THE NAUGHTON GALLERY

The eighth instalment of the Naughton Gallery’s acclaimed sports exhibition series explores the high-stakes territory where art and sport intersect. Bringing together an international selection of artists working across painting, photography, textiles, sculpture, comics, installation, and publishing, the exhibition examines sport not simply as entertainment or spectacle, but as a powerful cultural arena through which ideas of identity, politics, gender, aspiration, and belonging are continuously negotiated. Across the exhibition, the sporting body emerges as both celebrated and scrutinised: disciplined, commodified, mythologised, and politicised in equal measure. The works on display consider how sport shapes both personal and collective identities, functioning simultaneously as a site of visibility, pressure, exclusion, resistance, and release. Themes of masculinity, queer identity, fandom, celebrity, labour, vulnerability, and representation run throughout the exhibition, revealing the complex social and emotional structures embedded within sporting culture. At the same time, the exhibition examines the aesthetics and visual language of sport itself – its gestures, uniforms, architecture, rituals, and systems of image production – highlighting how these forms construct meaning, desire, and belonging both within and beyond the arena. A complementary display of design-led publications expands this dialogue further, tracing how sport circulates through publishing, graphic design, and mass media. Historic Roland-Garros posters and the rereleased Nike Moon Shoe similarly foreground the enduring relationship between sport, aesthetics, commerce, and cultural memory. Ultimately, the exhibition positions sport as far more than a game: a lens through which wider questions surrounding power, identity, community, and contemporary culture come sharply into focus.

AVANT GARDENER examines how contemporary artists are tending to new growth – cultivating visions of connection, care, and resistance. Bringing together local and international practitioners, the exhibition explores the intersections of art, activism, and sustainability, asking how we continue to find meaning, pleasure, and purpose in our relationship with the living world. From lush landscapes to post-apocalyptic dreamscapes, the works consider how the human body and experience are shaped by their surroundings – at once embedded within them and set apart. Through pop cultural references, mythological allusions, and cinematic echoes, the exhibition invites us to look anew at the environments we inhabit, shape, and sometimes destroy. In an age defined by climate anxiety and ecological awakening, gardens, parks, and landscapes emerge as terrains of care and control, conflict and connection. These spaces can be sites of refuge and tension, intimacy and exclusion, growth and erasure, where questions of belonging, identity, and responsibility come into focus. Spanning comics, illustration, moving image, installation, photography, and sculpture, the works ask what it means to belong – and who or what is allowed to thrive. Rather than a passive backdrop, the environment appears here as a dynamic, responsive presence that reflects our fears, fantasies, and vulnerabilities. The exhibition moves between the personal and the speculative, the playful and the profound, offering multiple ways of seeing and understanding our place within these entangled systems. Many of the artists draw attention to what is often overlooked: fragile habitats, invasive species, hidden urban ecologies, and the complex worlds beneath our feet. Shifting perspective from the microscopic to the monumental, the exhibition foregrounds interconnection across all forms of life. It suggests that creativity – through art, world-building, storytelling, publishing, and play – can help us think differently about the future, encouraging new ways of living with and caring for the natural world. AVANT GARDENER forms part of REACH 26, Queen’s University Belfast’s annual Arts and Sustainability Festival, and continues the Naughton Gallery’s commitment to presenting bold, thought-provoking work that speaks to the world we share.

The Naughton Gallery presents Disasters and Interventions, a new exhibition by internationally renowned artist Oliver Jeffers. This marks the first time that this collection of works – created sporadically over the past decade and a half – has been exhibited together. Each piece involves the artist intervening in some way on a found image. Although collage has long been part of Jeffers’ approach, both the disaster paintings and the intervention works differ from traditional collage: rather than cutting up found material for its colour or specific imagery, Jeffers uses the entirety of the original scene, adding a new element that completely alters the depicted narrative. The series began in 2011, when Jeffers retrieved a decaying landscape print from a trash can in Chinatown, New York. He brought it back to his studio and instinctively painted the first thing that came to mind to “add” to the otherwise empty setting – a bright red rocket, borrowed from his well-known picture book How to Catch a Star, crash-landed in the dirt ( * A Point of Light in the Dark ). After creating several more of these works – early pieces often featured half-sunk Titanics, made around 2012, the centenary of the ship’s sinking – Jeffers realised that all of his interventions depicted some form of disaster. This ritual of finding and amending, or intervening in, old paintings and photographs became a sort of game for the artist between other projects, and soon expanded to include non-disaster interventions, such as portals to other worlds or crude, child-like drawings made to appear as though from the hands of serious men. While the rest of the artist’s canon tends to explore larger world issues through beauty, hope, and dramatic shifts in perspective, this body of work turns to humour as a source of relief in the face of futility.