Naoise Halloran Mackay, Kek kek kek-kek-kek-kek-kek (Kingfisher house) 2025, Documentation by Grace Harré | Naoise Halloran Mackay, Cage, 2025, Documentation by Grace Harré

Gallery 2

Shelter

Naoise Halloran-Mackay

roomsheet

Naoise Halloran-Mackay explores ideas of shelter and the ways in which we may build, seek, or offer it.

Blending imagery reminiscent of real estate advertisements, 1970s DIY construction manuals, grandiose Renaissance palazzos, and homes he has lived in or helped build, Naoise conveys illusionary space through the construction of decorative facades that blur the line between the familiar and the distant.

In his translucent paintings on sheer organza, internal supports that would typically be concealed beneath the surface are exposed and reimagined as part of the composition, bringing together image and object and anchoring the works in an architectural framework.

Alongside these sit a series of sculptural ‘nest boxes’ clad in natural hardwood veneers. At the conclusion of the exhibition, these boxes will be placed in trees as surrogates for hollows lost to development, offering shelter to wildlife.

Naoise is drawn to the irony of these boxes: crafted from trees, now reassembled to fulfill the same role they once naturally served. This cycle of extraction, abstraction, and return reflects a broader detachment from the origins of materials, and a sheltering from the ecological costs of our aesthetic desires.