Carousel | Mary Cullen Kelly at Dunamaise Gallery

Event Details

Exhibition continues 15th August – 20th September 2025. 
Mary Cullen-Kelly presents Carousel.
15th August – 20th September at Dunamaise Arts Centre.
Free to visit during opening hours, and 1 hour prior events (Tues to Sat, 1pm to 5pm).

Mary Cullen Kelly likes to time travel using paint, print and collage. Her colourful and detailed images can feel all at once familiar and strange. She creates moments and places that may or may not have existed. She is interested in and has studied the experience of Flow Theory in relation to art making.

Mary was awarded this solo exhibition as a prize from our Open Submission Show 2024 by Guest Selector Vera Klute, RHA.

About the Artist
Mary is an artist from Dublin who lives in Carlow. She has a degree in Fine Art Print from NCAD and an MSc in Disability Studies from UCD, which focussed on the experience of engagement in arts activities, for which she won the Eunice Kennedy Shriver medal. She has previously exhibited in VISUAL Carlow and extensively in group and open submission shows, including the RHA Annual. Mary has been involved in community arts in Dublin and Carlow. See more on www.marycullenkelly.com

The exhibition title references the TV series MadMen; there the ‘carousel’ is a Kodak slide projector that ‘moves the viewer forwards and backwards’ in time.
This series of paintings, prints and objects seek to describe a world that can feel familiar and strange all at the same time. Things are always changing. The artist draws on science fiction movies from the 50s and 60s. Colourful paintings of domestic and ‘small town’ settings draw us in with a whiff of nostalgia, a sense of the familiar which is subverted as things are not quite as expected. Photopolymer prints and made objects offer clues that the world we are in has been altered. Flora and other items have appeared nearby. Questions are posed but not answered. The world has changed and we are not quite sure where we are.