Mandy O’Neill, Best Laid Plans

Best Laid Plans

Best Laid Plans is the outcome of Mandy O’Neill’s four-year practice-based PhD, completed in 2025. In her research, O’Neill employed expanded photography practices to consider scenarios and outcomes in relation to housing and planning in the inner suburb of Cabra, Dublin 7.

The Cabra housing schemes were constructed between 1929 and 1948 by Dublin Corporation as a way to address a severe public health and housing crisis in Dublin’s inner city slums. Housing design in Cabra was influenced by the model of the Garden Suburb, which the new Irish Free State government saw as both a pragmatic and ideological solution to the accommodation crisis. 

The modern town planning movement emerged at the turn of the 20th century, in parallel with the ‘garden city’ idea. Pioneering town planner Patrick Geddes brought his ‘Cities and Town Planning’ exhibition to Dublin in 1911, which was swiftly followed by the 1914 Dublin town planning competition. Competitors were specifically required to consider low-density suburban housing in their entries, with the prize awarded to Patrick Abercrombie, Sidney Kelly, and Arthur Kelly, for their plan entitled ‘Dublin of the Future’. An imaginative plan for the development of Cabra housing was included. 

As O’Neill embarked on her research in 2020, the outcomes of new planning initiatives were beginning to materialise, resulting in the construction of two large-scale housing developments in the area. Compelled to walk and to photograph the building processes of these sites, she also recorded small everyday shifts in the built fabric of Cabra. While geo-photographic protocols, including the survey, time-lapse photography, the photo-walk, and field diaries, served as a point of departure for O’Neill’s methodology, she often relied on instinct and photographic impulse. She also engaged with residents through dialogue, photographs, and making, seeking to reflect the lived experience of housing development and the effects of planning on everyday life. 

Moving beyond the often utopian premises of planning and its impact on individuals and communities, O’Neill’s work identifies slippages in time while exploring the potential of planning as a catalyst for collective transformation across the past, the present, and the future.

A first iteration of Best Laid Plans was exhibited at the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) in 2024, tailored specifically to the historical and architectural context of the 18th-century Georgian building. For New Irish Works, Mandy has reconfigured and updated elements of the work, while expanding on her site-specific approach to exhibition making.

Mandy O’Neill

Mandy O’Neill is a Visual Artist based in Dublin, Ireland. Her Expanded Photography practice encompasses photography, installation, and text, alongside recent experiments with sound and video. The concept of support structures or systems has underpinned much of her practice to date, particularly work about education and housing, and with community groups and young people. Recently, this concept has extended to observation of the built environment (and housing as a support system), and the impetus to construct photo-sculptural installations, which reflects this observation. 

O’Neill’s recent PhD research utilised multiple photographic approaches in an attempt to capture the multi-layered transformations taking place in her immediate built environment. Ultimately concluding that her practice was not genre-bound but rather a multi-stranded set of ‘photographies’– a flexible visual language which is ever evolving. 

Mandy holds a Practice-based PhD from DCU, an MA from IADT, and a BA in Photography from TUD. Recent exhibitions include Best Laid Plans (2024) at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin 2; ‘The Art of Sport’ (2023), Butler Gallery, Kilkenny; ‘Ireland’s Eye’ (2023), WTC and ISA Gallery Jakarta, Indonesia; ‘Making Art: Photography’ (2023), Draíocht Gallery, Dublin. Her work is held in public and private collections, including the Arts Council of Ireland, TU Dublin Faculty of Arts, National Gallery of Ireland, and The Digital Hub. She has won multiple awards, including the Zurich Portrait Prize at the National Gallery of Ireland, and has recently been awarded a three-year studio membership at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios.

Mandy O’Neill, Best Laid Plans
New Irish Works series 2025–27
Launch 6pm Thu 14 May 2026
Running 15 May–9 August 2026
At the International Centre for the Image