Robin Parmar | The Vault of Night

5-28 June 2025 

The Vaults at Lavit Gallery

Lavit Gallery presents a site-specific installation by Robin Parmar.

“The vaults at Lavit Gallery are a historic place, intimately tied to the practice of brewing in the city. They also have a very special acoustic character. Spending time in the dark under the vaulted ceilings, I recalled past listening experiences in and around Cork. My residencies at The Guesthouse and Sirius Arts Centre had given me ample time to explore places for their acoustics and architectural properties. One night in May 2016 I stayed up late, until human activity softened. From a vantage point in Cobh I recorded the shoreline of Cork Harbour. As the waves washed onto the rocky shoreline. As the birds slept in the trees. As the fish swam silently in their cold depths. As the clouds obscured the moon. This installation consists of location recordings and pure sine waves that have been specifically tuned to the volume of air contained within these vaults. Visitors are encouraged to hear how different positions and slight movements of their own body might change their perception. This is a listening ecology, a study of where we live.”

Robin Palmer, Field recording

Robin Parmar is a media artist and researcher who explores the phenomenology of place-making and our relationships with nature. His cross-disciplinary practice includes electroacoustic composition, sound and video installations, experimental film, and improvised performance. His research interests include soundscape composition, psychoacoustics, and sonic arts theory. Robin has released fourteen albums of music, the most recent being “Aletheia” (2025, Silent Records, USA). Awards include the Invisible Places residency (2017) and an Arts Council Bursary (2017). He was selected for the national showcase “Just Listening – Ireland Calling” in 2011 (curated by the National Sculpture Factory) and was an invited artist at EVA International, Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2010 (curated by Elizabeth Hatz). Robin has a doctorate in Sonic Creativity from De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) and lectures in Video, Film, and Visual Communication at the University of Limerick (Ireland) where he directs the BSc. in Music, Media and Performance Technology. He is Vice-President of the Irish Science, Sound, and Technology Association (ISSTA) and reviews for the journal Organised Sound. His handbook “Listening To Places” (Void Gallery, Derry, 2022) sold out its first printing. 

Michael Quane & Johanna Connor | Paper – Pencil – Chisel – Stone  

22 May – 14 June 2025  

Opening reception Thursday 22 May, 5.30-7.30pm  

Paper – Pencil – Chisel – Stone is a joint exhibition by Michael Quane RHA and Johanna Connor, drawing on the artists respective media of stone and paper.  

Connor’s drawings on paper are made as if looking through a lens, editing the visible and the invisible and striving to extract some of the hidden magic from the mundane. Quane on the other hand incessantly and meditatively scrapes through the act of carving stone, a ‘loose and flabby’ boulder ever tightening with each pass of the chisel and emerging into a deliberate form.  

O’Connor seeks beauty in what appears to be ordinary scenes and sets about to reveal this beauty through the process of drawing. The artist loses herself in a thicket of meaning derived from the traces of peoples’ endeavours that have left an impression in the landscape. Her landscape is the landscape of things and traces, where furrows drawn deep remain in the tilth of the soil, where the hollow in a horizon holds a story, where the vast scale of husbandry in the land reveals a scale of means, where the proportions of subjects can express an aesthetic that is personal, communal or indeed global, where characteristics can reveal the architecture of social and cultural evolution, where assumptions find us caught in the wire of nostalgia, where the ground has the indelible, yet faintest, footprint impressed upon its surface. Titles emerge whilst drawing or sometimes in discussion with Quane. 

The principal material onto which Quane draws is stone. The chisel tears into the surface, scraping white abrasions into black stone, in the act of gathering the form into itself. Each mark serves a purpose but isn’t cherished for its own sake. Its value to the whole is equal to how long it lasts before another scrape of the chisel obliterates it; that mark in turn to be supplanted by subsequent marks and scrapes. Hundreds of thousands of these serve to gather up the form from the boulder. The marks fold a drawing’s surface into itself where it needs to be tucked and wrap it ever tighter, until a stage is reached where the drawn surface stretches into a form. Fragments of a drawing remain proud of the form, having the appearance of a lesion on the surface, through which the subjacent quality of the rock can be seen. He is intent on immediacy and spontaneity and hence the drawings he produces are part of the process of direct carving.  

Michael Quane and Johanna Connor are based in Coachford, County Cork where they share ‘2 Studios: One Gallery’.  

Johanna Connor, Sky-Fall, 2025,  Pencil on HP Waterford paper 300gms, 75 x 75 cm, framed 90 x 90 cm  

Michael Quane, All Our Belongings, 2025, Nabresina-Light Limestone, 52 x 42 x 30 cm 

Orla O’Byrne

09 May– 31 May 2025  

The Vaults at Lavit Gallery 

Orla O’Byrne presents photographic work, drawing and installation in response to her ongoing project at St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork, where she is overseeing the conservation of a large collection of historical plaster models. Lavit Gallery is located just 300 metres from St Fin Barre’s Cathedral. For this exhibition, the artist envisages the gallery’s vaults, tucked snugly below ground level, as a symbolic inner world where she is free to temporarily depart from the systematised logic of the conservation project. Here, she focuses on the intriguing visual language of fragments and embraces the role of chance in her work. 

Orla O’Byrne, South Tower, St Mark, 2025, digital print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315gsm, image 29x 21cm

“I work across a variety of media and methods such as drawing, photography and sculptural installation. I frequently use chalk, charcoal and plaster in my work and adopt an experimental approach, constantly exploring and testing the limits of these and other materials. The ideas behind my work come from the overlooked histories of specific sites or artefacts and I have a particular curiosity about what’s concealed within the vastness of the institutional archive.” Orla O’Byrne, 2025. 

Orla O’Byrne is an artist and researcher currently based between Backwater Artists Group and St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork. She holds an MA in Art & Process from MTU Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, and is a PhD candidate, writing her dissertation on artists working with archival materials. Her previous awards include Lavit Gallery Student of the Year, the CIT Registrar’s Prize and The Valerie Gleeson Bursary Award.  Orla has been Chair of the Board of Backwater Artists Group since 2023. At St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, her time is divided between pioneering a rolling arts programme and overseeing a conservation project.