Announcing: CCA Research Associates 2024

Iarlaith Ní Fheorais is a curator and writer based between the UK and Ireland. She is an Independent Producer with field:arts, working closely with artists Bridget O’Gorman and Ebun Sodipo. Recently she has curated honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise with Tulca 2023, Speech Sounds as Curator-in-Residence at VISUAL Carlow as part of Carlow Arts Festival and collaborated with Emma Wolf-Haugh on a new film commission for Ulysses 2.2. In previous roles she worked at Tate Modern and Britain as Assistant Curator of Young People’s Programmes and was the co-director of Basic Space from 2016-18.

As a writer she has written on the work of Jesse Darling, Manuel Solano and Lorenza Böttner for Frieze, Burlington Contemporary, Viscose Journal and has an art and access column with Visual Arts News Sheet. She regularly contributes towards public programmes and lectures including at Somerset House, Arts and Disability Ireland and Goldsmiths University.

Committed to improving access in the arts, she is currently developing an Arts Council England funded access toolkit for curators and producers. She is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design and is currently studying at the Dutch Art Institute.

Image credit: Tomás Eyzaguirre

Taey Iohe is a transdisciplinary artist and migrant worker whose work spans across diverse media, including moving images, sound, social practice and collective actions through an Asian crip/queer lens. Their approach fuses research-based work with personal narratives that challenge socio-botanical entanglements within environmental hormones, medical humanities and climate justice. Taey is a co-founder of the Decolonising Botany Working Group and has presented a performance, A Refusing Oasis at Documenta 15. Taey, currently focuses on Leak Research, how bodily and planetary leakages are intertwined through water’s edge.

Image: A dark blue portrait of an Korean queer mother, portrait by Christa Holka

Sophie Mak-Schram likes to think-work-make-be about how we (come to) know and what forms that knowledge takes. She mainly works with others, both as method and as form. Trained as an art historian and working across experiential education, inclusion work, collective practices and artistic research, Sophie convenes, facilitates, writes, reads, makes objects to learn with or listen to, and performs. Currently, she's (still) interested in the 'and' between art and education, and speculative architectures as sites of worlding - something she plans to explore with CCADLD in 2024.

In 2023-24, she has been Associate Artist with Peak Cymru exploring their work with young people, working on a commission around decolonisation for National Museum Wales and Chapter, Cardiff, co-convener of Gentle Gestures, a porous international research group about forms of pedagogies across/through the arts, and Early Stage Researcher as part of a Europe-wide PhD programme about the future(s) of socially engaged practices.

Photo: Sophie Mak-Schram (Still from collective reading with Iliada Charalambous for Change Feeling (Van Abbemuseum), July 2022, photograph by Ozgur Atlagan)

Oisín Roberts is an artist and writer from Derry, Ireland and living in London. Recent shows and readings incl; Subtexts (Queen Mary University), the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, AMP Gallery, San Mei Gallery, The Ivy House, Biblioteka Library, CCA Derry/Londonderry and on the air with Montez Press Radio and No Bounds FM. He also set up and runs Think Big, Read Community Library, a lending library in Peckham, South East London. The library is small with a core collection of poetry, life-writing, queer/trans* literature, anticapitalist and abolitionist/anticarceral writing.

Miach Malachy is an artist, born in Belfast. Recent works include; an audio installation of interlocking imperatives (And You Will Will It So. 2023), a bilingual fiction and video concerning a parasitic spiritual double (An Radharc Ón Fhuinneog Chúil. The View From The Backseat. 2023), video, text and sculpture around a demanding entity and a complex dedicated to a particular form of attention (Careful Not to Stare, Careful Not to Look Away, 2022), a video featuring 3 obscured narrators who repeat and edit a troubling memory attributed to the viewer (Muerdeladrillos, 2020), a text animation of a horrific rupture in language (Slash City, 2020), and a looped situation for four sculptures stuck between interrogation and a looming presence (Rotters, 2019).

Miach has received recent new work commissions from New Contemporaries (UK), Museo Leonara Carrington (SLP, Mexico), Channel Four Random Acts (UK), CCA Derry/Londonderry, Made in Roath (Wales), Catalyst Arts (Belfast), and has shown at Modern Art Oxford, Leeds Art Gallery, The South London Gallery, Guest Projects, xero, kline & coma, Outpost, and with New Work From Northern Ireland and The MAC International. Miach holds an MFA from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

Image: Miach Malachy, video still of Muerdeladrillos (2020)