traditional boundaries of sculpture, shifting between the industrial, the organic, the domestic, and the commercial. Sometimes Words explores the dialogue between artworks, and how artists engage in an intuitive dance of push and pull between individual practices and collective meaning.
Sometimes Words creates a thought-provoking dynamic in the gallery, with visitors encouraged to navigate the ebb and flow between these disparate works, uncovering a myriad of interpretations.
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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Through the combined mediums of photography, textile and sculpture, Isabel English extends from the literary genre of autofiction to create contextually sensitive installations. Drawing on the architecture of the home, she fuses sites of personal significance with the politics of psychology. In her practice, body and building become analogous: the body acting as an architecture housing an emotional interiority, and building, a structure whose fundamental ambition is to protect those who dwell within it. Here, the gestures of covering, protecting, layering and armouring become significant processes. These actions are traced onto the material properties of 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 along the jagged edge of uncertainty. Meaning can be reconstructed, but never duplicated, hovering between the tangible, the elusive and the not-yet-known.
Sibyl Montague works across sculpture, moving image, drawing 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 'Profit & Loss' use thrifted, found matter and digital detritus, that is re-shaped to form new hybrid compositions. Presented as 'tools' or series of assembled objects of use, Montague's 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 and folklore 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. She excavates and displays her findings to reveal stories embedded in everyday consumables, whether found, repurposed or fabricated. Working with sculpture, installation, drawing, and site-specific interventions, Puthod uses a comical graphic language to enliven cultural artefacts, deconstructing the visual language of advertising into something more humorous, yet melancholic and uncanny. Her work reflects on the day to day commodification of objects and materials, considering what should be preserved, held, or contained based on how, when and why they have been made. By engaging with specialists of many disciplines her practice brings different perspectives on labour, its relationship to the body, and the values that connect or undermine the handmade versus the machine-made.
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Image: Isabel English, a separate self, 2023. from the group show ‘Fly Floor’ The Complex Dublin. Photo: Jan McCullough
