scáth.án
is a visual artist based in Dublin, Ireland
Their practice centres on memory, intimacy, and material traces, often combining portraiture with archival and object-based approaches.
Through processes of layering, stitching, gilding, redaction, and photographic mapping, their work examines how personal and collective histories inhabit bodies, spaces, and landscapes. Influenced by devotional imagery, literary archives, and psychogeographic practices, they explores themes of remembrance, displacement, vulnerability, and the unstable nature of perception.
Their recent work engages with ideas of emotional topography and the preservation of fragile memory through image and material gesture.
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My practice explores memory, intimacy, embodiment, and place through painting, photography, text, sculpture, and object-based work. Working between the figurative and the experimental, I combine archival gestures, material processes, and site-responsive imagery to consider how personal histories become inscribed onto bodies, domestic spaces, and landscapes.
Much of my work operates within tensions between concealment and revelation, presence and absence, tenderness and rupture. I approach image-making as both ritual and record: an attempt to preserve traces of lived experience while acknowledging the fragility and instability of memory itself.
Material processes such as stitching, gilding, layering, redaction, and cutting function not only formally but symbolically, transforming surfaces into palimpsests of physical, emotional, and psychological residue. Through these processes, images and objects are altered, concealed, reconstructed, and revisited, allowing preservation to remain inseparable from transformation.
Recurring concerns include remembrance, displacement, staged atmospheres, and the poetics of looking. I draw from archival structures, devotional imagery, acheiropoietic images (αχειροποίητα), and Surrealist techniques, alongside approaches to landscape informed by psychogeographic practices. Across these different modes, I am interested in how perception shapes what is remembered, how images mediate absence, and how places become repositories for experience.
My work considers the ephemeral and the possibility of preserving what cannot be fully retained. Deliberate acts of recording, collecting, returning, and making become gestures against erasure, while acknowledging that every act of preservation also transforms what it seeks to hold.
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2026
08 Aug. — 05 Sept.
CORRESPONDANCES — group exhibition
The Curators, 20 rue Meslay, Paris, France

