Each season sees The Dollhouse occupied by a different group of invited artists.
The current season, Winter in The Dollhouse, welcomes:
To enter a virtual process room and view the occupying artist's work, please click on the artist's name and location below.
Mark Orange is a visual artist from Belfast, Northern Ireland, living and working in New
York since 1999. His work in audio, video, photography and installation has been shown at galleries
internationally, including Artists Space, Swiss Institute, Participant Inc, and Anthology Film Archives in
New York, as well as Overgaden Copenhagen, Temple Bar Gallery Dublin, Cornell University Ithaca, and
Model Arts and Niland Gallery Sligo. In 2017, Orange presented McCullough Mulvin Orange, a major
solo exhibition project that took place across five venues in Dublin, including the Irish Architecture
Foundation, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, and Trinity College. He was a founding member of Belfast
artist-run organisation, Catalyst Arts in 1993, where he was closely involved in curating a series of
exhibitions and projects in non-gallery spaces.
Áine Nic Giolla Coda is an artist based in County Clare, Ireland. She works as a lecturer in Fine Art and is Programme Leader in Painting at Limerick School of Art and Design (LIT). She is currently a board member of EVA International, Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art.
Áine’s practice explores architectural space and the rural environment and incorporates a variety of media including drawing, painting, photography and adopts socially engaged and collaborative approaches with group workshop projects (Green Fern Art Project). She has exhibited in group shows, nationally and internationally as well as solo exhibitions at the Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast and Limerick City Gallery of Art. She has collaborated with artist Michael Minnis on several projects and they are going to bring ideas together through collaboration and discussion for Winter in the Dollhouse.
Michael Minnis is an artist and artist educator. Originally from Belfast he is now based in Co. Clare and Lectures on the BA and MA Programmes in Art at GMIT, Galway. He is currently pursuing practice-based doctorate research at the Ulster University, Belfast.
This research has evolved out of Michael’s long-standing interest in historical memory and representation. His work draws upon photography and archives as a method of capturing historical temporalities. His projects draw upon collective memory and displacements relating to ideas around site and context.
Having completed the PS1 Fellowship in New York in the mid nineties Michael returned to Ireland where he has had the opportunity of developing projects within galleries and public forums. These include the Limerick City Gallery of art, as well as, ‘In Context’, public art projects, Dublin, and the Pier 4a, Art Commissions, Heathrow Airport. He has had a long-standing interest in collaboration and has developed site oriented projects with artist Áine Nic Giolla Coda. 'The Dollhouse’ offers the first opportunity to extend this collaboration within a virtual space.
Christa Forster—writer, educator, performer—was born and raised in Southern California. During her young adulthood, she lived in Los Angeles, Durham (England), Salamanca (Spain) and San Francisco. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she studied with poets Edward Hirsch and Adam Zagajewski and served as poetry editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. She has won multiple arts awards and grants for her literary, multi-disciplinary, and educational work. In addition, she has written for and performed in live bands, the longest running one called Shag. Her written work has been published in print anthologies and in online literary journals. Most recently, her feature work has appeared in Bluestem, The Broken Plate, Cite Magazine, ellipsis... literature & art, The Houston Chronicle, The Main Street Rag, The New York Times, The Round, Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine, and Sculpture Magazine and Steam Ticket.
Also an educator, Christa has taught poetry workshops to adults, teens, and children through Inprint, Writers in the Schools, and The Hines Center for Spirituality and Prayer. She teaches high school English full time in Houston, TX.
Over the past 15 years, she has created a variety of blogs to document her work, including teXta, Antilogical Pedagogical, and “What’s on [My] Mind?”. She’s findable on Instagram and Twitter as @xtaforster.
Gesine Beermann-Kielhöfer is a Botanical Artist living in the Netherlands. Gesine was born and raised in the south of Germany. When she grew up she was encouraged by her father, a biologist, to draw plants. He used to take her to the local botanical garden and tell her the Latin names of the different plant species.
Gesine studied Fashion Design at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. After working for a fashion magazine in Hamburg, she moved to the Netherlands with her family. She decided to focus more on her own art and followed several workshops by internationally known botanical artists. Her favourite media is watercolour which she applies with very thin brushstrokes on paper or vellum. Gesine is a working member of the Dutch Society of Botanical Artists and is also a board member of the society. Her works were in many exhibitions in the Netherlands (Het Noord Brabants Museum, Museum de Zwarte Tulp, Paleis Het Loo, Het Westfries Museum) and abroad (Milan; London: the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art; Florence: Villa Bardini; Kleve: B.C. Koekkoekhaus).
For a recent project, Gesine painted native plants of the Netherlands. Four of her works are currently exhibited in Kleve, Germany.