For Lisbon Art Weekend, Zaratan presents Skies Leaving Factories, a new live performance by Sheenagh Geoghegan. In this work, the artist turns their back to the audience to sing directly to their own artwork, transforming the drawing into a living partner in a shared act of attention. By redirecting the gaze, the performance reconfigures the relationship between performer, artwork, and audience—creating a space that is shared rather than shown.
The voice moves between registers—rising, breaking, holding—carrying the physical traces of breath, hesitation, and intensity. This invites the audience to let go of the pressure to look, and instead to feel the song as a resonance through the space and their own bodies.
Rooted in the long lineage of song as resilience and resistance, the performance explores how singing can hold longing, defiance, and care, reaching for connection when language fails. It unfolds as a kind of lullaby for a world in crisis— and is also a direct response to the staggering violence and genocide faced by the Palestinian people, and to all communities living under occupation and terror.
The artist states: “I sing to sing. To ward off the pain, to find relief. It’s a space between imagination and resistance—a way to question, to share and to protest. Making and witnessing live performance is my way of belonging to our time. I hope it feels like a work of shared feeling, solidarity and love. The work's title "Factory of Skies" comes from a line I wrote about Ireland, my homeland, a place where the skies are so dramatic and so changeable, it also acts as a fitting metaphor for time passing, for change, for the possibility of transformation, for the poetics and materiality of language.”
The artwork to which the artist sings— a strange diptych, part drawing, part writing, part assemblage—explores the fragile space between felt language and spoken language. How utterances that are deemed syntactically or grammatically incorrect can feel entirely precise in relation to the ways in which our bodies experience grief and trauma.
This is an offering of song as both tenderness and defiance, a small act of hope that persists even as words falter.

BIOGRAPHY: Irish artist Sheenagh Geoghegan completed her MFA at The Slade School of Art, London, 2013, at her graduate degree show, she was awarded the Stanford Scholarship, The Orpen Award and The Charles Heath Hayward Award. She has also received numerous funding awards from The Arts Council and Culture Ireland.
She has exhibited widely in Europe and America including Cornell University, New York, 2019, Alma Zevi in Venice and Leila Heller Gallery, New York. She has participated in the Colour and Poetry Symposium at The Slade, University College London in 2025, 2024 and 2023. Her work is part of many public and private collections including Trinity College Dublin, Limerick City Gallery and The Environmental Protection Agency.
Recent solo exhibitions include Atelier Concorde in Lisbon (2023), and Camera Cluj, Cluj România (2024) and Limerick City Gallery of Art, 2025.
In 2026, she will take part in the prestigious Tyrone Guthrie Centre Residency in Ireland.