Olive Dunne
**Learning How to Pray** is a mixed media project examining relationships to faith in Ireland. Through the lens of personal experience Olive Dunne chronicles a journey familiar to many young people growing up in Ireland.
The work takes the viewer from introduction to religion; God in the Backseat, to rejection; You’re Not Here, Are You, and finishes with reconciliation; Hello Old Friend.
Through the work, Dunne grapples with the complexity of faith and ritual. At the end of the three-piece journey we are left with an understanding of the importance of ritual and the ways in which institutional religion has alienated us from these practices.
A politically engaged artist, Dunne engages with both the personal and the institutional aspects of religion. Their rejection of religion comes from a place of discomfort with the church’s treatment of the feminine body and they argue for reconciliation not with the church as a structure but with faith and ritual as it pertains to the individual.
As Ireland becomes an increasingly secular country, the artist does not call for a return to the country of the past, one of shame and control. Instead they argue against the false dichotomy of secularism and structured religion, conceptualising a new relationship to the spiritual which is dictated not by institutions but by ourselves. Ritual to be celebrated, not enforced.
Olive Dunne is a multi-media artist based in Dublin. A political organiser from a young age, their work exists in the intersection between the personal and the political.
As a concept-driven artist their practice includes a large array of mediums, from film to sculpture to performance. They maintain a through-line of political analysis filtered through the lens of emotion and experience rather than intellect.
They have previously presented work in Down the road, around the corner, Pallas Projects/Studios (2026), Better than Ambrosia, curated by Dylan Yearsley at the Orangery at Marley Park (2025) and The Place Project, IMMA Studios (2023).
