25/08/2026
GOMA Presents
At Night the Hens Stand and Dream
Niamh Coffey
20 August – 9 September 2026
GOMA Gallery of Modern Art is delighted to present At Night the Hens Stand and Dream, an art exhibition by Niamh Coffey.............Enter under intertwined necks of birds in love. Please don& #39;t let the PDA make you queasy. A hungry and disembodied mouth looms over you, sputtering frantic toads and teeth out onto the floor. You step back to avoid them and bump into a small and ugly spiked creature. It scuttles past, leaving a trail of juicy, bespittled blackberries behind. Please do not be tempted to snack right now. A ladder tumbles down from the moon, droplets of milk following. Two conjoined eggs whisper as you pass by. You didn& #39;t catch the words but the tone seemed ominous, especially in this duplicitous Gemini season. You go to leave and a sweaty hand presses something conspiratorially into your palm.....................
This exhibition combines two bodies of work, Siúnta (2023-25) and Clodhoppers (2025-ongoing).Taking its name from the Irish for a seam or joint, Siúnta weaves together past narratives to imagine new ecological relationships. Clodhoppers takes its name from how the celestial characters, Sphinx, Moon and Godwoman, refer to the earthbound subjects in Marina Carr& #39;s play The Boy. Clodhoppers widens these imagined relationships to include cosmic connections. In this exhibition, forms of flesh, fur, flower and feather mingle and merge. Subjects create symbiotic and antagonistic relationships, exhibit absurd actions and explore
neoteric habits together. In 1937-39, the Irish Folklore Commission asked primary school children to collect local history from their
relatives and neighbours. Nestled in exercise copies, between thousands of stories detailed in meticulous handwriting, lie their tales of metamorphosis and binary-blurring. Hares become milk-hungry witches, needy children are turned to stone, gooseberries transform sore eyes, tadpoles swirl in boggy bellies. Siúnta
uses these instances of metamorphosis as departure points to wriggle further into absurd and imaginary realms. These archives show that in an earlier Irish imaginary world, the boundaries that separate us from nature and other entities were not so separate and fixed, but porous and blurred.
The exhibition was made by gathering these stories of binary-blurring between humans and non-humans and making drawings based on them. These drawings then played together, created links and found connections, they were collaged together, their elements were extended and emphasised, their actions sped up and slowed down, their beginnings swapped with their ends, subjects up and left one story for another. Narratives eventually emerged from this process and were brought into a textile world, a medium used because of its rich history with collaborative story-telling, connotations to gender and queerness and ability to physically join separate elements together.