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James L Hayes is contemporary visual artist based in Cork he has a multi-disciplinary practice, making sculptures, installations, cast iron performances and film works as well as developing large scale public art projects.
Hayes’s recent works aim to reinvest a modernist sculptural language, whilst exploring aspects casting technologies as a means by which to interrogate the boundaries between artist, artisan and art object.
His sculptural work aims to draw out the often-incongruous relationships between finished art objects, and the industrial aspects of the processes that produce these often revered objects.
This referencing or re-imagining is brought together with his broader research interests that range from contemporary interpretations of sculptural legacies and underexplored historical works and interpretations of contemporary literature and science and that draw from traces of significant pasts and cultural histories.

Recently completing a residency at the renowned Sloss Metal Arts program at Sloss Furances National Historic landmark in Birmingham Alabama, where he completed the first Part of his Psyche Project, the second part being created at the National Sculpture Factory for the third part of their Material Laboratories program in October 2024.

Hayes exhibits his works nationally and internationally, recently at the Centre Cultural Irlandais (CCI), Paris, The Glucksman Gallery, Cork, The Royal Hibernia Academy (RHA) Dublin, Caponi Sculpture Park Minnesota,The MART Gallery, Dublin, The McNally School of Fine Arts / La Salle College of Arts, Singapore, The UNO Gallery New Orleans, Art Market Budapest and SUPERMARKET Art Fair Stockholm .
He has been an artist in residence at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre and The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Ireland ,he is s a graduate of TU /Limerick School of Art & Design (LSAD), De Montfort University, Leicester and University College London (UCL) in the UK and he is a Lecturer in Sculpture at Munster Technological University (MTU) Crawford College of Art in Cork , Ireland.

www.jameslhayes.ie

Michal Staszczak is a graduate of sculpture at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław (Poland). Diploma in 2005 in the studio of prof. Leon Podsiadły, an annex from a small sculptural form in the studio of prof. Jacek Dworski. Since 2006, he has been employed at his alma mater, where he currently runs a foundry studio. In 2019, he obtained the title of academic professor. In the years 2016-2020, he was head of the Department of Sculpting Techniques at the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław. From 2020, Vice-Rector for International Cooperation and Promotion of the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław.
Founder and co-organizer of the Festival of High Temperatures, he conducts workshops and foundry demonstrations, builds outdoor furnaces for melting bronze, aluminum and cast iron. He creates assemblage sculptures, bas-reliefs and installations which are cast from metal. In the creative process, he also uses 3D design and printing technology.

In my practice, I basically make sculpture and installation. The majority of my works are surreal creatures or imagined landscapes. The material I use most often, is cast metal: bronze, aluminnum and iron. The choice of technique and material strongly affects the way I make my works. The method of assemblage which I use to create models of my sculptures is much more complex than just gluing things together. I collect different objects and textures to have a kind of “library”. Then I choose the ones I like, make plaster moulds and fill them with wax. Thus, I get the elements which I can freely multiply, modify and join. It is a very enjoyable and creative stage.
Recently, I have been assembling models of my sculptures in virtual space and this method gives me even more freedom. I scan different elements in 3D, then model them with the use of 3D programs and finally print them. Regardless of what material the sculpture model is made of, most of the works are finally cast in metal. I draw from the limitless forms and shapes of the surrounding world. Imagination binds them into new beings – familiar and yet not tame. Liquid metal allows time to stop for a while.

michalstaszczak.pl

Eden has 30 years of experience in working in the field of sculpture and has worked casting bronze and iron as far away as Sweden, Latvia, Germany and America. He works in a variety of media including aluminum, iron and bronze, as well as stone carving.

www.fireforgeandfurnace.com

Helle Helsner is a visual artist and lecturer in Crawford College of Art and Design. She is currently undertaking a PhD through Burren College of Art on a MTU staff scholarship. Her research concerns materiality, memory and landscape, investigated through her practice as a sculptor and bronzecaster using the landscape and social politics surrounding the disused Copper mines in Allihies on the Beara Peninsula.
Helle graduated from CCAD in 2001 with a MA by research concerning pre historic bronze casting technology and subsequently set up her own low tech/TEK foundry enabling her to cast all her own work. She has over 23 years of casting experience and has been working in this capacity with makers such as Joseph Walsh, archaeologists including Flemming Kaul senior curator of The National Museum of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Stephen Murray is an Artist and Sculpture Technician who works at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (ESW) managing the workshop facilities and supporting the cultural programme. He assists artists with their sculptural practice, enabling them to develop new technical skills and realise projects and commissions. Over the past five years Stephen has developed an open access foundry facility at ESW which runs alongside wood, metal, ceramics, and carving.

As an artist with over 20 years experience Stephen’s practice takes a variety of approaches, but at its core is a hunger for material knowledge, and a love of process. This often requires collaboration and results in events that bring together makers, participants and audience.

Róisín Foley graduated from the Crawford College in 2014 with a B.A in Fine Art, specialising in sculpture and glass casting processes. She received the Ciarán Langford memorial bursary with a 6-month sculpture studio at Backwater Artists and the Crawford College Graduate Sculpture Residency Award. Róisín has worked on large scale metal casting projects such as participating in the first two Iron Research (IRONR) Projects at the National Sculpture Factory, and commercial and fine art bronze foundry production at Kilnagleary studios as an assistant to Mick Wilkins. She regularly collaborates with Helle Helsner on experimental and earth-based forms of production, and is a fringe member of Umha Aois (Bronze Age Casting Project). In her own research she has taken residencies at The Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Allihies Copper Mines Museum and Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre.

For the past number of years Róisín has been developing and working on commissions and projects that explore creative responses to landscape and ecology through systems of care and locality, as a result of a formative residency through the support of the Oileán AIR program and a yearlong study in permaculture and sustainable horticulture. Most recently she has been developing work at The Centre of Excellence for Climate Action and Sustainability (CECAS) in Leap.

Paul Rondelez obtained his PhD degree at UCC in 2014 on late-medieval iron production in Ireland. He is an archaeological metalworking consultant and Events Officer of the Historical Metallurgy Society. Next to several research projects on the history of iron production in Ireland, he is the main organiser of the Furnace Festivals of Ireland. Now in its sixth year, this event aims at making iron from Irish ores.

www.furnacefestival.ie

Cóilín is a silversmith producing work that explores vessel forms through a study of process, materials and colour.

Cóilín trained at Grennan Mill craft school and Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1996. He subsequently worked as a designer for industry in India, the Philippines, and the UK, and set up a workshop in Kilkenny, Ireland. In 1998, he moved to Tokyo, to study in the metalwork department at the National University of Fine Arts and Music (Tokyo Geidai), receiving a doctorate in 2005. From 2007-2019, Cóilín worked as a Senior Research Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University. He currently lectures in the School of Design at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.

He exhibits his work internationally and has pieces in collections including the National Museum of Ireland, the Goldsmiths’ Collection, London, and the Marzee collection, Netherlands.

www.coilin.com

Catherine is an artist whose practice has included the development of several forms of collaborative endeavour, such as a series of large scale durational and ephemeral projects under Hehir & Noonan collaborations, which was co-initiator of an international collective project titled State of Print – that questions the structures and mechanisms of state in relation to expanded print with current art structures.
She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the Crawford College of Art and Design. Residencies include Amsterdam Grafisch Atelier, The Purple Bamboo Studios Hangzhou China, Tyrone Gutherie Centre, Monaghan, and the LARQ Centre of Research in Western Tasmania.

The work navigates the boundaries between traditional art making and new technologies in an experimental manner working both independently and collaboratively using several different mediums but primarily expanded print materiality and how it has integrated/expanded into the fields of sculpture and Installation. Current work engages within site-specific events gathering sound, fauna and obsolete objects related to space and place with rural environments, transferring ideas into embodied sculptural artworks, casts and works on paper referencing the index of a process. My work explores the phenomena around human intervention within a rural environment and artwork’s connection within cultural geography.