About

Orla O’Byrne is an artist, researcher, and curator of St Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork City, Ireland.

She holds an MA in Art & Process from MTU Crawford, Cork, and is a PhD candidate, writing her dissertation on artists working with archival materials. Her previous awards include The Lavit Gallery Student of the Year, the CIT Registrar’s Prize and The Valerie Gleeson Bursary Award. She teaches life drawing at MTU Crawford in Cork and she is chair of the board at Backwater Artist’s Group, where she has been a studio member since 2020.

Orla works across a variety of media and methods such as drawing, photography and sculptural installation. She uses chalk, charcoal and plaster and adopts an experimental approach, constantly exploring and testing the limits of these and other materials. She also works in analogue photography.

The ideas behind Orla’s work come from the overlooked histories of specific sites or artefacts and she has a particular curiosity about what’s concealed within the vastness of the institutional archive.

At St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Orla’s time is divided between pioneering a rolling arts programme, curating in-house exhibitions from the cathedral’s collection, and overseeing the conservation of the Burges Maquettes.

“Orla O’Byrne’s practice…departs from the quantified logic of the institutional archive. The interrogation of the museum space functioning as a critique of legibility, and how the ledger of recorded history contains within it excesses irreducible to any totalistic system of presentation. The rendition of the fragmented view of a cloud (it cannot be contained by one view) becoming symbolic of those unbounded material potentialities.”

Laurence Counihan, from ‘Fluid Dynamics’, MA:AP Catalogue Essay, 2022