2026
SOLO EXHIBITION: BEYOND EYE SEA
Solo exhibition, Lavit Gallery, Cork. 26 February - 21 March, 2026.
Beyond Eye Sea presents a new body of work for my first solo show at Cork’s Lavit Gallery. This exhibition continues my exploration of the role of the shapeshifter as both a concept and creative strategy. Through this new work, I interpret concerns around marine biodiversity through a personal, mythic, and ecological lens. In my practice, shapeshifting is considered an active and playful process of making art—one in which the edges of the self dissolve and the human is reimagined as part something else.
Washes of watercolour and ink pool across paper, forming ambiguous, shifting semblances. This approach expands as I reshape these works into collaged cut-outs that extend across the gallery walls. As the material unfurls through the space, collaged forms lead toward a stop-motion animation where a figure traverses a series of transformations. What remains are traces—residues left at the end of each sequence.
Together, these works culminate in an ecosystem of forms, each distinct yet interconnected. Just as the removal of a single entity can ripple and reshape complex systems of life, Beyond Eye Sea embraces multiplicity, transformation, and the in-between spaces of being in a shared world. Through my work I ask: what possibilities emerge when we look beyond what is seen and recognise within ourselves the many and diverse others that make us human?
THREE-PERSON EXHIBITION: SHAPESHIFTING
GOMA three-person Exhibition. Gallery of Modern Art, Waterford. 29 January – 21 February, 2026.
GOMA Gallery of Modern Art is delighted to present the GOMA Graduate Award Exhibition 2026, an annual celebration of the exceptional talent emerging from Ireland’s art colleges. Each year, GOMA Waterford aims to highlight the wealth of talent graduating annually in the country by awarding selected graduates with an exhibition. This year, three artists have been chosen for the award: Danny Foley, Tanja Novacic and Patrick Penney.
For this exhibition, I showed a reiteration of my hand-drawn stop-motion animation A Tail of Two, six drawings from the video piece itself and my work In Two Places - reedited archival footage of myself as a child playing with my shadow as a double or non-human other.
Through an intuitive and experimental approach to drawing, painting, and animation, this work explores the shapeshifter as both a concept and creative strategy in my artistic process. Within my art practice, shapeshifting is considered an active, curious, and playful means of making art –where the edges of the self dissolve and the human is reimagined. Mixed-media works, early videos of me playing as a child and a stop-motion animation unfold as metamorphic journeys within shared spaces, shifting in and out of form, mirroring changes in state and being.
CROSS-POLLINATE
Clancy Quay/Super Projects Professional Development Group Show. Clancy Quay Studios, Dublin, January 29th - February 1st, 2026.
Beyond Eye Sea / From Within The Well collaboration by Danny Foley and Andrew Scully.
Danny Foley is an Irish artist currently based in Cork City. Foley received many awards including Student of the Year, Backwater Artist Group Moving-Image Residency, Best Thesis Prize and has had work purchased by Cork City and County Council’s art collections. He has exhibited in group shows both nationally and internationally.
Andrew Scully is a visual artist, currently on residency at Clancy Quay Studios. He is a recent graduate of the National College of Art and Design, who graduated with a degree in Fine Art and Visual Culture.
Foley’s work explores the role of the shapeshifter as both a concept and creative strategy. Experimenting with a broad range of intuitive approaches to drawing, painting and animation, these processes culminate to form immersive installations that contemplate ecological, mythic and personal relations.
Scully's work explores the relationship between the observer and the observed. His work talks about the power dynamic present between the two parties and how matter or the subject of the gaze changes when observed. All of this, including ideas from Descartes "Mind-body Dualism" along with concepts from "Actor Network Theory" are at the core of Andrew Scully's practice.
Foley’s most recent animation Beyond Eye Sea presents watercolour and ink washes on paper that pool together, creating both ambiguous and hybrid forms. The piece unfolds as a figure traverses between transformations, mirroring changes in state and being. The most recent work of from Scully, From Within The Well consists of a truncated dressing table allowing the audience to view inside the piece and watch the animation piece made by Foley, Beyond Eye Sea.
From Within The Well acts as a viewing space while also feeling like an exploration of the personal and interpersonal life of the observed. The work of Foley is reflected within the confines of the dressing table creating a more intimate experience between the participants. The pieces, when combined in this manner, create two narratives. One depicts the personal entanglements between two given parties. That being of the shapeshifter, an ever-changing entity, encountering the new intimate spaces and reacting to the force of the observer. The second narrative highlights the importance of community and networks between both the artists participating in the Super Projects professional development program and beyond. There is a strength and significance to the collective journey experienced in the transition from students to practicing artists, showing the importance of connecting to others in your field and helping each other in progressing careers.
2025
EARTH
MTU Arts Office STEAM Group Exhibition. James Barry Exhibition Centre, MTU. 3rd - 21st November, 2025.
This exhibition is selected and presented annually by the MTU Arts Office to a number of BA (Hons) alumni from the MTU Crawford College of Art & Design. It celebrates innovative art and design works that connect to STEAM concepts.
This might include works and projects that investigate or utilise methods or materials common to another discipline, or that explore new connections and interactions.
Presenting their work in a group exhibition in the James Barry Exhibition Centre is another opportunity to further explore connections and possibilities, and for the artists to engage with expertise from around the MTU community that can benefit their development as artists and designers.
This year sees seven BA Hons in Fine Art & Visual Communications selected to represent their degree works of Alan Foley, Aoibhean Geary, Aoife Clifford, Caoimhe Murphy, Danny Foley, Pascaline Horan, and Patrick Penney. The exhibition title EARTH been used to connect to the themes of grounding, transformation, the universe, information overload, skin, symbiocene, and perception.
For this exhibition I exhibited my hand drawn stop-motion animation A Tail of Two and three out of seven of the end result drawings form the animation itself.
Cork City Council Exhibition
Cork City Hall Atrium, Anglesea St. Cork. July 17th - 22nd, 2025.
This exhibition was the result of my artwork Guide II Shapeshifter being purchased by the Cork City Council’s art collection. The piece was put on display in tandem with a reception for Cork City Council 2025 arts and funding recipients hosted by Lord Mayor Cllr Fergal Dennehy in the Cork City Hall Atrium.
A Tail of Two
MTU Crawford College of Art and Design BA (Honours) in Fine Art Degree Show Neither Here Nor There. June 6th - 12th, 2025.
The installation A tail of Two navigates the shifting boundaries between the human and the More-Than-Human World. Working across drawing, animation, and installation, this work explores the self and otherness through a lens of Irish folklore—guided by the Púca, a shapeshifting trickster spirit.
In my practice, the Púca is not merely a subject, but a method: a way of working that embraces transformation, chance, and the unknown. Drawing from archival footage of his infancy, I am is seen playing with his shadow as a double or animal other, my work considers the self as unfixed, formed by ongoing encounters with the other—both human and non-human.
These themes now echo in my large-scale drawings and stop motion animations. Using charcoal, he renders shadowy figures that act as guides. Shaped by mythic and ecological entanglements, each drawing is a threshold or a mirror, emerging intuitively through the act of mark-making, erasure, and discovery. The animations unfold as metamorphic journeys across empty terrains—creatures transforming in and out of form, mirroring shifts in state and being.
By reconnecting with the embodied gestures of my childhood and drawing from tales of the Púca, This body of work contemplates on ideas of ecological consciousness, the multiplicities of being and seeks to disrupt human-centred hierarchies through the perspective of the self/other as shapeshifter.
SPECIES / MAKE 2025
Group exhibition, MTU Gallery at 46 Grand Parade, Cork, as part of MAKE 2025: ART/INTERSPECIES Symposium. March 8th – March 28th. Pallas University of Applied Sciences, Tartu, Estonia until July, 2025.
The SPECIES exhibition in MTU Gallery at 46 Grand Parade, Cork, featured artworks which embody an interspecies ethos, which cross boundaries of plant/human, animal/human; which show empathy for our fellow non-human species.
For this exhibition, I showed nine small-scale drawings entitled Púca Series. This series of drawings was inspired by still images taken from archival footage of my infancy, where I am seen taking on the imagined perspective of various non-human animals. Guided by the Púca, a shapeshifting trickster spirit, these drawings were made to reflect on mythic and ecological entanglements between humans and non-humans through the perspective of the self/other as a shapeshifter.
The exhibition travelled to the Pallas University of Applied Arts, Tartu, Estonia, and was displayed there until July, 2025.
2024
THE TALE OF THE NORWAY SPRUCE AND THE BARK BEETLE – Ecological Crisis and Trauma
Group exhibition, 1111 Gallery, Budapest. August 31st – September 13th, 2024.
Starting from a garden, the international artists’ exhibition investigates the phenomenon of traumatic loss and disappearance of a well-known species, affecting local residents personally, as well as the problem of ecological change in general in a local, regional context. The research-based exhibition explores the complex ecological, horticultural and social issues related to the extinction of spruce trees with special emphasis to the relationship between human and more than human agency. The exhibiting artists’ research was supported by experts who gave a series of lectures, with examples such as new strategies for tree replacement, urban opportunities for creating functioning ecosystems. For the exhibition, I showed a series of three mixed-media paintings on canvas, created as a personal response to the cutting down of deceased pine trees on Gellért Hill. The short film In the Quiet was made in collaboration with Marta Massa and Yeasir Arafat, who recorded me, my studio, and the places I was researching in relation to the work I was making while living in Budapest. Shown beside my paintings, the film tells a story in the context of the pine trees and of the reciprocity between the human body and the more-than-human world. By presenting the viewer with interactions between human and non-human bodies in public spaces and places, this collaboration expands on the themes of the show.
TWISTER
Group exhibition, MaMü Galéria, Budapest. May 3rd – May 23rd, 2024.
For this exhibition, I presented a series of three mixed-media paintings on canvas, created as a personal response to the cutting down of deceased pine trees on Gellért Hill. In these works, I explore the complex ecological, horticultural, and social issues surrounding the decline of spruce trees in Budapest, with particular emphasis on the relationship between human and more-than-human agency. Through the process of painting, I reflect on my own relationship to the trees and the spaces they once inhabited, seeking to empathise with how their disappearance has affected local residents personally, as well as the broader challenges of ecological change within a regional context.
2025 © Danny Foley
