The Naughton Gallery

The Naughton Gallery The Naughton Gallery is located at the heart of Queen's University. More details at http://www.naughtongallery.org/silversounds/

Since 2001, The Gallery has become one of Belfast’s most sought after and exciting visual arts platforms, featuring a rolling programme of works from the University’s own collection, touring exhibitions and shows by local and international artists. The Naughton Gallery is a registered museum and is named after its benefactors Martin and Carmel Naughton. The Naughton Gallery presents up to eight ex

hibitions per year and also co-ordinates commissions of new art works for Queen’s University. The University’s extensive art collection comprises gifts, bequests and purchases since the foundation of Queen’s College in 1845. The wide range of works includes paintings, prints, works on paper, sculpture, furniture, metalwork and silver. The collection is on display throughout the University with an impressive hang of over forty portraits in the Great Hall. On semi-permanent display is Silver Sounds, our new interactive display of the Queen's silver collection, winner of the Times Higher Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts 2008.

Scattered throughout AVANT GARDENER are magazines, comics, and models that have informed its thinking – showing how idea...
03/06/2026

Scattered throughout AVANT GARDENER are magazines, comics, and models that have informed its thinking – showing how ideas about cultivation, ecology, and our relationship with plants emerge across popular culture, publishing, design, and play.

From Yūji Yokoyama’s manga series ‘Tokachi Hitoribocchi Farm’, which humorously chronicles the realities of farming life, to It’s Freezing in LA! (), the award-winning magazine bringing together climate writing, art, and environmental thought, these works offer alternative ways of engaging with environmental questions.

Also on display is LEGO’s Botanical Garden, a playful reimagining of the historic glasshouse that invites us to think about biodiversity, stewardship, and the role imagination can play in shaping more sustainable futures.

Together, these materials reveal how conversations about nature and cultivation extend far beyond the gallery – appearing in comics, magazines, toys, and the everyday objects that influence how we understand the world around us.

🎾 The G.O.A.T. is back.As Serena Williams prepares for her return to the court, we’re looking back at the lasting impact...
02/06/2026

🎾 The G.O.A.T. is back.

As Serena Williams prepares for her return to the court, we’re looking back at the lasting impact she’s had on our sports exhibition series.

Jody Rogac’s iconic photograph of Serena launched our very first sports exhibition in 2017, and her influence has echoed throughout the series ever since – from Jamie Beard’s celebration of sporting trailblazers to Rosie McGinn’s grunting tennis ball and Sonny Ross’s exploration of Serena’s game-changing on-court style.

We’re excited to see Serena’s next chapter unfold – and even more excited to share what’s coming next in our sports exhibition series. More details coming later this week!

Today we’re taking a closer look at the work of Irish artist Laura Kelly (), whose site-specific installation is current...
02/06/2026

Today we’re taking a closer look at the work of Irish artist Laura Kelly (), whose site-specific installation is currently on view in our AVANT GARDENER exhibition.

With work straddling the drawing/sculpture divide and ranging in scale from small wall pieces to large installations, Kelly uses an experimental approach to drawing to respond to landscape. She is concerned with how the interplay between drawing, mark making, surface, materiality, and suggested illusion can combine to create a sensation of transience and perceptual ambiguity while simultaneously generating a deliberate air of temporary occupation and fragile attachment.

For AVANT GARDENER, Kelly has installed a site-specific drawing alluding to Locus Amoenus – the “pleasant place” of ancient thought which described a fragment of landscape where time slows, perception sharpens, and everything is connected.

Visit the exhibition daily, 11am–4pm, until Sunday 07 June. Free admission.

Images: .mccullough

On what would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday, we’re delighted to be bringing you a special SCREEN/PRINT showi...
01/06/2026

On what would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday, we’re delighted to be bringing you a special SCREEN/PRINT showing of Some Like It Hot at as part of their Marilyn Monroe 100 season!

All attendees will receive a copy of this specially commissioned poster by Irish illustrator Laura Callaghan (), featuring references from across Monroe’s film catalogue.

Screening TONIGHT, Monday 01 June, 6pm. SOLD OUT!

There’s just one week left to visit AVANT GARDENER and today we’re taking a closer look at the work of artist Oisin Toze...
01/06/2026

There’s just one week left to visit AVANT GARDENER and today we’re taking a closer look at the work of artist Oisin Tozer (.va). Based in Ireland, Tozer draws upon materials, media, and mechanisms of display to investigate how we understand and relate to the world, particularly to nature. His works form relationships with each other and the space they inhabit, culminating in visually spare, site-responsive installations. These installations question binary distinctions between nature, culture and technology.

For AVANT GARDENER, Tozer has produced two wall-based works which simultaneously respond to both the exhibition’s themes and to the physical space in the gallery. One of these works is a large image of the common w**d couch grass, carved into a luscious black surface of stained wood. Couch grass is often w**ded out – sacrificed in the pursuit of the idealised space that is a garden. This violent act of uprooting is echoed in how the work is carved out of the surface of the wood. Couch Grass’s leaf is echoed in the adjacent work, which is a thin, slender form made from glass. The stained glass and Neo-Gothic arch under which it sits call to mind the Christian tradition, drawing a comparison between its themes of sacrificial beauty and our relationship to the plant.

Visit the exhibition daily, 11am–4pm until Sunday 07 June. Free admission.

Images: .mccullough

The second of this weekend’s AVANT GARDENER artist spotlights is on Adham Faramawy (), who works across a range of media...
31/05/2026

The second of this weekend’s AVANT GARDENER artist spotlights is on Adham Faramawy (), who works across a range of media, including moving image, sculptural installation, photography, painting, and wall-based works. His practice explores materiality, touch, and toxic embodiment, questioning ideas of the natural in relation to marginalised communities.

A Proposal for a Parakeet’s Garden (2021) is a video work conceived in solidarity with migrants and refugees arriving in England, created in the context of ongoing global crises: migration driven by war, inequality, and climate collapse. Since its making, these conditions have only intensified – from the use of the Bibby Stockholm to house asylum seekers to the far-right riots of 2024 and the devastating violence in Palestine.

The video imagines a garden for the bright green parakeet – a bird often labelled a “feral threat” since its arrival in Britain. Originally brought to England as a Victorian pet, the parakeet has – through “a series of escapes and small liberations” – become one of the most widespread bird species in the country. Like the grey squirrel, it is seen to disrupt the dominance of native species, prompting the question: what, then, is really at stake?

In this work, the parakeet functions as a metaphor – not a direct stand-in for human migration, but a way of thinking about belonging. It offers a concise allegory that calls for kindness and invites us to imagine how communities might be formed together. The garden emerges as a kind of utilitarian monument: something practical and sustaining, particularly for marginalised groups – a space that is both refuge and paradise.

Up next in our AVANT GARDENER artist spotlights is Aidan Koch (), an artist and graphic novelist based in the Mojave Des...
30/05/2026

Up next in our AVANT GARDENER artist spotlights is Aidan Koch (), an artist and graphic novelist based in the Mojave Desert on unceded Serrano land. Koch’s work uses modes of ecological storytelling to explore loving and fraught relationships between humans, non-human animals, and landscapes.

Koch is the author of several graphic novels including Xeric Award winning The Blonde Woman (2012), After Nothing Comes (2016), and Spiral and Other Stories (2024); with short works featured in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Frieze, Best American Comics 2014, and MoMA PS1’s Greater New York series. Koch’s work has been exhibited at spaces including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and South Bend Museum of Art, Indiana. She has previously exhibited at the Naughton Gallery in the group exhibitions Future Ruins (2016), Blue Smoke (2022), and All That We Have Built (2025), and her solo exhibition, Kiss of Light From a New Dawn, was presented at the gallery in 2018. Koch’s ongoing projects, Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations and Environmental Comics, act as pedagogical and collaborative extensions of her ecological inquiries.

Today’s AVANT GARDENER artist spotlight is on Stuart Sandford (), a multidisciplinary artist based between London, Los A...
29/05/2026

Today’s AVANT GARDENER artist spotlight is on Stuart Sandford (), a multidisciplinary artist based between London, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. Working across (and often combining) different media, including photography, sculpture, painting, moving image, and installation, he has exhibited his work widely in galleries and museums around the world.

Polaroid Collages (2018–2025) is a series of cut and re-assembled Polaroid “instant sculptures”, invoking ideas of memory, time, place and intimacy. The Polaroid Collages originate from the pleasure that comes from satisfying small desires: the desire to photograph, which is also, almost inevitably, the desire to look, to smell, to touch, to taste, to possess. Anonymous Landscapes (2007–TBA) is an ongoing series of photographic and video works documenting urban and rural public spaces around the world where men have s*x with men. In the age of Grindr and hook-up apps, as well as COVID-19 and MPox, many of these spaces have been lost and alongside them the connections forged, be it simply for a fleeting moment of pleasure or, perhaps, for something more enduring.

Visit AVANT GARDENER daily, 11am–4pm, until Sunday 07 June. Free admission.

There’s no business like Monroe business! Not many icons of the screen shone as bright as Marilyn Monroe. Our friends a...
28/05/2026

There’s no business like Monroe business! Not many icons of the screen shone as bright as Marilyn Monroe. Our friends are celebrating 100 years of Marilyn Monroe with a selection of her films, showcasing her star-power across comedy, musicals, and drama.

We’re joining in on the celebrations with a SCREEN/PRINT showing of Some Like It Hot! One of the most beloved films of all time, this sizzling masterpiece by Billy Wilder stars Marilyn Monroe at the height of her bombshell powers.

Attendees will receive a free A3 poster by illustrator Laura Callaghan, celebrating the pop culture icon’s 100th birthday and featuring a delight of Easter eggs from across QFT’s Marilyn Monroe 100 season!

Monday 1st July, 6pm, at QFT. Tickets on sale now!

We suspect the sunny bank holiday has many of you out in the garden 🌱☀️ So today’s AVANT GARDENER artist spotlight is on...
25/05/2026

We suspect the sunny bank holiday has many of you out in the garden 🌱☀️ So today’s AVANT GARDENER artist spotlight is on Tara Booth () and her comic The Gardener’s Dilemma. A w**der’s work is never done!

Tara Booth is an Eisner and Ignatz Award-winning comic artist, illustrator, and painter from Philadelphia. Her candid autobiographical comics bring humour and honesty to subjects including mental health, addiction, and s*xuality. Known for her painterly approach, Booth’s work bursts with bright colours and dizzying patterns.

Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vice, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Best American Comics. She previously exhibited at the Naughton Gallery as part of the 2022 group exhibition I Know I’ve Been a Stranger Lately.

When she’s not making comics, Booth loves travelling and hiking with her two dogs.

Avant Gardener is open daily, 11am–4pm, until Sunday 07 June.

Address

1st Floor, Lanyon Building, Queen's University
Belfast
BT71NN

Opening Hours

Tuesday 11am - 4pm
Wednesday 11am - 4pm
Thursday 11am - 4pm
Friday 11am - 4pm
Saturday 11am - 4pm
Sunday 11am - 4pm

Telephone

+44 (0) 28 9097 3580

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