11/05/2026
GOMA PRESENTS
Joseph Heffernan: where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
GOMA Waterford 9 May – 6 June 2026
Curated by Aideen Quirke
Joseph Heffernan is an Irish artist based in Backwater Artist Studios, Cork. Working across painting, drawing, text, assemblage and installation, his practice is concerned with identity, rituals, performance and how memory is constructed. His sculptural work uses found, antique and reclaimed materials to examine how objects can carry meaning. Often devotional in nature, these works question how we choose to assign significance to things in order to construct and poeticise personal narratives, providing a theatrical setting for the paintings, drawings and texts that surround them.
where oxlips and the nodding violet grows imagines a speculative narrative dominated by a game referred to as The Ceremony of the Flowers. While the rules of this game are only alluded to, they seem to be an abstract synthesis of poetry, mathematics and esoteric knowledge that envisages the world as full of elaborate rituals involving obscure signs and symbols. The game functions as an intercessor between the mundanity of everyday life and the quasi-divine, asking questions about belief and what we choose to put our faith in.
The Flowers, Ritual and the Secular World
The silk and plastic flowers, once rich with symbolic meaning, are now bleached and faded, discarded at the end of their metaphorical life cycles. Heffernan describes them as an analogy for memory's continuous tendency toward selection, deletion and rearrangement in order to process, frame and poeticise personal narratives. Worn and exhausted by their first function, they are brought here to serve a second.
The exhibition grew from a question about what has been lost in the secularisation of contemporary life. Rituals and ceremonies have historically functioned as technologies for living: ways of processing the unspeakable, marking transitions, and holding collective experience in shared form.
where oxlips and the nodding violet grows proposes the gallery itself as a site of ceremony, a space in which accumulated feeling might be set down or transformed. The work suggests that art can serve this human need: to ritualise, to place difficult things into containers, and to collectively sit with what resists easy resolution.
The central installation brings together found and repurposed objects: the graveyard flowers, a funerary urn, an old wooden cradle, and a length of red rope. Together they constitute something like an altar, or a threshold, holding a span of human life between them without needing to state it explicitly.
Heffernan is drawn to objects as containers or totems, things that hold what cannot easily be said. None of the elements here are conventionally beautiful or comfortable, but each carries a presence that invites a particular quality of attention. The red rope introduces a note of violence that runs quietly through the work as a whole, sitting alongside tenderness without either cancelling the other out.
Heffernan regards the work as diaristic on some level: an embodied examination of grieving, illness, ageing. The work was being made around the same time as the untimely loss of his brother, Ken. In Heffernan’s own words: it is not about him though. It more represents the frame of mind that I was in as a result of that happening. It made me think quite a lot about the parts of us that get damaged as we go through life and where we put those things, not so that we can just forget about them, but so that we can be alright about them.
The exhibition does not ask the viewer to receive someone else's grief. It offers a structure in which the viewer's own experience of damage, loss and repair might find a place. The specific is the point of entry. The universal is where it opens out.
The Paintings and Drawings: Ghosts, Dreams, Ceremony, Belief.
The paintings are populated by figures that resist easy categorisation: not quite real people, not quite statues, not quite dream-characters. Ghost-like and idol-like, they go about their strange repeated actions as though they have always done so, closer to nymphs or mythological creatures than to individuals with interior lives. Gesture is central, and a quasi-religious quality pervades many of the arrangements.
The paintings were conceived as a coherent body of work, their relationships in terms of scale, colour and recurring motif carefully considered. Violence is present throughout, not as subject matter but as quality, surfacing in the brushwork and certain passages of paint, sitting alongside tenderness without cancelling it out.
The drawings function as pages from a naturalist's notebook: a found ledger from the late nineteenth century, its aged paper used as ground for works describing aspects of The Ceremony of the Flowers. The language is antiquated, somewhere between diaristic and journalistic, shifting in tone from the romantic and lyrical to the quietly violent, with nothing to anchor the work to a fixed time or place. Eight framed pages from the ledger are presented the exhibition, offering an unsettling glimpse of the mysterious games and the ceremony. The drawings and objects speak to each other across the gallery, inviting the visitor to move between them and assemble their own account of the ceremony being described.
The exhibition title is taken from A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play whose characters are similarly suspended between the human and the not-quite-human, the real and the dreamed. Titles matter throughout the work: not labels but additional layers of reading, part of the instructions for the game, suggestive rather than prescriptive.
At its core, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows asks what we believe in, and what we need to believe in, in order to live. It does not answer this. It holds open the space in which the question can be genuinely felt: between the mundane and the mysterious, between loss and something that might, with the right ceremony, be made bearable.
Text by Aideen Quirke, an independent Curator and Arts Worker from Co. Tipperary living in Cork. She has worked in facilitation, curatorial, administrative and production roles at a number of galleries and museums across Ireland and internationally. She has previously worked with Joseph Heffernan on his exhibition A Thousand Years at Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group, Cork.
