A drop in becoming
4 June - 2 July
Annie Hogg & Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe
A drop in becoming is a living exhibition, transforming over the course of a month in response to the temporal world we inhabit. Featuring the works of Annie Hogg and Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe, sculptures dissolve, absorb, and digest in an ever-changing encounter. The artists employ sustainable techniques and hand-harvested materials in intimate communication with their natural surroundings that question our changing relationship to the earth. Audiences are invited to become participants in the gallery space as the works engage all five of their senses.
Annie Hogg’s work explores the microscopic world of Archaea, single-celled organisms that are the closest living relatives to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). Actions and reactions are fabricated in natural materials to mirror those performed by Archaea in their crucial role over planetary boundaries and health. Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe utilises sculpture and fiction to explore how we become from place through our mineral exchange with home, land, and the matter we share it with. Visitors are invited to absorb place through consumption, touch, and conversation with material.
The exhibition is accompanied by an events programme that engages the audience in active listening, slow looking, creative writing, and speculative thinking. Events are all free to attend, full programme available below.
Thank you to Arts Council Northern Ireland and Tipperary Arts Office for funding this project. The exhibition and events programme were curated by Catalyst Arts Co-Director Samar Nezamabad.
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Annie Hogg is a Tipperary artist, based on the banks of the River Suir. She gained a BA in Fine Art from AKI Akademie voor Beeldende Kunst, in The Netherlands in 2002, returning in 2019 to a studio based practice using sculpture, installation, sound and community engagement, working with natural materials in traditional and innovative ways. Her work researches power relations and resources. Aiming to see both human and other than human responses and outcomes in human led situations.
Annie has exhibited nationally and internationally, with three solo shows including South Tipperary Arts Centre, LOST 2023 and numerous group shows including Rua Red Annual Open Exhibition 2025, Hamilton Gallery & Embassy of Ireland, The Hague, The Netherlands, ”Bloodroot”, 2025. Source Arts Centre, The Point of Origin, 2026, Artlink Fort Dunree, Art in the Park V, 2026. Upcoming group shows include Junction Arts Festival.
Recent awards include Arts Council of Ireland Agility Awards, 2021-22, K-Fest Arts Award Winner (formally Screaming Pope Prize), LOST, 2023, Arts Creative Ireland Project Award 2025 and Tipperary County Council Artist Awards 2021, 2023-2026.
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Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe is a sculptor and writer from Co. Clare, currently based in Limerick city where she is a member of Spacecraft Artist Studios. She received a first class BA Honours in Sculpture & Combined Media from Limerick School of Art & Design in 2020 and went on to receive a first class honours from the Art Writing MLitt at Glasgow School of Art in 2023. Since then she has been award two Agility Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland to develop her writing/making practice in 2023-24. She has recently had work published in Mirror Lamp Press’s 11th Issue The Bottom of the Pot which had a digital launch on Resonance FM, and has recently presented work at The Courthouse Gallery in Ennistymon, Ormston House, Spacecraft Artist Studios and Centre of Contemporary Art Glasgow. She recently represented Spacecraft Artist Studios at Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm for the second year in April 2026 showcasing a body of new sculptural works and debuting a new performance piece.
Her practice weaves sculpture and fiction together, engaging with the entanglements of identity and place, human and more than-human relations and ecological concerns, drawing upon methodologies of casting, story-telling and contemporary forms of ritual.
Events Programme
All events are free to attend, booking is required. Click here to book.
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Performance by Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe & Parmenides
Saturday, 6 June; 4.30 – 6.00pm; Catalyst Arts
Drink down deep is a collaborative performance by Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe and Parmenides that weaves fiction, music and field recordings from sacred sites on the Burren. Accompanied by live music and field recordings devised and performed by Parmenides, the artist will tell us stories of exchanges between body and place while making a series of clay casts of the interior of hagstones that will go on to be fired and incorporated into new iterations of this work.
BYOB but elderflower cordial will also be provided!
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Guided walk with A. Laurie Palmer
Thursday 11 June; 5pm; starting at Catalyst Arts
This lichen walk casts the entire world as an open air museum in which lichens can be found practically everywhere, including in the sidewalks beneath our feet. With lenses in hand, we dive into the tiny, intensive world of these amazing symbiotic organisms, paying attention to how we can learn from their collaborative, hardy, inventive existences. This is led by an artist and is not a walk that will focus on lichen identification, but anyone with that expertise is welcome to join and share your knowledge.
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Facilitated by Annie Hogg.
Saturday 13 June; Catalyst Arts
Join us for a series of slow-looking sessions, where we will slow down and engage our senses with all aspects of the exhibition. Through this practice, we aim to take a moment away from our hectic day-to-days to open investigation into the work. Participants will explore independently first, then come together as a group and share a conversation about the experience. Slow-looking is a tool used throughout many gallery settings to allow space to slow down and engage, not only with artworks, but as a practice taken forward into our daily lives. A Slow Revolution!
Links to book:
Session 1 (12-1)
Session 2 (2-3)
Session 3 (4-5) -
Writing workshop with Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe
Saturday 4 July; 2.00 – 3.30pm; PeasPark, 76 Skegoneill Ave
Writing With invites participants to explore time as a material within their writing practice, utilizing fiction as a tool to imagine, re-imagine, empathise with and explore the plants and matter living at PeasPark. The workshop will consist of a series of facilitated short writing exercises with prompts and space for discussion, between writing exercises the group will move through the garden exploring and weaving walking and interactions with the site into the writing exercises.
Please bring pen, paper, or whatever writing tools you would like to work with!
Tables and chairs will be provided.
