Announcing PS²'s Graduate-in-residence 2026/27

We're so delighted to announce the recipient of our 2026/27 Graduate-in-residence award... Áine Crawford! They will receive a free studio for a period of one year, culminating in a solo exhibition. 

You can see Áine's work at the Belfast School of Art Graduate Showcase, which kicks off on Friday 5 June from 6pm - 9pm. The Graduate Showcase will remain open for viewing from 10am - 5pm until Saturday 20 June. 

About Áine

Áine is a queer and neurodivergent multi-disciplinary artist, currently specialising in drawing, sculpture, and performance. Their practice explores moments in the everyday and mundane where the abject body is at a threshold, caught in jeopardy physically, mentally, or through sensory inputs.

A foundation of their practice is an interest in storytelling and worldbuilding, which they develop through drawings of “ladies” existing within a void, liminal world that parallels our own. In the face of rapidly increasing femicide and domestic violence statistics in a post-conflict North of Ireland, Áine's 'ladies' act as narrators for their installation to explore how misogyny and surveillance directly impact female presenting bodies within the domestic sphere.

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About Áine's degree show:

My current body of work specifically interrogates how “tout” culture in the North of Ireland uses the ordinary person as a scapegoat to blame or threaten into silence, especially marginalised, vulnerable people, rather than paramilitary activity or the government. I consider how, within these systems of injustice, there is a voyeuristic expectation for the ordinary person to silently observe or dismiss pain and suffering of others/self to benefit authoritative figures, especially within online algorithms. 

I also explore “hard lad” culture in the age of the “manosphere” and its associated toxic masculinity, interested in void devotions and mass mind washing to appraise the cisgender white male. I investigate these ideologies using taxidermy to explore female-animal relationships in terms of Aristotelian tradition, which places marginalised humans and non-humans together at the bottom of the patriarchal, anthropocentric hierarchy to justify cisgender, white, male domination and oppression. Considering transgressive ideas of becoming, I use the motif of the fish as an animal I am unable to become with all its blokey associations, only feminine or neutral when it has been caught, devoured, or associated with female genitals in a derogatory fashion.

I aim to question the authority of perversion and subversion, and who gave some hard lad bloke in tighty whities his ma washed for him that much power anyways?

PS² is supported by The National Lottery through Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council's Artists' Studio and Makerspace Organisational Grant, Arts & Business NI's Blueprint Investment Grant, and Dormant Assets NI through The National Lottery Community Fund.