WAKE
Elvis Beetham & Ian Jermyn
working across expanded cinema, surf craft, and material translation
1 December 2025 – 13 February 2026
Opening: Friday 1 December, 19:00
Closing: Friday 13 February, 17:00
Location: Scenius Gallery, Sligo
Gallery 1 (Adelaide St.): Street-facing installation, viewable 24 hours
Gallery 2: Open Monday–Friday, 10:00–17:00
Admission: Free
About the Exhibition
Wake is presented by Freehold Collective, a collaboration between three artists whose practices emerge through surfing, material experimentation, and coastal geographies.
Formed across the Atlantic, between Ireland and the UK, the collective works through movement—between making and unmaking, use and reuse, contact and withdrawal. Here, the sea operates less as subject than as condition: a shifting field that resists fixity while structuring rhythm, labour, and form.
The exhibition brings together a surfboard shaper based in Mayo, a fin-maker working between Cornwall and Scotland, and a printmaker and textile artist based in Sligo. Across these practices, objects are reconfigured through processes of adaptation, pressure, and repeated iteration, foregrounding instability as a generative force.
Installation view showing woodblock print on sailcloth by Ian Jermyn and resin sculpture by Elvis Beetham, WAKE, Scenius Gallery Sligo, 2025
Expanded Cinema
The expanded cinema programme stages a live encounter between moving image and sound, where documentary material is reworked through performance. Image and sound operate as interdependent systems, unfolding in real time and resisting fixed composition.
Departures
Departures is an experimental trio working across guitar, percussion, and synthesis. Emerging in 2024, the group explores sound in non-traditional environments from airport lounges to industrial sites, treating space as an active acoustic condition.
Their practice centres on disruption: feedback, distortion, and evolving textures produce unstable sonic fields that shift over time.
Instagram: @departures_music_strandhill
Departures experimental music trio performing at Scenius Gallery Sligo, 2025
Exhibition Artists
Elvis Beetham
Elvis Beetham’s practice operates at the intersection of surfing and object-making, emerging from a sustained engagement with surfboard modification since 2009. His work reconfigures functional forms through adaptation, disruption, and reuse.
Drawing on surf culture, found materials, and embodied practice, Beetham tests how objects exceed their intended function. His iterative approach foregrounds the encounter between material, maker, and wave.
Website:booglerizesurfboards.com
Instagram: @booglerize_surfboards
Elvis Beetham, Bumps and Dips, 2025, extruded polystyrene, WAKE, Scenius Gallery Sligo
Elvis Beetham, Gutters (process), 2025, extruded polystyrene
Ian Jermyn
Ian Jermyn is an artist based in Sligo, Ireland, whose practice is shaped by coastal environments, a background in marine science, and repeated movement between Australia and Ireland.
This sustained oscillation between geographies informs an expanded understanding of “home” as contingent and unstable. Rather than fixed, home emerges through displacement—echoing the sea itself: tidal, without origin, continually arriving, receding, and retracing its paths across shifting shores.
Working across relief printing, dyeing, stitched textile processes, Jermyn produces materially layered works that foreground transformation, permeability, and drift. His use of repurposed materials further destabilises fixed meanings, allowing forms to circulate between contexts and accumulate new associations over time.
Website: organicdevolution.com
Instagram:@organicdevolution
Ian Jermyn, Flexion XII, 2025, woodblock print on acid-dyed, steam-set nylon sailcloth with industrial machine stitching
Ian Jermyn, Flexion IV, 2025, woodblock print on acid-dyed, steam-set nylon sailcloth with industrial machine stitching
Installation view with visitors, WAKE, Scenius Gallery, 2025
Credits
Presented by Freehold
Exhibiting artists: Elvis Beetham, Ian Jermyn
With Scenius Gallery
Film: Ian Jermyn
Expanded cinema: Departures (live music)
Curated by Marita O’Hanlon