At Night the Hens Stand and Dream

Niamh Coffey

20 August – 9 September 2026

GOMA Gallery of Modern Art is delighted to present At Night the Hens Stand and Dream, an art exhibition by Niamh Coffey.

………….Enter under intertwined necks of birds in love. Please don’t let the PDA make you queasy. A hungry and disembodied mouth looms over you, sputtering frantic toads and teeth out onto the floor. You step back to avoid them and bump into a small and ugly spiked creature. It scuttles past, leaving a trail of juicy, bespittled blackberries behind. Please do not be tempted to snack right now. A ladder tumbles down from the moon, droplets of milk following. Two conjoined eggs whisper as you pass by. You didn’t catch the words but the tone seemed ominous, especially in this duplicitous Gemini season. You go to leave and a sweaty hand presses something conspiratorially into your palm…………………

This exhibition combines two bodies of work, Siúnta (2023-25) and Clodhoppers (2025-ongoing). Taking its name from the Irish for a seam or joint, Siúnta weaves together past narratives to imagine new ecological relationships. Clodhoppers takes its name from how the celestial characters, Sphinx, Moon and Godwoman, refer to the earthbound subjects in Marina Carr’s play The Boy. Clodhoppers widens these imagined relationships to include cosmic connections. In this exhibition, forms of flesh, fur, flower and feather mingle and merge. Subjects create symbiotic and antagonistic relationships, exhibit absurd actions and explore neoteric habits together.

In 1937-39, the Irish Folklore Commission asked primary school children to collect local history from their relatives and neighbours. Nestled in exercise copies, between thousands of stories detailed in meticulous handwriting, lie their tales of metamorphosis and binary-blurring. Hares become milk-hungry witches, needy children are turned to stone, gooseberries transform sore eyes, tadpoles swirl in boggy bellies. Siúnta uses these instances of metamorphosis as departure points to wriggle further into absurd and imaginary realms. These archives show that in an earlier Irish imaginary world, the boundaries that separate us from nature and other entities were not so separate and fixed, but porous and blurred.

The exhibition was made by gathering these stories of binary-blurring between humans and non-humans and making drawings based on them. These drawings then played together, created links and found connections, they were collaged together, their elements were extended and emphasised, their actions sped up and slowed down, their beginnings swapped with their ends, subjects up and left one story for another. Narratives eventually emerged from this process and were brought into a textile world, a medium used because of its rich history with collaborative story-telling, connotations to gender and queerness and ability to physically join separate elements together.

In Clodhoppers, wider historical, alchemical and folkloric beliefs of human connection to the universe inspire and mix with these narratives. In the textile collage To Fix in a Waxy State, disembodied leatherette hands diligently knit, sew and prepare skin suits from kneeling wool donors as animal eyes wait from a star-lit sea. Soft swollen constellations of blackberries spit, gurgle and glisten. Worms wriggle in wonder among glittering moon rays. In The Twirlers, a hand-drawn wallpaper, subjects twist into wheels and perpetually spin from the sky, down and down a dug path, trowels and watering cans in hand and foot as they whirl through peeping cow-trodden piles of upturned earth.

These imagined narratives offer a humorous invitation to envisage new ways of interacting with and existing within the larger matrix of nature and the earth. This work is guided by the concept of queer ecology, which asks us to abandon ideas of human exceptionalism and anthropomorphism and instead asks us to see humans as part of a complex and interwoven system, whose patterns and processes are different from our own.

This work was kindly supported by a Laois Co. Council Arts Act Grant, Bród na Gaeltachta’s Ceangal residency and GOMA’s Ten Year Anniversary residency.

About the artist:

Niamh Coffey is a Dublin-based visual artist from Stradbally, Co. Laois, whose practice encompasses textiles, drawings and sculpture. Their work uses ideas from ecology, queer theory and Irish folklore to create imagined ecological relationships. Niamh graduated from NCAD in 2016 with a degree in Sculpture and Expanded Practices. Their debut solo exhibition Siúnta was shown in 2025 in Cultúrlann, Belfast, in Pallas Projects as part of their Artist-Initiated Projects and in Súil Gallery, Co. Clare. Previous group exhibitions in which their work has featured include: Borders at Rua Red; Work/Force/Field/ at A4 Sounds and; Atelier Páipéar at Workhouse Union. Upcoming shows in 2026 include solo exhibitions at The Arthouse in Stradbally and Custom House Gallery in Westport. In 2022, Niamh received an Arts Council Agility Award. Between 2024-2026, Niamh was awarded Laois County Council’s Tyrone Guthrie Centre Residency Bursary and two Arts Act Grants. Niamh’s website is niamhcoffey.ie.

Curated by Jenna Whelan.