Born in the Netherlands and based in Dublin, Ireland, Anita Groener makes drawings, installations, films, and animations. Recently her work has been exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Jane Lombard Gallery, New York; Columbia Circle, Shanghai; Riverside Art Museum, Beijing; Refuge, 21c Museum Hotels Arkansas + Cincinnati; Poggiali & Forconi Gallery, Florence; Green on Red Gallery Dublin; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam; Witteveen Visual Art Centre, Amsterdam; Butler gallery, Kilkenny; Limerick City Gallery of Art, The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon; West Cork Arts Centre and the LAB Dublin. Her next solo exhibition To the Edge of Your World, will open in Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris in April 2023 and will tour to the Netherlands and the USA. Until 2014 she was a lecturer in Fine Art in TU Dublin where she also served as the Head of Fine Art from 2004 to 2006. The artist was elected a member of Aosdána in 2005.
www.anitagroener.com

Gerard Smyth is a Dublin-born poet whose work has appeared in journals in Ireland, Britain and the United States as well as in translation. He has published ten collections, including The Sundays of Eternity ( Dedalus Press, 2020 ) and The Fullness of Time: New and Selected Poems ( Dedalus Press, 2010 ) as well as The Yellow River (a collaboration with artist Seán McSweeney and published by Solstice Arts Centre in 2017). He was the 2012 recipient of the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the University of St Thomas in Minnesota and is co-editor, with Pat Boran, of If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song (Dedalus Press).. He is a member of Aosdána and Poetry Editor of The Irish Times. www.gerardsmyth.com

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Michael Beirne, born in Carlow in 1958, studied fine art at the Crawford School of Art, Cork. Solo exhibitions of his work include David Cunningham Projects, San Francisco (2009); Sligo Arts Centre (2007); Butler Gallery, Kilkenny (2005); and Temple Bar Galleries + Studios, Dublin (1999). Selected Group Exhibitions include Fenton Gallery, Cork (2000); RHA, Dublin (1997); Clock Tower Gallery, New York; and Arhus Kunstbygning, Denmark (both 1996). Beirne was commissioned by The Arts Council to produce work for the touring school show 'Heroes' (1986). Apart from The Arts Council, his work is included in the collections of Butler Gallery, Kilkenny and Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork as well as several significant private collections in Ireland and abroad.

Jess McKinney is a poet from Inishowen, Donegal, currently living in Dublin. In 2020, she completed my MA in Poetry at Queen's University Belfast, where she was awarded the Irish Chair of Poetry Student Award. In 2021, she took part in the Dedalus Press Mentorship Programme, and Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Summer School. Her writing has appeared in The Belfield Literary Review, The Moth, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, SAND, Channel, Abridged, The Poetry Jukebox and New Island anthology The New Frontier: Writing from the Irish Border, with upcoming work in The Cormorant. Her debut pamphlet 'Weeding' was published with Hazel Press in September 2021, and launched at the London Review Bookshop, where it remained on their Best Seller List for several weeks. It was additionally shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2021, and Saboteur Awards 2022. Most recently she was awarded a place on the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series 2022, as one of the top ten emerging poets in Ireland.

Felicity Clear was born and lives in Dublin. Her drawing practice involves large-scale works on paper, 3D drawing installation and animation. She is interested in graphic visualisations of space, this include a representational drawing, a schematic drawing, map or diagram. Recent work is concerned with the way space and time are conceptualised in maps and schema that come from meteorological observations of wind, cloud and other natural systems.

Her work has been exhibited in a number of solo exhibitions including: The Butler Gallery (Kilkenny); The Lab (Dublin); Galway Arts Centre (Galway); The Mermaid (Bray); The Rubicon Gallery Dublin, and most recently Oonagh Young Gallery (Dublin). Her work has also been included in the following curated group exhibitions: Ecologies of Drawing: In Situ, Research Network, Loughborough University; Beyond Drawing, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre and Ballina Arts Centre, 10,000 to 50 Irish Museum of Modern Art, There not There, Crawford Gallery Of Art; ART Futures, Contemporary Art Society, London, New Contemporaries, Agnews, London, National Collection of Contemporary Drawing 30 years, Limerick City Gallery; Centennial Of Women In Art, Museum Of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, Amongst Other Things, DLR Lexicon, Dublin, A Borrowed Bounce, The Dock, Co Leitrim. Art’s Work, Limerick City Gallery. Clear’s work is included in the following selected collections: Arts Council Of Ireland, The National Drawing Collection, Limerick, Butler Gallery Collection and Goldman Sachs UK. Her work has been supported through Visual Arts Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland on numerous occasions. Residencies included Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris, The Model Sligo, Leitrim Sculpture Centre. Clear is a part-time lecturer in the National College of Art and Design, where she lectures in Fine Art multidisciplinary studies.

Jane Clarke is the author of two collections, The River and When the Tree Falls (Bloodaxe Books 2015 & 2019), as well as an illustrated chapbook, All the Way Home, (Smith|Doorstop 2019). Jane’s awards include the 2016 Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry and the 2016 Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year. The River was the first poetry collection ever shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Award, given for a distinguished work of fiction or non-fiction evoking the spirit of a place. Jane’s third collection A Change in the Air will be published by Bloodaxe in May 2023.

www.janeclarkepoetry.ie

Helena Gorey's most recent solo exhibition was 'Understory' at Highlanes Gallery and Custom House Gallery. Concentrating on richness of colour and texture the 'Understory' paintings attempt to give some sense of the beauty that can be seen in jewell like plants if you look closely into an uncut hedgerow at the height of summer. It continues her engagement with the natural world which has also been reflected in exhibitions such as 'Proscenium', Ashford Gallery, 2018, 'The Orchard' Butler Gallery 2013, 'Two Trees' The Dock 2006, 'The Blackcurrant Field' 2001 and 'Landscape & Memory' 1999 at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

Her work was recently selected for group exhibitions at Mark Borghi Gallery, New York and Contemporary Irish Arts Centre Los Angeles and exhibitions at Rathfarnham Castle and Farmleigh Gallery curated by Mark St. John Ellis. She won the Artworks Award at Visual Carlow in 2020 and received a Highly Commended award for Highlanes Gallery Open Submission in the same year. She curated The Overhanging Garden for AKA Kilkenny Arts Festival 2021 and her work is installed at Grangegorman Primary Care Centre as part of GDA public art program.

Public collections include The OPW, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Limerick City Gallery of Art, The Arts Council, Highlanes Gallery, Butler Gallery and The Glebe Gallery.

She studied at Limerick School Art & Design and is represented by Nag Gallery.

Tara Bergin has published two collections of poetry with Carcanet Press, This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry), and The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes).

Awards won by Tara Bergin:

• Short-listed, 2018 Irish Times Poetry Now Award (The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx)
• Short-listed, 2017 Listowel Writers' Week Irish Poem of the Year ('Bride and Moth', published in The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx)
• Short-listed, 2017 The T.S. Eliot Prize (The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx)
• Short-listed, 2017 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx)
• Commended, 2017
• Poetry Book Society Recommendation
• (The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx)
• Winner, 2014 Shine/Strong Poetry Award
• Winner, 2014 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection
• Short-listed, 2014 Irish Times Poetry Now Award