Padraic Barrett

Pádraic Barrett is an interdisciplinary Irish artist who works across performance, film, and installation to explore contemporary issues such as techno-capitalism, surveillance, and human agency. Originally from Kerry and based in Cork, he holds an MA in Art and Process (2021) and a BA in Fine Art (2019) from the Crawford College of Art and Design. His practice integrates sculptural installations, performance-based media, and collaborative methodologies to critically engage with societal structures.

Barrett’s work has been exhibited internationally, with recent solo shows including Machination at the Municipal Corporation of Culture of San Joaquin in Santiago, Chile (2023) and The Engineering of Consent II at The Marina Warehouse in Cork (2021). His recent projects include ⌥ertigo, A Crescendo (2025), funded by the Arts Council of Ireland Project Award, and Error: /Undefined (2023), presented as part of Pallas Projects’ Artist-Initiated Projects. Barrett is also a founding member of inter_site, an artist collective focused on site-responsive and collaborative practice. He has exhibited widely across Ireland, the UK, Germany, and Portugal in both solo and group exhibitions.

A recipient of multiple awards from the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork City Council, Barrett has participated in international residencies at GlogauAIR in Berlin and PADA Studios in Lisbon. His work has been featured in public art festivals and gallery settings, gaining recognition for its innovative use of space and narrative. In addition, Barrett shares his insights through visiting lectures at institutions like the Crawford College of Art and Design, engaging students in dialogue about art’s role in sociopolitical critique.

i'After Light: These Dark Citizens' by Peter Power, with National Sculpture Factory at Cork Midsummer Festival 2022 / Photograph: Jed Niezgoda - www.jedniezgoda.com
Artist statement

My work is a response to techno-capitalist structures and explores alternative vantage points in the realm of the Anthropocene, that contains a mapping of futurity. By placing the queer body in a suspended and simulated space in time, I allude to the activation of a state of heterotopia and imagine other ways of being in the world.

 

I merge performance, film and installation to explore human and machine agency through bodily and technological frameworks that can open a space for reflection on the nature of our contemporary experience. These complex relationships are interrogated through nonhuman imagery and post-human landscapes, casting resonances on how the current world is constructed. This demonstrates how the body can mediate the tension between cinematic modes and how we live our lives.

 

Explorations of the social and spatial experience to the ubiquity of machines are impressed upon by fictional frameworks that have a direct port into our lives. The work seeks out political imagination and presents a modeling of worlds past and future as a mode of thinking, sensing and seeing across time.

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