Pádraig Spillane works with photography, collage, object-based assemblages, and installation. He explores desire through the intersections of imagery and mass-produced cultural forms. He views images as unstable, to be waywardly rearranged beyond their intended meanings and functions. His works are constructed using visual references from commercial display and collective imaginaries, exploring how images generate desires through their complex entanglements. Reorientating the drives and relations from aesthetic elements to consider suggestive potentials, his works perform as assemblies of disruption and appeal.
Selected exhibitions include: Future Tense, FORMAT Photography Festival, Derby, (2024); Stories of Art, Glucksman Gallery, Cork, (2024); Intentional Selection, Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, (2024); Field Trip, Lavit Gallery, Cork (2024); In Our Own Image: Photography and the Social Gaze, Photo Museum Ireland, Dublin, (2022); Images Are All We Have, PhotoIreland Festival, Dublin Castle, (2022); define silver lining V2.0, Cork Centre for Architectural Education, Cork, (2022); C L O S E R, Lavit Gallery, Cork (2022); Saturation: the everyday transformed, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, (2022); Silver-Tongued Seas, Jupiter Woods, London, (2021); Far From Here, The Complex, Dublin, (2019); Naked Truth: The Nude in Irish Art, Crawford Art Gallery, (2018); What Passes Between Us, Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, (2017).
Spillane’s work features in the Arts Council of Ireland Collection, UCC Art Collection, and private collections. His work is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.