Tether- Irish Artists in New York
Exhibition curated by Lisa McCleary featuring works by George Bolster, Helen O’Leary, Martin Mullin, Mike Dowley, Lisa McCleary, alongside a work by Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland. February 17th – 23rd, with reception on Saturday, February 21st from 2 to 5 pm
Press Release Tether
Curated by Lisa McCleary
Exhibition Dates
Tuesday February 17 – Monday February 23, 10 – 6pm
Drinks Reception
Saturday February 21, 2 – 5pm
Exhibiting Artists
George Bolster, Helen O’Leary, Martin Mullin, Mike Dowley, Lisa McCleary, alongside a work by Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland.
Curatorial Statement
Tether brings together Irish visual artists living and working in New York, exploring the invisible lines that bind us across distance, time, and place.
To be Irish abroad is often to live in a state of tension: between departure and return, inheritance and reinvention, belonging and estrangement. A tether is not a chain – it allows movement, drift, and transformation – yet it holds. It suggests attachment without confinement, connection without stasis. For artists shaped by Ireland and practicing elsewhere, this tether is felt in language, memory, landscape, politics, family, and the body itself.
The works in this exhibition do not attempt to define Irishness as a fixed identity. Instead, they trace how it is carried, resisted, reimagined, or quietly endured. Some artists pull against the tether, testing its limits; others lean into it, allowing it to ground their practice.
Set in New York – a city deeply entwined with Irish histories of emigration and labor – Tether situates these practices within a global art context while remaining attentive to origin. The exhibition also honors the legacy of Brian O’Doherty, whose conceptual rigor and engagement with language and space continue to influence Irish artistic practice across generations.
Together, the works in Tether reveal Irish identity as dynamic and unresolved – stretched across geographies, shaped by migration, and continually rewritten through making. The exhibition offers a space for reflection on how we remain connected to what formed us, even as we move through new worlds, carrying those ties quietly within us.
Curator Lisa McCleary
Lisa McCleary is an Irish-Australian artist who has returned to Ireland after a decade of
living and working overseas in New York and Sydney. In 2018 she completed her MFA
Degree at Parsons, The New School, NYC. McCleary has exhibited internationally with
previous solo exhibitions in Sydney, Mexico, Ireland and New York City. Since her return
to Ireland in 2022, McCleary has been selected to exhibit her work at the Irish
Consulate, New York, the Royal Hibernian Academy’s 193rd Summer Annual, Dublin,
Ireland, the London Art Biennale, Kensington, London, and Manly Art Gallery & Museum
Sydney.
Trestle Artist Residency Art & Law Program Summer Painting Residency
the Vermont Studio Residency VSC Merit Grant.
In 2020, McCleary was included in The UK Sunday Times article ‘30 under 30: Ireland’s most promising artists.’
