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The first time I heard Andrea Horan speak was at
a creative conference in Smock Alley some years back. Striding onto the stage in a leopardprint, sequin-covered concoction (you’ll find no wallflower frocks in this woman’s wardrobe) her presence was nothing short of electric, zapping each audience tier into sharp focus. Thirty seconds into her speech, I had shedloads of proof that her resplendent nail bar, Tropical Popical, was a complete carbon copy of her brain; a flamingo-festooned colour bomb, teeming with palm trees and endless servings of craic. As she traced her personal and professional timeline with colourful flair, Horan’s entrepreneurial approach struck a chord: why is bigger always better? Why open ten sub-standard premises when you can seamlessly run one? “There’s nothing like [Tropical Popical] in Ireland – a sense of community provided with a nail salon. There had been no sociability around it before… We never wanted to be a chain of nail bars whacking out products. Because I wasn’t hemmed in by [those demands], I could focus on how we could be most creative, developing projects that could pull off all my interests in the one place.” While TropPop’s South William Street perch HEMLINES RENAILSSANCE WOMEN Armed with a tight-knit team of artistic visionaries, Andrea Horan and Sinead Rice are setting elitist rulebooks ablaze words Amelia O’Mahony-Brady continued to soar in popularity, Horan’s business didn’t expand in square meterage: instead, she confidently charged into pro-choice activism. The Hunreal Issues was conceived in 2016, a Repeal-centric space that unjumbled political jargon, and on the first birthday of Repeal’s resounding success she created United Ireland – a woker-than-woke podcast – alongside Una Mullally. Around the same time as Hunreal’s emergence, Sinead Rice was harnessing her new role as Head of Education at the National Gallery of Ireland, then on the cusp of re-launching its historic wings after years of renovation. “To get the position at that time was incredibly exciting! So little of the gallery had stayed open [during the refurbishment], and suddenly everything was changing, opening up… we had so much space to work with.” With considerable public interest drummed up, the re-launch of NGI’s major temporary exhibitions “represented an unbelievable opportunity to overhaul what we do – use this civic platform to showcase our accessible, inclusive educational programming.” One such showcase was Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, primed to debut two days after the gallery re-launched in June 2017. Footfall was set to skyrocket, so the Education team held a roundtable talk (their standard practise before every show) to spitball ideas. How could they make these 17th century paintings – acclaimed, but often quiet, domestic scenes – appear more accessible to a diverse audience? During this brainstorming session, the suggestion of working with Tropical Popical was suddenly put forward, so Rice swiftly looked them up, liked what she saw, and wasted no time to get in touch. Calling the collaboration “Dutch Gold and Details”, Tropical Popical’s brightest and bravest descended upon the gallery space, soaked up the exhibition during a secret walk-through, and headed back to base camp to break down the works. Their artistic responses stretched from “really flamboyant nails that would take a while to create,” Rice recalls, “and others that could be more speedily re-produced, whether in Tropical Popical or – during a couple of events – the gallery itself.” Unsurprisingly, the project was a phenomenal success, bringing effervescence to a (sometimes) heavyweight subject, and both 20