'Liminal Imprints' Zoe Velthuysen explores migration and identity through her art

Liminal Imprints, an exhibition by Zoe Velthuysen, comes as a result of STAC’s Tipperary Artist in Residence 2025, an initiative supported by Tipperary Arts Office.

This new body of work will explore how migration and place shape identity, drawing from the artist's own experience of migrating from Australia to rural Tipperary.  

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 Motivated by the internal and often quiet ways in which place interacts with identity, Velthuysen's work engages with how surroundings, systems, and social dynamics leave their mark on a person over time, asking what happens when the contours of a new place meet the inner workings of a migrant?  

The exhibition aims to interrogate the experience of adapting to new surroundings, questioning what it means to belong, to move, and to carry a sense of home within one's body.  

The artist's material-led process uses repetition, accumulation, and subtle variation to reflect instability and gradual change. Drawing forms the foundation of her practice, while sculptural work extends these investigations into three-dimensional space. Her work often engages with thresholds, transitional states, and the tension between permanence and impermanence. 

Zoe Velthuysen is an Irish Australian artist working primarily in drawing and sculpture. Her practice examines migration as a lived, bodily experience, focusing on how identity shifts through movement, adaptation, and place. Grounded in personal research and observation, her work considers how attachments to place are formed and how they change over time. 

Velthuysen is a recent graduate of the BA (Hons) in Fine Art at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design. She has exhibited in group shows in Ireland and has received several graduate awards, including: the Lavit Gallery Graduate Group Exhibition Award, Cork City Council's Arts Office Purchase Prize, and the MTU Student Engagement Exhibition Award.

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