Luke Donnelly
The Cruising Class — My Favourite Conspiracy Theory is that Everything is Going to Be Ok
Luke Donnelly, based in County Galway, is a recipient of the Agility Award 2023 and the Galway Arts Centre + Galway Culture Company Bursary 2024.
Luke’s work takes form through drawing, text, sculpture, moving image, and lecture performance. Stemming from Jack Halberstam’s ideas of queer practice as “a scavenger methodology”, gathered images shape narratives that move across mediums through gender, sexuality, and non-static ideas of the Other.
“If, in my work, a language through which critique occurs exists, then I must bend that finger right back around.”
He is interested in acknowledging how marginalisation, however true and materially effective, can be weaponised and coupled with other privileges to employ Otherness as armour against accountability.
The work also considers how ideas of value, defined by a dominant social class as a “system of hierarchies of agreed-upon social worth”, are mediated through a queer lens, and how these systems can dismantle or undermine queer solidarity.
€uro fag, tinfoil, PLA, dimensions variable.
there's not gonna be a pool you stupid f-slur, there’s not even gonna be a house (i), aluminium foil, foil tape, dimensions variable.
there's not gonna be a pool you stupid f-slur, there’s not even gonna be a house (ii), photo on gloss paper, tape, dimensions variable.
17.03.26, photocopy on paper, aluminium foil, endless edition, 29.7 x 21 cm.
Installation detail, enter text from image above to talk to me, 2025, pen & ink on paper, collaged script, 100 x 70 cm/ 29.7 x 42 cm.
Research
current affairs, tinfoil, photocopy on paper, 29.7 x 42 cm.
the internet used to be a place in your home now it's somewhere lodged under one of my ribs, (2025), photocopy, magnets, 168 x 89.1 cm.
n.s.a(the bomb), (2025), digital drawing, 42 x 59.4 cm.
engineering ambiguities, aluminum foil, tape, dimensions variable.