Ciara Rodgers—Paper Facades make Tender Follies

4 Jun-20 Jun 2026

Overview

Pallas Projects are pleased to present Ciara Rodgers—Paper Facades make Tender Follies, the fifth exhibition of our 2026 Artist-Initiated Projects programme.

Cities, often produced through the logic of capitalism, inevitably generate excess in the form of debris, gaps, and distortions that resist sleek incorporation. The exhibition Paper Facades make Tender Follies works within this excess, framing the city as a body that is sheltering, worn, and repeatedly repaired through acts of care and shaped by its circadian rhythms of light and darkness.

Moving between daylight and artificial night, the exhibition responds to shifting atmospheres, shadow and illumination that fracture perception. It unfolds across two interconnected spaces: one dark, one light. The darker space evokes nocturnal urban atmospheres that are intimate, disorienting, and immersive. Neon and reflective elements cast low glows and fragmented reflections, where vision is partial, and the body navigates through shadow. The lighter space offers exposure and clarity yet reveals the instability and labour within the work. Together, these spaces mirror the temporal and psychological rhythms of the city and a body.

Across both environments, sculptural forms, found-material assemblages, paper cast bricks, and Polaroid photographs form a site-responsive installation. Precarious, ephemeral structures are bundled, propped, and balanced and exist in flux. Central forms loosely resembling igloos or tents carry the textures of masonry and flesh: protective yet tender, worn yet sheltering. Their surfaces recall touch and repair, echoing maternal gestures of making and mending, while suggesting inevitable collapse.

Polaroids punctuate the space as material witnesses: off-centre, tactile, and embedded, resisting polished representation. Moving through the city during daylight, dusk, and the artificial night, one can be sensitised to how environments transform. Shadowed spaces give way to illumination, neon glows against wet surfaces, and reflective materials fracture and redirect vision.

Feminist punk and grunge accompany Rodgers as she walks the city, a call to resistance, subversion, and reclamation. Some of their lyrics intervene in snippets as titles for the artworks. Fragments gathered through walking, scraps of plaster, foam, and packaging marked by weather, neglect, or human handling speak to labour, carrying, and quiet acts of care. All forming the basis of a materially responsive practice shaped by personal experience and the self-determination of Arte Povera and D.I.Y. punk.

Responding sensitively to the specific architecture of Pallas, the work creates a dialogue between internal and external architectures: between imagined, skin-like shelters and the fractured urban landscapes beyond. Viewers are invited to consider texture, colour, structure, openings, accidents, and atmospheres of light within the city, and to reflect on how care whether for a body, a building, or a community can hold fragile structures together. Through the reimagining of ordinary building materials and urban rubble, Paper Facades make Tender Follies asks how something delicate might still endure within systems that continually produce instability.

Ciara Rodgers is a visual artist based between Cork and Waterford and works across drawing, installation, performance, and Polaroid photography. Her practice explores the entanglement of body and building, tracing how power, gender, and capitalism shape our physical and psychological experience of space. Through walking and material reconfiguration, she constructs fragile yet defiant assemblages and situations that expose the quiet contradictions and resistances embedded within urban environments. Looking between what shelters, confines or controls, Rodgers’ work occupies the threshold between the poetic and the political, the embodied and the architectural.

She holds a First-Class Honours MA in Art & Process from MTU CCAD (2018). A studio member of Backwater Artists Group and Cork Printmakers, she was awarded a Visual Art Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2020 and an Agility Award in 2021. Her work has been exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally, and often unfolds through collaboration and site-responsive research. Solo presentations include Folly | Façade at GOMA, Waterford (2024), Green Mouth at SIRIUS, Cork (2023), A City of Beautiful Nonsense at Studio 12, Cork (2022), Monuments II at Garter Lane, Waterford (2020) and Monuments of Abandoned Futures at LHQ Gallery, Cork County Council (2019). 

Recipient of Cork Midsummer Festival’s Jane Anne Rothwell Award 2026,  Rodgers has recently written for JAWS: Journal of Art & Writing and Source and is completing a practice-based Ph.D at SETU Waterford.

ciararodgers.com | @ciaraarodgers