About HAstudios
HAstudios is a creative collaboration between Holly Christine Callaghan and Afif El-Khuffash, bringing together traditional art, digital illustration, storytelling and print design.
At its heart, HAstudios is about making art that feels personal. Some pieces begin with a sketch. Some begin with a photograph, a conversation, a memory, a joke, a feeling, or one of those strange ideas that sounds ridiculous until it suddenly becomes beautiful. The work sits somewhere between the handmade and the digital, between emotional storytelling and bold visual design.
Holly and Afif come to art from very different worlds, and that is exactly what gives HAstudios its energy.
Holly
Holly is a Dublin-based artist and illustrator whose work is rooted in traditional practice. She began her artistic journey doodling with a ballpoint pen in school and continued to develop that medium throughout her career. Her work combines ballpoint pen, watercolour, portraiture, pop surrealism and expressive feminine imagery, often exploring motherhood, identity, emotion and mental health.
Holly has exhibited at Repeal, Art Source and K Fest, has worked as a lead character artist on Irish-made animated films, and has illustrated book covers. Her style is instantly recognisable: detailed, feminine, emotional and full of visual tension. There is softness in her work, but never weakness. There is beauty, but never blandness.
After becoming a mother, Holly stepped back from art for a time while raising her two children, Leo and Amber. That experience shaped her creative voice in a deeper way. Her work now carries the honesty of someone who understands that motherhood can be joyful, overwhelming, healing, boring, euphoric and completely shattering, often before breakfast.
Her art brings the human hand into HAstudios: texture, instinct, composition, imperfection, emotion and the kind of detail that cannot be mass-produced.
Afif
Afif is a consultant neonatologist, paediatrician, board-certified lactation consultant, podcaster and artist. He has spent over 20 years caring for newborn babies and supporting families, particularly during some of the most vulnerable and transformative moments of their lives.
His creative work is shaped by that world. Afif’s art often explores motherhood, infancy, identity, family and transformation. Rather than seeing motherhood as a single fixed moment, his work approaches it as a gradual process of change: anticipation, uncertainty, physical connection, emotional upheaval and the slow emergence of a new identity.
Afif brings digital illustration, visual storytelling and design into HAstudios. His work often begins with an idea or emotional concept and moves through digital experimentation, colour, abstraction and print. There is a strong narrative element to what he creates, which is hardly surprising given his background in podcasting, medicine and storytelling.
He also brings the dangerous confidence of a man who owns too many gadgets and thinks most problems can be solved with a printer, a tablet and one more cable.
