Opening Season 18, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Van Tran on his studio in 2024. Want to know what an artist studio is like? Watch full Instagram interview here.

Van Tran (b. 2000, Hanoi, Vietnam) is a visual artist working between Vietnam and Ireland. His practice centres on traditional Vietnamese lacquer, engaging themes of migration, ecological interdependence, and material memory.

Through layered surfaces incorporating silver leaf, eggshell, and shell fragments, Tran constructs paintings that function as temporal archives. His work reflects lived experience across geographies, drawing parallels between avian migration and diasporic identity.

He has exhibited in Ireland, Vietnam, China, and France, including exhibitions at the National Museum of Fine Art (Vietnam) and The Lab Gallery (Dublin).

Artist statement

Painting begins before its physical making. It exists first within memory, material, and inherited knowledge. My practice centers on Vietnamese lacquer, a medium shaped by generations of makers, including my parents, whose thirty-year engagement with lacquer forms the foundation of my relationship to it.

Having grown up between Vietnam and Ireland, I experience identity as something continuously negotiated across distance. Places return altered; memories persist while landscapes shift. Lacquer mirrors this condition. Built through layering, sanding, concealment, and revelation, it records time through accumulation.

Here, Where It Remains examines migration through the parallel movements of diasporic experience and bird migration. Birds appear not as symbols but as bodies guided by instinct, climate, and survival — navigating between departure and return.

The works treat lacquer as a temporal surface where traces emerge and disappear. Silver leaf oxidizes, shells fracture, and pigments darken. These transformations echo how identity forms through erosion and persistence. Migration becomes neither loss nor arrival, but an ongoing state of becoming.

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For more information, follow Van Tran on Instagram @van.trran

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Closing superbly this special Season 17, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Lee Welch in his studio. Also Watch full Instagram interview here.

Lee Welch is an artist who works in painting, drawing, and installation, but his true medium is the space between knowing and not knowing—the familiar made strange. His paintings are fragments of a dream you can’t quite place: figures and objects pared to their essence, hovering in a world both intimate and alien. Emerging from the shadows of art history, architecture, literature, and tennis, as well as his own private archive, Welch’s work distills, abstracts, and rebuilds, creating a visual language entirely his own. Figures appear in domestic scenes or leisure, their mundane actions charged with eerie resonance. They feel close yet distant, their flattened forms and muted textures like memories just out of reach. Welch’s paintings are not just seen; they are felt—a faint ache, a distant hum, lingering long after you’ve looked away.

Lee Welch was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1975 and currently lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Welch creates gestural, atmospheric paintings that attest to the psychical and emotional depths of his chosen subjects and map out delicate negotiations between beauty, desire, and the painted image. Depicting figures from his own milieu, as well as from history, literature, music, and tennis, Welch finds feeling in that which he depicts, always rendered with the intensity of his particular humanism; a close looking akin to love. In each subject’s specificity, the artist reveals the universal feelings that connect us to each other, and that stretch from our present moment back through time.

Welch received his BFA from the National College of Art and Design in 2009 and his MFA from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam in 2011. Currently based at the dlr Baths Artist Studios, he has previously held residencies at NCAD, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Banff Centre for Arts, the latter supported by the Arts Council.

Welch received his BFA from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in 2009 and his MFA from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam in 2011. He has since been widely exhibited internationally and received numerous awards. Recent exhibitions have taken place at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain; Glucksman Gallery, Cork; Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. His paintings are in private and public collections such as the MB Art Foundation, the Arts Council, Hugh Lane Gallery, and the OPW - State Art Collection.

Lee Welch is part of the duo Hallahan & Welch, a curatorial partnership founded by Paul Hallahan and Lee Welch, two artists with a deep-rooted commitment to the Irish arts scene. Having established influential artist-led spaces in the late 2000s, Hallahan with SOMA (Waterford) and Welch with FOUR (Dublin), the duo has spent over a decade fostering platforms for contemporary art through economic and social shifts.

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For more information, follow Lee Welch on Instagram @_leewelch_

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On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Matthew Coll in 2024 in a super studio visit! Watch full Instagram episode here.

Matthew Coll is an Irish artist based in Dublin. He graduated from NCAD’s Fine Art Painting BA in 2022 and works predominantly in painting, sculpture and installation.

His work is part of several private and public collections, including the Office of Public Works, St Vincent’s University Hospital and Teeling Whiskey Distillery. He has received several awards, including NCAD's Clancy Quay Studio Graduate Residency Award 2023/2024, the Arts Council’s Agility Award 2023 and Fingal County Council's Artists’ Support Scheme Bursaries 2023 & 2025.

His current work focuses on the subject matter of crowds, exploring the influence between the collective and the individual, how shared energies of bliss or discontent become channelled into constructive and destructive forces. Utilising found imagery and photography from daily life as a starting point for source imagery.

Painting actual and imagined gatherings, ranging from joyous raves to turbulent riots, aiming to depict a reality slipping away, where Real and Unreal become indistinguishable. Distorting the origin of the image through the painting process, often dragging, sanding, scraping and pouring paint across the surface and occasionally deconstructing structural components, pursuing a simultaneous harmony and conflict between points of representation and abstraction. Whilst frequently working on found or discarded materials as the painting surface.

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For more information, follow Matthew Coll on Instagram @matthewcoll.art

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