Butler Gallery Garden Studio Residency – Declan Byrne

Declan Byrne is Artist-in-Residence for the month of September 2026, where he will develop a new body of work, inspired directly by the museum building, the Butler Gallery collection and his daily journey to and from the studio . An open studio event will be hosted following Declan's residency, showing his artistic process and artworks in stages of development.

Declan Byrne's Artist Residency is part of a supported, inclusive and accessible artist-led residency programme at Butler Gallery, where a selected artist from KCAT Arts Centre has the opportunity to develop a new or existing body of work in the museum context.

About the artist:

Declan Byrne has been a member of KCAT Studio since 2004. He has exhibited
internationally, including at UNT Art Galleries Dallas Texas, Beyond Festival Leeds UK,Project Ability Glasgow Scotland, Freight Gallery Fremantle Australia, Gallery Prabbeli Luxembourg and the Art Brut Biennale Hengelo the Netherlands. He has also shown extensively in Ireland, including at the Linenhall Arts Centre Castlebar, F.E. McWilliam Gallery Banbridge, Atypical Gallery Belfast, West Cork Arts Centre Skibbereen, Farmleigh House Dublin, Galway Arts Centre and Crawford Gallery Cork. Declan features alongside his
KCAT colleagues in the documentary Living Colour (2011) by Wildfire Films. His work is also featured in several publications, including The Engagement Project KCAT 2014-2020(2020), Art & Inclusion: The Story of KCAT (2009), Works on Paper (2008) IWTK (2015) and the retrospective catalogue Declan Byrne (2021). He also has work in the Irish National Collection at the Crawford Gallery Cork.

Declan has developed a substantial body of work in painting, drawing and sculpture. Many of his sculptural works represent a unique engagement with the materiality of dried acrylic paint, which is retrieved from palettes, easels, sinks and bins across the KCAT Studio. Chunks of dried paint are cut down into large quantities of small different coloured quadratic shapes. These are then methodically glued piece by piece over the entire surface of fractured and broken found objects, such as a used pair of men’s shoes and a headless religious statue. The weeks and months of deeply focused harvesting, cutting, sorting, and categorising of an otherwise throwaway material appears to carry at least as much importance to the artist as the compelling final artworks produced.

Each of Declan’s paintings is also created over months, with small coloured dots and blocks of colour applied side by side, eventually spreading out in all directions as though a multi-coloured aerial view of an exquisitely coloured landscape. The subjects, scenes and figures he starts with remain only somewhat apparent in finished works, with figuration largely kept
at a distance through abstraction. The resulting intense multi-coloured surfaces suggest a sensitive and raw emotional and psychological mapping of the world, without ever betraying and fully revealing the inner privacy that is drawn on to bring such work into the world. Those of us who spend time with Declan’s work gain access to a unique lens through which the world can be engaged with and understood in new ways.