Ultimology Summer School
Fire Station Artists’ Studios annual Summer Studio 28–30 May 2025
As part of Fire Station Artists’ Studios annual Summer Studio, the Department of Ultimology and Kunstverein Aughrim are thrilled to present a three day intensive workshop. This summer school will invite selected participants to delve into Ultimology, the study of endings, to look at how people attend to death as a way of informing our approach to the urgencies of the present.
Main image: Department of Ultimology, Mediating a Rupture, Symposium at VISUAL Carlow, photography by Louis Haugh, 2023.
Open Call Details
Fire Station Artists’ Studios (FSAS) is calling artists, curators, writers & thinkers to send their expression of interest for Ultimology Summer School by Wednesday 26 March, 5pm.
FSAS 2025 Summer Studio: Ultimology Summer School is devised and facilitated by Fiona Hallinan and Kate Strain, and developed in collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim and the Department of Ultimology. It will take place from 28-30 May in FSAS and includes a day trip to Kunstverein Aughrim (more info in itinerary below).
This Ultimology Summer School invites participants to delve into Ultimology, or the practice of paying attention to endings. Through readings, field trips, hands-on activities, workshops and guest presentations, participants will draw on research into practices proximate to death, to imagine how paying attention to endings might shape or alter our present approaches to artistic knowledge production.
We are living in a period of environmental crises that has been deemed a “sixth mass extinction” for the extent of biodiversity and species loss wrought by human-led activity. In this context, Ultimology considers ways of paying attention to vulnerability, obsolescence, redundancy and death, asking how might we navigate loss and consider endings at a time when many rituals, species, relationships and ways of being are at risk of extinction? Ultimology considers how we attend to the loss of life, that most significant of endings, to inform our approach to thinking about other endings and the urgencies of the present.
The three-day programme will be delivered by Fiona Hallinan and Kate Strain of the Department of Ultimology, in collaboration with invited guest contributors: Marie Farrington, Maïa Nunes and Staci Bu Shea. Artist Marie Farrington will lead a hands-on clay workshop during a session of deep introductions. Artist and sound therapist Maïa Nunes will lead a site-specific Voice Bath as part of our field trip to Kunstverein Aughrim. Curator Staci Bu Shea will lead a workshop and share a presentation on their research into the practice of Dying Livingly, drawing on their holistic experience as a death doula to speak to the aesthetic and poetic experience of living life led by death.
Dates: 28, 29, 30 May 2025
Time: 10am – 5pm (exact times tbc closer to the date)
Venue: FSAS, 9-12 Lower Buckingham Street, Dublin 1 & Kunstverein Aughrim, Main Street, Aughrim, Co Wicklow, Ireland.
Cost: €150 for the three days, lunch included.
Schedule
Day 1: Deep Introductions
Facilitators and participants share introductions to their research and artistic practices, during a hands-on clay workshop led by artist Marie Farrington.
Day 2: Field Trip
A coach takes participants from Dublin to south county Wicklow, to visit an exhibition at Kunstverein Aughrim. Pit stops along the way include a Voice Bath by artist and sound therapist Maïa Nunes.
Day 3: Dying Livingly
Readings and an intimate workshop with our invited contributor Staci Bu Shea, followed by a public presentation and launch of Bu Shea’s newest publication Dying Livingly (2025).
The Ultimology Summer School will be of interest to anyone in the creative sector whose work engages with ideas around death, endings, extinction, loss, preservation, ecology, education, practices of care, feminist new materialism, death studies, and/or wake work.
About the contributors:
Fiona Hallinan is an artist, researcher, filmmaker and, alongside curator Kate Strain, co-founder of the Department of Ultimology, based between Brussels, Belgium and Cork, Ireland. Her doctoral research at LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven explores the coming-into-being of Ultimology as a tool for transformative discourse. This project involves instigating gatherings around “ruptures” as case studies; the closure of a canteen, the demolition of a church, the extinction of a plant. This research is informed by gathering knowledge related to rituals of mourning, supported by a monthly reading group On Death. She is interested in themes of hospitality, traces, thresholds, care and critical pedagogy and often works with food as part of her practice, cooking and organising meals. She has presented work in a number of international contexts, including at IMMA, VISUAL Carlow, Kerlin Gallery, the John Nicholas Brown Centre for Public Humanities at Brown University and Grazer Kunstverein. Her film and installation work, We Turn Towards an Ending and Pay Attention, is currently on exhibition at Kunsthal Ghent, Belgium, until June 2025.
Kate Strain is a curator of contemporary art and the founding director of Kunstverein Aughrim. From 2016–2021 she was Artistic Director of Grazer Kunstverein, Austria, where she commissioned a rolling programme of seasonal solo exhibitions and collaborative projects by major international artists. In close collaboration with artist Fiona Hallinan, Strain is co-founder of the Department of Ultimology, a research body dedicated to the study of endings. Working alongside Rachael Gilbourne, Strain makes up one half of the paired curatorial practice RGKSKSRG, commissioning, presenting and contextualising contemporary art. Strain previously worked as Acting Curator at Project Arts Centre, a multidisciplinary art centre in Dublin. She is a member of IKT, the international association of curators of contemporary art, and regularly lectures in curatorial practice, art history and contemporary art.
Staci Bu Shea (b. Miami, 1988) is a curator, writer and death doula based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Broadly, they focus on aesthetic and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as its manifestations in interpersonal relationships and daily life, community organizing and institutional practice. Bu Shea’s latest publication Solution 305: Dying Livingly (Sternberg Press, 2025) is a collection of short essays written in the first few years of the author’s holistic deathcare research and practice. With a focus on the truth of impermanence and the material cultures of death and dying, the writing reaches toward a future of compassionate, community-centered deathcare. Bu Shea was curator at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons (Utrecht, 2017-2022). With Carmel Curtis, they co-curated Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (New York City, 2017). Bu Shea holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2016).
Marie Farrington is an artist whose practice reflects on the act of making through geological and archaeological lenses. Using casting, carving and other sculptural processes, she engages with memory through situated encounters with landscape and architecture. Her work makes formal reference to field sampling, built heritage and histories of display. She holds a Three-Year Membership Studio at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios and is a part-time lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Her work is held in the permanent collections of The Arts Council of Ireland, Trinity Centre for the Environment, and the Office of Public Works. Supported by The Arts Council of Ireland.
Maïa Nunes is an Irish-Trinidadian transdisciplinary artist & sound therapist whose artwork weaves with voice, cloth, movement, sound and the land to create immersive and multi-textural performance worlds in the form of films, audio-sculptural installations and live performances. Theirs is a liberation practice; a live process of re-membering the self in dialogue with the ancestral past. It unravels and re-imagines, using a transpersonal approach to usher catharsis and transformation.
How to apply:
Participants will have an active and demonstrable practice in the arts, and an interest in ideas around death, endings, extinction, loss, preservation, ecology, education, practices of care, feminist new materialism, death studies, wake work.
To apply, please send the following:
1) a selected CV (2 pages maximum)
2) an expression of interest stating how participating in the Ultimology Summer School would be of benefit to your practice. Please refer to previous work or projects that demonstrate your interest in the theme of endings (1 page max + up to 3 images or audio/video files)
Please send all these documents in 1 PDF file by email to apply@firestation.ie with the subject line FSAS Summer Studio 2025.
Please note: selection is competitive as numbers are restricted to 10 and a fee of €150 is payable. The closing date for receipt of completed application is Wednesday, 26 March at 5pm. For queries, contact programme@firestation.ie.
Main image: Department of Ultimology, Mediating a Rupture, Symposium at VISUAL Carlow, photography by Louis Haugh, 2023.