What’s On around Ireland

Last Chance to See | Exhibition continues 2 – 31 August 2025.

‘Anarchive’, curated by Ciara Corscadden Hennessy of the 126 Gallery Board of directors

Exhibiting Artists:
Amanda Hunt – Aisling Monds – Amanda Walker – Aodán McCardle – Barbara Allen – Brian Brown – Caroline Kuyper – Caroline Vesey – Catherine Canning – Ian Handschuh – David Gepp – Deborah Stockdale – Deirdre Doherty – Fiona Carlin – Frances Bermingham Berrow – Frank Boyce – Gillian Wright – Hans van Meeuwen – Heather McLaughlin – Helen Hancock – Ian Wieczorek – Jacqui Deveney-Reed – Joanne McLaughlin – John McCarron – Josephine Kelly – Karen McLaughlin – Kevin Harkin – Maeve Peoples – Martin Hughes – Mary Connors – Mary-Joyce Davis – Melissa Carton – Myriam Rommers – Nina Quigley – Noel Connor – Paul Campbell – Rikki Louise van den Berg – Seamus Gallagher – Sinéad Smyth – Sinéad Walsh – Stella Norrby – Stephen Cavanagh – Sue Morris – Susan Kyle – Una Walker – Vanessa Marsh – Veronica Buchanon – William-Alexander

Exhibition continues from the 14th of August to the 19th of September 2025

Featuring three 5.4m towers from discarded wardrobes—antique mahogany to mid-20th-century chipboard. Once bedroom sentinels, they mirror human scale amid capitalist decay & ecological loss. Charred, their graphite sheen reveals pre-industrial carbon, a silvery breath from past forests, hinting at immortality. From cave charcoal to quantum tech, this graphite, a communication tool, sparks hope via cross-disciplinary dialogue against the ecological abyss. With eco-gothic tones—from toppled dolmens to Space Odyssey monoliths—they evoke a haunting legacy of neglect through architectural resonance.

Page Turners is an exhibition of artists’ books which launches in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral at 5:30pm on Thursday, September 4th.
This autumn exhibition in the cathedral ambulatory invites visitors to linger and spend time exploring selected artists’ books from across Ireland, the UK and France.
Selected national and international book artists include Ambeck Design, Coracle Press, Helen Douglas, Paul Gaffney, Helena Grimes, ottoGraphic Books, Road Books, and Tom Sowden. Editions will be for sale through the cathedral shop.

Page-turners is co-curated with MTU Crawford College of Art & Design and is an important moment at the cathedral as we pioneer a rolling arts programme.

There will also be a panel discussion at the cathedral at 12:30pm on Thursday, September 18th.
The exhibition runs until October 31st, 2025

There no charge to see this exhibition: email arts@stfinbarres.ie to receive your ticket.

The Office of Public Works and Dublin City Arts Office are pleased to present a new exhibition of work by Eithne Jordan RHA curated by Margarita Cappock. It takes place at the Casino Marino, Cherrymount Crescent, Marino, Dublin 3, D03 HH70.

The exhibition is open everyday from 10.00am to 5.00pm and admission to the exhibition is free.

About the Artist
Eithne Jordan is one of Ireland’s pre-eminent painters. In this exhibition, Jordan has turned her artistic gaze to the interiors of public and private spaces, such as museums and institutional buildings, which she has visited on her travels in Ireland, France, Italy, Switzerland and the United States. Jordan explores the way paintings, sculptures and artefacts are displayed in these spaces. She creates paintings that are, in her words, ‘emotional landscapes’. Jordan is drawn to exhibiting in unusual spaces where her work can interact with their surroundings as in this exhibition at the Casino Marino. Her paintings reflect her enduring interest in architecture and the interplay that can happen between her paintings and their environment, whether a modernist space or a historic building.

The resonance of this new body of work – most from the last five years – displayed in the rooms of the Casino creates the ‘echo’ of an ongoing conversation with the eighteenth century, which is why the artist chose this as the exhibition title. Eithne Jordan grew up in Clontarf, not far from the Casino. She states, ‘The Casino has an air of grandeur but it also has that sense of intimacy in the beauty of its proportions. It is one of the things that I love about it.’

Funded by the OPW and Dublin City Arts Office with the support of the Arts Council.

Signal Arts Centre is thrilled to present Moments of Joy, the debut solo exhibition of Wicklow-based painter Heather Flynn, running from September 1 to 14, 2025.
The exhibition will officially open with a reception on Friday, September 5, from 7–9pm, and all are warmly invited to join this special celebration of art, colour, and community.
Already well-known to the Signal Arts Centre family as Communications Officer, Heather has long championed the creativity of others. Now, stepping into the spotlight herself, she shares her own artistic voice in this much-anticipated first solo show.
Heather’s oil paintings are inspired by the wild beauty of Wicklow’s landscapes, where sea, sky, and earth merge in endless transformation. Her expressive brushwork, bold use of colour, and layered textures capture the fleeting rhythms of nature — from the hush of dawn to the glow of evening. Striking a vibrant balance between abstraction and landscape, her work invites viewers to lose themselves in colour, memory, and atmosphere.
Moments of Joy is more than a collection of paintings; it is an invitation to pause, to reflect, and to celebrate the radiance of everyday beauty. Heather’s art is filled with movement, emotion, and a sense of wonder — a vivid reminder of how nature and creativity connect us all.

Deirdre Brennan’s image of Sinead O’Connor’s funeral courage was selected for “The Canticle of the Creatures” The International Photography Exhibition in Assisi.
Trieste Photo Days and Exhibit Around APS present in Assisi the international photography exhibition The Canticle of the Creatures, created on the occasion of the eighth centenary of Saint Francis’s hymn.Over 100 works will be on display, selected from more than 6,000 submissions from around the world. The photographers have interpreted the nine themes of Saint Francis’s celebrated hymn.

New voices in Irish Photography at Photo Museum Ireland

Photo Museum Ireland is proud to announce TALENTS 2025, a major exhibition spotlighting eight of Ireland’s most exciting emerging photographic artists. Opening to the public on Saturday 30 August 2025, the exhibition celebrates the bold, diverse perspectives shaping contemporary photography across the island of Ireland.

TALENTS 2025 features new work by:

Niamh Barry
Ishmael Claxton
Evanna Devine
Sabrina Faria
Roisin Lambert
Ben Malcolmson
Conn McCarrick
Tolu Ogunware

Unfolding

MFA/MA in Fine Art Exhibition at the Large Sculpture Studio GF20, Limerick School of Art and Design

Limerick, Ireland – [21st of July 2025] – Unfolding is an exhibition featuring seven artists from the MFA/MA in Fine Art programme at Limerick School of Art and Design—TUS. It will take place at the Large Sculpture Studio, Clare St. Campus, from September 2nd to September 10th, 2025. The artists’ reception event will be held on September 9th at 5:30 PM.

In Unfolding, the act of slowly revealing is a sustained movement; an ongoing unfolding of form, thought, and relation that favours becoming over closure.

Through diverse media, the artists engage with themes that are intimate, political, embodied, and affective. Across the exhibition, material becomes a means of thinking: with memory, space, the body, and with the systems both visible and invisible, that shape lived experience. Unfolding becomes an epistemological gesture; an opening into ways of knowing that remain fluid, provisional, and situated.

Artists:

Marta Baptista – Sorcha Hassett – Marta Jagusiak – Brendan Roddy – Brian Twomey – Oliwia Alicja Woszczynska – Barry Wrafter

In her first solo exhibition in Paris, The Conundrum of the Organically Angular, Liliane Tomasko presents new abstract paintings that engage with the architecture and legacy of Le Corbusier. Maison La Roche, built between 1923 and 1925, exemplifies Le Corbusier’s early concept of the house as a space to be experienced physically and rhythmically through circulation, colour and light. Tomasko’s vital, gesturally abstract works unfold as painterly topographies of the unconscious, reflecting on inner states and spatial experience. They are in constant movement, resonating with the building’s modernist conception and its enduring genius loci.
The Conundrum of the Organically Angular is presented by Fondation Le Corbusier and organised by Barbara Huttrop. A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition featuring texts by Tanja Pirsig-Marshall and Loïc Le Gall, as well as a conversation between Liliane Tomasko and Barbara Huttrop.

Exhibition continues from the 15th of August to the 20th of September 2025

The exhibition title references the TV series Mad Men; there the ‘carousel’ is a Kodak slide projector that in a sense 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.

Margo Harkin is one of Ireland’s most versatile and respected filmmakers – having directed and produced fiction and documentary films for over forty years. Her work includes an invaluable chronicle of Northern Ireland’s recent political history.

After graduating in Fine Art from the Ulster College of Art and Design in 1974, Harkin worked as an art teacher and community worker in socially deprived areas of Derry. She joined Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 as an Assistant Stage Manager on Brian Friel’s Translations, before going on to work as a stage designer for the company.

In 1984, Harkin co-founded Derry Film & Video Workshop with Anne Crilly and Trisha Ziff delivering critical perspectives that ran counter to the censored narratives then broadcast by British and Irish television. The signal works of this period were Mother Ireland (1988), Anne Crilly’s controversial documentary about feminism and Irish republicanism, and Harkin’s own Hush-A-Bye Baby (1990), a feature drama about teenage pregnancy following the 1983 abortion referendum in Ireland.

Harkin established Besom Productions in 1992 making educational films for Channel 4 but her reputation as an astute, local documentarian of injustices was soon forged through a series of highly regarded television documentaries. Her cinema films, the surf documentary Waveriders (2003), by Joel Conroy (which she produced), and Stolen (2023), about the plight of unmarried mothers in Ireland in the 20th century, provided thoroughly researched, compelling accounts of their subjects.

Margo Harkin is a member of Aosdána. Her work has won countless awards and is widely taught to third-level film and media students.

Spanning over four decades, Harkin’s work has consistently challenged societal narratives, giving voice to the silenced and bearing witness to the social and political upheavals that have shaped the contemporary Irish landscape. This retrospective will span across the IFI’s cinema screens, as well as online via IFI@Home, IFI International and the IFI Archive Player.

IFI DIGITAL PLATFORMS

A selection of Margo Harkin’s films are available to rent for Irish audiences on IFI@Home and for international audiences on IFI International. These titles are now available for pre-order and will be available to watch from Wednesday Sept 3. Film bundles are available for purchase with pricing below.

Titles available on both IFI@Home and IFI International include: Hush-A-Bye Baby (1990), 12 Days in July (1997), Waveriders (2008), Bloody Sunday – A Derry Diary (2010), Far Side of Revenge (2012), and Stolen (2023).

A selection of Margo Harkin’s films are available free-to-watch worldwide on the IFI Archive Player.

IFI Archive Player exclusive titles will be available from Wednesday Sept 3, with The Hunger Strike (2006) and Eamonn McCann: A Long March (2018) available from Wednesday Oct 1, following their respective theatrical screening dates.

IFI Archive Player titles include: NYPD Nude (1995), Clear The Stage (1998), A Plague on Both Your Houses (1999), Looking for Lundy (2000), , You Looking at Me? (2003), The Hunger Strike (2006), Ocras (2006), The Return of Colmcille (2013), Eamonn McCann: A Long March (2018)

The IFI Archive Player is the virtual viewing room for the remarkable moving image collections held in the IFI Irish Film Archive, giving audiences across the globe instant access to this rich heritage.

BOOKING INFO

• Booking via ifi.ie/margo-harkin or by calling the IFI Box Office on 01 679 3477, or in person at the IFI, 6 Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2.
• The season is eligible for the IFI’s 25 & Under scheme, details of which can be found via ifi.ie/25under
  Tickets to the Margo Harkin: Career Interview will be €10.
• Season ticket bundles available: 3 for €30 and full season pass for €70.
• IFI Membership is required for all films without IFCO classification. If you are not an IFI Member then a membership fee of €1.50 will be added to each unclassified Margo Harkin: Radical Witness ticket price, and/or a Season Membership fee of €5.00 will be added to each Margo Harkin: Radical Witness ticket bundle.
• Films on IFI@Home and IFI International will be €5.99 each, with the exception of the newly restored, exclusive title Hush-A-Bye Baby which will be €7.99.
• A bundle of all streaming titles will be available for €34.

SUPPORT

The titles in this retrospective were digitised and preserved thanks to a grant from Coimisiún na Meán’s Archiving Funding Scheme, which aims to preserve content recorded for broadcast on radio or television. The restoration of Hush-A-Bye Baby (1990) from original 16mm elements has been created by the IFI Irish Film Archive for IFI’s Digital Restoration Project funded by Screen Ireland/Fís Éireann and supported by A Season of Classic Films an initiative of ACE – Association des Cinémathèques Européennes supported by the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme.

The IFI Archive Player is developed with the support and partnership of Axonista.

The IFI acknowledges the support of the Arts Council.

Closing Launch on Wednesday 24th September 7pm.
This is a new body of work that merges abstract ink landscapes with darkroom experimentation. Moving Mountains includes chemigrams, chemograms, and salt etching pieces, created using resists and natural plant-based chemistry. These works engage with the local Irish landscape in a poetic, intuitive, and materially sensitive way. Through her practice, Greta offers a counter-narrative to the pace and noise of contemporary life inviting viewers to embrace the unknown, slow down, reconnect with the natural world, and find presence in the in-between.
No Booking Required

Lia Laimböck Origin series at City Assembly House in the Knight of Glin Room. Large scale paintings themed; Where do we come from, Who are we? Where do we go? The Arch of Life.

Elsewhere, Here

Arddangosfa o artistiaid stiwdio oriel elysium o Abertawe, Cymru
An exhibition of Elysium Gallery studio artists from Swansea, Wales

Reception: 5.30-7.30pm, Wednesday 3rd September
Opening Remarks by the Lord Mayor of Cork, Cllr. Fergal Dennehy

Lleoliad / Venue: Lord Mayors Pavilion, Cork
Rahgolwg / Preview: Dydd Mercher 3ydd Mawrth, 5.30-7.30YP
Oriel ar agor Dydd Mawrth – Dydd Sadwrn 11yb – 5yh, Sul 12yb – 5yh
Gallery open Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm, Sunday 12pm – 5pm

Leila Bebb | Kate Bell | Luke Cotter | Ewan Coombs | Tim Davies | Angela Dickens | Lucy Donald | Gemma Ellen | Daniel Gower | Stephen Hammett | Rory Hancock | Sophie Hancock | Tim Kelly | Bonita James | Demian Johnston | Hannah Jones | Lucia Jones | Ann Jordan | Sheree Murphy | Heidi Lucce-Redcliffe | Holly Slingsby | Tracey McMaster | Paul Munn | Graham Parker | Jonathan Powell | Euros Rowlands | Claire Staveley | Daniel Staveley | Hollie Wilkins | Dylan Williams | Melanie Wotton

Sample-Studios, one of Ireland’s largest artist studios, is delighted to continue our partnership with Elysium Gallery+Studios, Wales’ largest artist studios. Elsewhere, Here is a cross-border showcase presenting painting, sculpture, and installation, that explore the shifting meanings of place, belonging, and identity by Elysium Gallery+Studios’ artist community. This exhibition marks the first time a group of Elysium artists have exhibited in Cork, creating a platform for dialogue between artist-led communities in Wales and Ireland. The exhibition is also part of an ongoing creative exchange programme between Sample-Studios and Elysium Gallery+Studios, following on from a major exhibition of works by artists from both studio communities in Swansea in 2024.

“’Elsewhere, Here’ is about the ways we carry our sense of place with us, It’s an exchange of perspectives, a meeting point between the familiar and the unknown. We believe in building bridges between creative communities. Cork has a thriving independent art scene, and this exhibition is a chance to share, learn, and spark new connections.”

Founded in 2007, Elysium has become a cornerstone of Wales’ artist-led scene, providing studio spaces, exhibitions, and community engagement. This exhibition showcases 30 contemporary Welsh artists in Cork, Ireland, aimed at fostering cross-cultural dialogue and creative exchange. Hosted in partnership with Sample-Studios in The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, the exhibition will highlight diverse Welsh artistic practices across mediums. A central aspect of the exchange this year will be a networking event in UCC uniting Welsh and Irish artists, encouraging collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and future joint projects. This initiative seeks to strengthen cultural ties between Swansea and Cork, promoting Welsh artists, and create lasting connections between the two cities.

Sample-Studios is one of Ireland’s largest artist studios, founded in 2011 and based in Churchfield, Cork City. As Sample-Studios Artistic Director Aoibhie McCarthy reflects “In Elysium, we have found like-minded partners who share our dedication to launching, supporting and sustaining creative careers and practices in our respective cities studios and gallery exhibitions provision. Our organisations share many commonalities, namely our focus on collaboration and community but also, the extent to which we have had to evolve nomadically. Both Sample-Studios and Elysium have survived and thrived because of our adaptability and ability to be responsive to the needs of artists and our cities- this exhibition is a celebration of that.”

Elysium is Wales largest artist studio provider looking after over 100 artists across Swansea City centre including two art galleries, live music/performance venue, community education space as well as instigating offsite international opportunities for Welsh artists. Find out more about Elysium: www.elysiumgallery.com

This exhibition is supported by The Arts Council of Ireland, Cork City Council Twinned Cities Scheme, Wales Arts International, Wales Arts Council, Wales Government and The National Lottery Fund Wales.

Future Stars of the Arts World to Exhibit at ArtisAnn Gallery in Belfast

Emerging Artists 2025

A group exhibition featuring recent graduates:

Esther Barfoot
Georgia Esler
Niamh McGowan
Stiofán Ó Maoileóin

Wednesday 3rd to Saturday 27th September
Late Night Opening Wed 3rd September 6 to 8pm

ArtisAnn is proud to present this exceptional group show featuring exciting artists from this year’s art college graduates.

Chosen due to their undoubted talent and their ability to show the world through different eyes, we are delighted to help them take the first steps in what can be an uncertain career.

Often fraught with difficulty in the best of times, the career of an artist is even more volatile in the current climate. Art is often considered a luxury and is one of the first things cast aside when times are tough. We, however, believe that a world without art is one not worth living in and so we will continue to promote and encourage young talent – indeed, all talent – where and when we can.

We hope that you too will join us in giving a helping hand to these new fledgling artists and, who knows, in years to come, you may have a valuable masterpiece that will fetch a fortune at auction! But even if it has no future monetary value, think of the years of pleasure you will derive from a unique, original artwork.

Dr Ann McVeigh, co-owner of ArtisAnn, says:

‘The ArtisAnn Gallery believes in offering encouragement to young and emerging artists and is confident that these are stars of the future. The artwork produced by these newcomers is remarkable both for its technical ability and breadth of new ideas. This is a very varied show, with two common linkages: all are recent graduates and all are of the highest quality, with every indication that they will be ‘names’ of the future.’

All Welcome and No Booking Necessary
Admission is free.
All artworks are available to buy.
You can also buy art from this exhibition through the Own Art scheme which gives you an interest-free loan over 10 months (and you still get to take the art home immediately the exhibition ends).

Join us in conversation with Sara Sassanelli, who joins us at FSAS as our next visiting curator in 2025 as part of the FSAS International Curator Residency programme.

Curator and producer Sara Sassanelli traces their journey from London’s DIY dance, music and club scenes into institutional contexts and, more recently, independent producing. Inspired by Michael Clark, whose practice fused ballet, punk, fashion, queer nightlife, Sassanelli reflects on how early encounters with skill, collaboration, and friendship shaped their approach to dance and curatorial work.

They situate their beginnings in resourceful, collective experimentation, working closely with artists on commissions, workshops, and live performances. At the ICA (2019–2024), Sassanelli re-established the experimental dance programme, developing hybrid formats that blurred boundaries between performance, exhibition, rave, and live music. Projects included commissions with choreographer Eve Stainton (Dykegeist, IMPACT DRIVER) and large-scale all-night events that expanded conventional performance frameworks.

Last year Sara founded Alice Agency with Jared Davis, producing international projects that support experimental dancers and musicians. As a producer and curator they work with artists including Eve Stainton, Billy Bultheel, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Jack Hogan and Florence Sinclair.

Through their work, Sassanelli examines how curating and producing can create conditions for liveness and experimentation, even amid diminishing institutional support. Sara will introduce their Fire Station project, focusing on ‘groupwork’ in choreographic practices.

Panel talk: Beyond Words: Communicating sustainability

6-8PM, Wednesday, 3rd September

Bookings via EventBrite.

Lisa Fitzsimons (Strategy and Sustainability Lead at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA))
Noel Kelly (Chief Executive Officer of Visual Artists Ireland)
Gareth Kennedy (Artists and lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practice at the National College of Art and Design)

Communicating an ecological approach is complex, especially when it comes to visual art, and also reaching our neighbourhoods and communities. It’s a nuanced space where values, habits, and systems intersect.

This cross-disciplinary panel explores how artists, galleries and art institutions communicate their efforts in ways that are honest, hopeful, and engaging. A view of the behind-the-scenes decisions that institutions employ, with the aim of supporting sustainable exhibition-making, artistic practices and choices, and leading-by-example strategies. Whether the art is transdisciplinary, embedded in social action and deeply rooted in natural ecology, or sustainability is an underlying concern in an artist’s practice (or in an art programme), there’s value in making the invisible work visible.

How do we give space to small actions and highlight the relevance of what often goes unseen? How do we communicate this work in ways that resonate with others? And how can we do all of this without leaning on narratives of doom while remaining factual? Beyond Words: Communicating sustainability is about language and strategies that are hopeful and grounded. It’s about exploring approaches to communicating the quiet labour of care, the strength of collective effort, and the possibility of change toward a sustainable art ecosystem.

We invite the wider community and communities of interest to join us in this open conversation, and share their insights and perspectives. Time is set before and after the talk to gather informally. Participants will be encouraged to ask questions and share their thoughts and experience in a relaxed exchange, blurring the usual roles of panellist and audience.

Biographies

Lisa Fitzsimons is the Strategy and Sustainability Lead at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), where she leads the implementation of IMMA’s five-year strategy and produces Earth Rising, an annual festival exploring the intersection of contemporary art, ecological innovation, and community resilience.
With a background in brand and communications leadership across cultural, corporate, and non-profit sectors, she is passionate about using storytelling to deepen understanding, shift mindsets, and inspire action. Her work bridges strategy, creativity, and public engagement, demonstrating how cultural institutions can be powerful platforms for climate communication and change.

Noel Kelly is the Chief Executive Officer of Visual Artists Ireland, a role he has held since 2007, He is a Life Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and serves on the International Programming Panel for Cukrarna, Ljubljana. He acts as policy expert on a number of local government committees. His governance portfolio includes previous board roles with the Irish Visual Artists Rights Organisation (IVARO), The Butler Gallery, and the Royal Dublin Society. Under his stewardship, VAI launched initiatives such as Get Together, the national day for visual artists; the Social, Economic and Fiscal Status Survey; the Payment Guidelines for Visual Artists, and Job Seeker Allowance for Visual Artists. Noel’s advocacy focuses on equitable treatment of artists and expanding networking and development opportunities that support artists at every career stage. His most recent project is that development of The Visual Artists’ Bill of Rights, research into workspaces in Ireland, and the on-going development of a green approach to the visual arts.

Visual artist Gareth Kennedy’s work explores the social agency of the handcrafted in the 21st century and generates ‘communities of interest’ around the production and performance of experimental material cultures. Informed by an anthropological approach these works draw on the layered histories of a location. Projects are embedded, evolve over time, and are enacted by diverse publics and individuals. His practice to date includes public art commissions, workshops, education projects, exhibitions, residencies and collaborations. He is a lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practice at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Since 2020, he is lead coordinator of NCAD FIELD, a site beside the college which through radical pedagogies is being appraised as a novel ecology, a taskscape and an experiment in the urban commons. Kennedy runs accredited courses at undergraduate level and together with artist colleagues Seoidin O’Sullivan and Mark Clare, runs the Creative Futures Academy Professional Certificate and Diploma in Art and Ecology. In 2024-25, he is an Urban Fields artist in residence as part of L’Internationale Museum of the Commons Climate Assembly and was the resident artist on the Rhizome Residency with Kilkenny Arts Office which formed part of research into the Roots for the Future Climate Art Assembly. He is a member of the All-Island Climate and Biodiversity Research Network.

A solo exhibition by Zoë Gibson, as part of the Linen Biennale 2025.

In response to the 2025 Linen Biennale theme ‘Regroup and React’, emerging Bangor based artist, Zoë Gibson, presents linen landscape embroideries focusing on the ecologies which we often take for granted.

Through craft and creativity, the landscapes are reimagined on a linen canvas to encourage the viewer to visually connect with the intricacies of the individual flax fibers, and explore a landscape which they may have only ventured on foot.

Challenging familiarity, this personal journey explores how landscapes sit within their wider context, hoping to provoke viewers to reconnect with these places within Ards and North Down, Ireland and Great Britain.

This exhibition is part of the Linen Biennale 2025 programme of events.

Exhibition Open Reception: Thurs 4 Sept, 7-9pm, £Free

Join us for this open reception and enjoy a glass of wine or soft drink as you view the artwork on display. Meet the artist, and chat about their work.

To register your attendance, please visit: https://andculture.org.uk/whats-on/linen-landscapes

A solo exhibition by Leah Davis

In The Human Condition, visual artist Leah Davis explores the intricate relationship between the human figure and its surrounding space through a dynamic interplay of painting and drawing. This exhibition reflects Davis’s evolving investigation into the complexities of the human experience, with works that examine how the body interacts with negative space to express emotional depth and shared vulnerability.

Featuring a range of scales and mixed media, the exhibition embraces both intimacy and expansiveness, inviting viewers into an immersive dialogue. Davis’s innovative approach challenges traditional boundaries, offering a bold and resonant reflection on what it means to be human.

This exhibition is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

ARTIST TALK

Thurs 4 Sept, 6.30pm, Free (pre-booking required)

As part of the exhibition, Leah will facilitate an artist’s talk.

Sculpture in Context Celebrates 40 Years at the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin

Ireland’s largest and longest-running sculpture exhibition, Sculpture in Context, proudly celebrates its 40th anniversary at the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin from Thursday 4th September to Friday 10th October 2025.

Much beloved by the public, Sculpture in Context is a pivotal event in the Irish arts calendar. Over the last four decades the unique presentation of ambitious and contemporary three-dimensional work by leading creative talent, has provided the public with memorable experiences. Sculpture in Context is the largest and longest running sculpture exhibition in Ireland, giving free access to an annual audience of over 100,000.

The exciting range of sculptures to be presented were selected from over 500 entries submitted via open call. The selection of the exhibits was made by a panel of three independent fellow sculptors. Selected artists include Róisín De Buitléar, Ester Barrett, Fiona Smith, Alva Gallagher, Ayelet Lalor, Ray Delaney, Helen Merrigan Colfer, amongst others.

As part of the anniversary celebration, the exhibition also welcomes several distinguished invited artists. Among them are Eilis O’Connell, Alison Kaye, Ken Drew, Ana Duncan, Seamus Gill, Beatrice Stewart, Ciaran Patterson, Penny Lacey, Michelle Maher, and Richard Healy, whose contributions further enrich this 40th anniversary exhibition.

Sculpture in Context will run from Thursday 4th September to Friday 10th October; is free to visit and all are welcome. The National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin will be open 9.00am to 5.00pm on weekdays and 10.00am to 6.00pm on Saturdays, Sundays and Bank Holidays.

Sculpture in Context is a non-profit voluntary organisation and is proceeding this year owing to the goodwill and support of OPW, private sponsorship and personal donations. Sculpture in Context extends heartfelt thanks to the many artists who applied this year and to all those who have contributed to its success over the past 40 years.

Selected images link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/fhirvewov77q4gikrlwhe/AO6oJOJKQCcbkLsBnp4Xh88?rlkey=0971szspqdcgr3tq3t63y1xok&st=cscfrdkn&dl=0

VISITOR INFORMATION

Dates: 4th September – 10th October 2025
Venue: National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin 9
Opening Hours:

Weekdays: 9.00am – 5.00pm
Weekends & Bank Holidays: 10.00am – 6.00pm
Admission: Free – All are welcome

Kim, Peter and Mary McCausland present recent paintings and drawings inspired by nature around home. Based in Larne on the North East coast of Northern Ireland, the family are interested in documenting home from personal photographs and observation. Through drawing and painting they portray three different gazes of things in common, including, people, place, pets, inanimate objects, flora and fauna.

Kim and Peter are married visual artists and arts educators. Both are alumni of Ulster University, Belfast School of Art. Their work, respectively, belongs in national public, and private collections. They have exhibited throughout Ireland and the UK. Mary is their child. This is her second group exhibition.

The exhibition will be on display from Thursday 4th until Friday 26th September 2025 and includes Saturday opening on 13th September. Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 10.00am – 4.00pm.

SIÚNTA by Niamh Coffey

In 1937-39, the Irish Folklore Commission asked primary school children to collect local history from their relatives and neighbours. Nestled in exercise copies, between thousands of stories detailed in meticulous handwriting, lie tales of metamorphosis and binary-blurring. Hares become milk-hungry witches, needy children are turned to stone, gooseberries transform sore eyes, tadpoles swirl in boggy bellies.

Siúnta, taking its name from the Irish for a seam or joint, uses these instances of metamorphosis as departure points to wriggle further into absurd and imaginary realms. These archives show that in an earlier Irish imaginary world, the boundaries that separate us from nature and other entities were not so separate and fixed, but porous and blurred.

Everyone is welcome to join us at the launch of Siúnta on Saturday 13th September at 2pm!

Helen Blake is a painter whose practice focuses on colour, engaging with rhythm and formalism, chance and deliberation. Using a working method where process and contemplation guide the evolution of the work, her overtly hand-made paintings record and examine colour conversations within accumulating pattern structures, embracing accidents, flaws and discrepancies within their rhythms.

Andrew Wilson, former Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art at Tate Britain, has written of Blake’s work that is underpinned by process – “always variously methodical and rational, yet also absurd and affected by the interruption of chance. In Blake’s paintings, colour is deployed to follow a given order and yet these are paintings of nature ….. not the rigid order of an urban modernism, but the texture and rhythms, and immediacy of life unfolding”.
As well four solo exhibitions at the Molesworth Gallery, Blake has shown at the RHA in FUTURES (2014), FUTURES Anthology (2015) and as part of ‘In and of itself – Abstraction in the age of images’ (2022). She was included in ‘Generation 2022: New Irish Painting’ at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, and received the Highly Commended award at the Contemporary Bristish Painting Prize (2022) . Her work has been acquired by the Arts Council of Ireland and by the OPW for the State Collection.

A celebration to mark the gallery’s 30th birthday! A specially selected exhibition of artworks by Irish and international artists who have exhibited at this Dublin gallery over the last 30 years.

Participating artists include: Basil Blackshaw, Cecilia Bullo, Anthony Caro, Sandro Chia, Peter Cleary, David Crone, Enzo Cucchi, Alan Davie, Vivienne Dick, Terry Frost, Sheenagh Geoghegan, John Gibbons, Patrick Graham, Patrick Hall, Claire Halpin, Marcelle Hanselaar, John Hoyland, Jonathan Hunter, Eithne Jordan, Eddie Kennedy, Alicia Ruiz Lopez, Nick Miller, Kevin Mooney, Paul Mosse, Gwen O’Dowd, Eamon O’Kane, Larry Poons, Tim Scott, John Noel Smith, George Warren, Michael Warren, Karl Weschke, Orla Whelan…

The Horse is excited to share the solo exhibition SLIPPERY LIKE MANGO JUICE by Dublin based, Swedish born artist Ella Bertilsson. The show is a survey of recent work that draws us through her exploration of aesthetics and attachment to objects, actions and vignettes, drawn from life experiences.

Preview: 4th of September, 6-9 pm.
Gallery opening hours: 2-6 pm, Mon-Wed, or by appointment.

Askeaton Contemporary Arts presents Aurora Tang, Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) Programme Director, to talk about her recent projects.

CLUI Programme Director Aurora Tang will share recent curatorial and research projects from the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a non-profit research organisation interested in exploring and understanding contemporary landscape issues in the United States. Founded in 1994 and headquartered in Los Angeles, the organisation has been continuously producing and presenting exhibitions, publications, research resources, tours, lectures, and public programming—all about the built landscape of the USA as a reflection of its culture and economy.

Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher based in Los Angeles, California. She has worked with the Center for Land Use Interpretation since 2009, and currently serves as its programme director. As an independent curator Tang has organized recent exhibitions at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (West Hollywood, California), MOCA Tucson (Tucson, Arizona), and Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, California). Tang was managing director of High Desert Test Sites (Joshua Tree, California).

Askeaton Contemporary Arts is an artist-led organisation based out of a small town in Limerick since 2006. An ongoing residency programme creates critical cultural encounters in the midst of the Irish countryside each summer, while public programmes, a dedicated publishing press and exhibitions in Askeaton and elsewhere over two decades all aim to find innovative public contexts and resilient relationships for new forms of artmaking to emerge. For current programming and updates please see www.askeatonarts.com

This event is supported by Free Space at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Free Space creates opportunities for artists to access space in the city for peer learning, artist exchanges, project development and presentations.

Event Information: This event will take place on the first floor accessible via lift and stairs. Seating will be theatre style. The room will be low lit with a projector. This room has limited ventilation and can become warm at busier events. For further access information contact Learning + Public Engagement Curator Órla Goodwin.

Join us for an artist talk with Leah Davis as she discusses her exhibition The Human Condition.

Belfast-based artist Leah Davis, graduated in Fine Art from The Belfast School of Art in 2021.

As a contemporary figurative painter, her work explores the human condition through body language, gesture, and the figure’s relationship with space. Blending painting and drawing, Davis delves into the dialogue between form and negative space, revealing intimacy, vulnerability, and shared human experiences.

Davis will give an informal Artists’ Talk before the preview of her exhibition, The Human Condition, giving further insight to her work and inspirations.

You are very welcome to join us in the Gallery directly after this talk from 7pm for the preview opening reception of Leah’s exhibition, The Human Condition

OPENING RECEPTION WITH THE ARTIST, CURATOR MEET-AND-GREET, FILM SCREENINGS, AND MORE

“It’s terrible to think [about] where I get my inspiration, but all these things are fodder to me as an artist. I love trees. I love mountains. But I don’t want to go out and paint them. I don’t paint to make money. I paint what I want, and I’ve always been political.”

— Patricia Hurl

For the past 40+ years, the painter Patricia Hurl has portrayed the lives of Irish women and their experiences as housewives, child-bearers, caretakers, providers and warriors navigating a male-dominated world, evoking the broad spectrum of emotions felt by her subjects through expressionistic, layered brushstrokes and blending the figurative and abstract.

As part of Irish Gothic, a retrospective of Hurl’s extraordinary career presented by IAC in partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), we will be offering special opportunities this September for audiences to engage with the artist and her work, including an opening night reception; a talk with curator Johanne Mullan of IMMA; a members-only private tour of the exhibition; screenings of the documentary Dawn to Dusk, which follows the artist collective Na Cailleacha, of which Hurl is a founding member; and gallery hours for an Irish Gothic theatre installation. Admission is free.

The Dichotomy of Change
The Dichotomy of Change brings together the work of Betty Gannon and Tony Gunning to explore the layered and evolving nature of our environments, both natural and man-made. Though their subject matter diverge, Gannon focusing on threatened sea and land forests, and Gunning on abandoned rural buildings, both artists present spaces deeply rooted in history, memory, and transformation.

Gannon’s mixed media works offer a contemplative response to the vulnerable ecosystems of Irish oak woodlands and oceanic seaweed forests. Her work highlights the quiet beauty of these habitats while underscoring their fragility in the face of human impact and climate change. In parallel, Gunning’s paintings of derelict structures evoke the echoes of lives once lived, shaped by waves of emigration, economic hardship, and rural decline. His work captures not only the starkness of abandonment but also the enduring beauty and significance of these spaces.

Together, their practices underscore a shared concern for the erosion of place, whether ecological or cultural, and reflect on how such environments, though worn and weathered, continue to act as living repositories of memory, identity, and resilience.

“One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’” Rachel Carson

Andrew Pelham-Burn, writer and poet

Betty Gannon lives and works in Westport, Co Mayo, mainly working in drawing, painting and mixed media work. She was selected for many solo exhibitions throughout Ireland and Northern Ireland and also selected for numerous group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Gannon was an award winner at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre Summer Exhibition in 2018, she was awarded an Agility Award in 2021 from the Arts Council of Ireland and was selected for a residency in Krems, Austria in 2022. She is currently researching and creating work supported by a Sustainable Arts Bursary Award from Wilderland a public art & community ecology project in Co Mayo.

Tony Gunning has been a professional artist since 2000. Following his sell-out debut at the Davis Gallery, Dublin, in 2002 he has had fifteen solo shows and has exhibited at numerous group shows including RA, RHA and RUA annual exhibitions. In 2007 he won the Curator’s Award and the Bank of Ireland Emerging Artist Award at EV+A (Ireland’s pre-eminent contemporary arts showcase). Internationally he has exhibited solo at the European Parliament, Brussels and was part of the Irish representation at the Florence Biennale 2005. His work is in many public and private collections including the National Collection (O.P.W.), the Northern Ireland Collection (Stormont) and the Bank of Ireland Collection.

‘first-person’ a solo exhibition by Isabel English opens at LHQ Gallery, 5th of September 6pm.

Isabel English, from Ballyhea in County Cork, is a visual artist and educator based in Dublin. Isabel’s work utilises the mediums of photography, textile and sculpture, to extend from the literary genre of autofiction, which combines autobiographical truths with fictionalised renderings, to create contextually sensitive installations.
In ‘first-person’, Isabel uses images of bodily anatomy, taken from A Manual of Artistic Anatomy by John C.L. Sparkes (London: Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1888) as a source for the work. These images have been spliced and rendered beyond recognition and presented to the viewer as enlarged scans on assorted sheets of acetate. These actions are reflected in a number of wall based sculptural pieces made from disposable patterned aluminium plating, replicating the composition of honeycomb cardboard, generally used as protective packaging in the shipment and transportation of goods. These processes of repetition, which underline much of English’s practice, refers to the psychological concept of Repetition Compulsion, as underlined by Freud in his essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ first published in German in 1920, as an unconscious tendency to repeat patterns of behaviour.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication produced by Isabel in which Cork based arts writer Sarah Long, and poet Julie Morrisey have written about Isabel’s work.
Isabel was awarded the inaugural Emerging Visual Artist Award from Cork County Council in 2024. Isabel was awarded the inaugural Emerging Visual Artist Award from Cork County Council in 2024. This award provides a bursary and the opportunity to have a solo exhibition at LHQ Gallery.

The exhibition runs from Friday 5th of September to Friday 24th of October.
Opening Hours: LHQ Gallery is open Monday to Friday 9.00am to 5.30pm, and closes on bank holidays.
Location: LHQ Gallery is in the County Library building on Carrigrohane Road, Cork, T12K335.

Oh What a State is a solo exhibition of work by Darran McGlynn, yearning for a meaningful marking of this time. The exhibition explores how space is embedded with layered histories and emotions in relation to land and identity, echoing encounters of existential complexities. Material tensions of construction and collapse emphasise the personal and collective experience of aspiration, power and loss in our changing world.

Oh What A State is the next iteration of McGlynn’s most recent body of work, following State of Play exhibited as part of Galway International Arts Festival 2025. Darran McGlynn is a member of Artspace Studios in Galway. His multidisciplinary practice combines social and philosophical reflection, contrasting contemporary circumstances with deep time.

Curated by Kate McSharry.

Kate McSharry is a Visual Artist and Independent Curator, also currently working as Co-Director at 126 Artist-Run Gallery & Studios, Administrator at Artspace Studios, and Education Officer at TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Kate’s practice has been supported by Galway City Council Arts Office, Galway Culture Company, Galway Arts Centre, Culture Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland since graduating with a First-Class Honours and the Academic Achievement Award in Contemporary Art from ATU Galway.

Exhibition runs until 17th Oct

Official Opening 5th Sept at 6pm – 17th Oct

Taylor Galleries is pleased to present Matters Arising, an exhibition of new work by Charles Tyrrell.

In reflecting on the exhibition title, Tyrrell notes: “I am simply paying homage to what I’ve realised is a constant throughout my painting life. It happens at every level… dealing with matters arising; the continuous process of reaction to preceding moves.”

The exhibition centres on ten new paintings that continue Tyrrell’s exploration of distorted grids — mapping, celebrating, and expanding on ideas of how a cohesive whole can emerge from random and disparate elements. Alongside these works, the exhibition includes a selection of new drawings, three new drypoint prints, and a towering timber wall-piece that fuses minimalist modular thinking with the transformative mark of fire.

Engage Art Studios is delighted to announce our new summer weekly showcase exhibition, Áit Eile, paintings by orbital member Stephanie McLaughlin showcases the artist’s relationship with her environment. It is a show about depicting ‘other places ‘literally and also refers to abstraction being a different form of painting to literal representation. Landscape painting has a history of being bourgeois/ conservative, as opposed to contemporary/ abstract art. Can this work bridge the divide? There is a risk of a painting being neither an interesting landscape nor an interesting abstract painting. Hopefully the gestural elements make for interesting work

In this ‘In Conversation’ event, artist Fiona Whelan will reflect on the content and process of making The River – a large-scale visual mapping of the processual features of her arts practice which engages with systemic power relations and inequalities through long-term collaborations.

Fiona will be in conversation with artist and researcher Dr Ciaran Smyth who supported her in a process of recursive mapping, as the pair explored new cartographic strategies for visualising this collaborative and socially engaged practice.

The conversation will be moderated by Carolann Courtney (Create).

the soft fall of land
5 – 27 September 2025

Curated by Ciara Hickey

Preview: Thursday 4 September 2025 from 6 – 8 pm at The Library Project, 4 Temple Bar, Dublin 2.

Featuring selected BCPS and invited artists: Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell, Chloe Brenan, Aisling Conroy, Grace Ryan, Soft Fiction Projects

Black Church Print Studio is delighted to present the soft fall of land curated by Ciara Hickey.

This exhibition brings together new work by Bassam Issa al-Sabah, Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell, Chloe Brenan, Aisling Conroy, Grace Ryan and Soft Fiction Projects. It considers the idea of Utopia and examines the pursuit of this imagined, impossible and aspirational state from a range of perspectives. The artworks in the exhibition oscillate between escapism and activism, fantasy and instruction for creating an alternative, better world.

Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell and Bassam Issa al-Sabah have each made a new series of prints directing us into dense, imagined worlds, created from a personal lexicon of symbols drawn from the artists’ history, experience and critical response to the humanitarian, social and ecological issues pervading contemporary life.

Al-Sabah’s monochromatic prints, made during his Process Residency at Black Church Studios, evoke imagery from his moving image works and installations, where sublime, seductive digital landscapes offer speculative worlds in which dystopian and utopian scenarios meet and intersect. Bhreathnach-Cashell, known for her immersive installations and activist work has created a new series of aquatint etchings, ‘Ulster Cycles’. The work translates years of the artist’s unseen drawings and depict mimetic figures using Celtic, biological and architectural imagery, conjuring contemporary fables and cautionary tales.

For Grace Ryan and Chloe Brenan, two studio members at Black Church Print Studio, the invitation to think about Utopian ideals led them to a close examination of the natural world. Ryan will create a sculptural composition in the gallery based on Ikebana—the ancient Japanese art of flower arrangement rooted in balance, asymmetry, and the harmony between humans and nature.

Chloe Brenan’s current work is focused on the microcosm of an orchard in Carlow that is located beside her family home. Originally created as a colonial project to order and control the land, the orchard is now overgrown, the traces of colonial past are muted by the unabetted growth of weeds and shrubs over decades. The artist has used Super 8 photography to mark the process of observing the orchard and acknowledging the small changes and diversity of plant life as dictated by time, climate and chance. Brenan’s work in this exhibition represents the first and last frames of a roll of film on which she photographed the orchard, the edges of which are singed, capturing the moment that an image is simultaneously created and extinguished.

Black Church Print Studio member Aisling Conroy continues her exploration of sound and cymatics, the study of vibrational phenomena. This new work comprises a grid of 40 prints representing the 40 Chladni plates, a methodology developed by Ernst Chladni in 1787 as a visual manifestation of sound vibrations, looking at the patterns produced by sounds on flat plates made by a bow. The work offers an invitation to think about the invisible forces that shape our reality and consider the possibilities of new languages and systems for understanding and grappling with the unknown.

Soft Fiction Projects (Alessia Cargnelli and Emily McFarland) are an initiative that produce printed and digital matter to explore archives of underrepresented voices, oppositional histories and geopolitical narratives. For the exhibition they have produced a free print that can be taken by visitors. The print is based on Women’s News, a Belfast collective-run publication active between 1984 and 2011, who used the medium of print matter as a method for generating common ground, sharing experiences and encouraging community building. This leaflet uses DIY approaches to archival material, collected from MayDay Rooms, as a way to reimagine and revisit this history.

Exhibition continues until Saturday 27 September 2025.
Opening hours: Mon – Fri 11 am – 6 pm, Sat 12 – 6 pm.
Late Opening for Culture Night: Fri 20 Sept. 2025. Open until 9 pm.

Join exhibiting artist Kathy Tynan in conversation in the Gallery with artist Ramon Kassam. The talk includes a short introduction to Kathy Tynan’s work which is on view as part of the group exhibition ‘Faigh Amach’, 01 August – 21 September 2025.

Kathy Tynan, along with Ella Bertilsson and Emily Waszak, was selected through an open call process and to take part in this group exhibition. ‘Faigh Amach’ (Irish, roughly translated as ‘discover’) is a new initiative by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in partnership with Culture Ireland and Southwark Park Galleries (SPG), London, to support an artist in presenting their first solo exhibition outside Ireland. One of the three exhibiting artists will be invited to present their first international solo exhibition at SPG Lake Gallery in Spring 2026.

Kathy Tynan’s paintings of familiar cityscapes and domestic scenes illuminate moments of affection, intimacy and curiosity. Rather than focussing her gaze on monumental landmarks, Tynan instead attributes value to that which is otherwise overlooked. Her semi-autobiographical subjects include her own family and friends but speak more broadly to shared enthusiasms, experiences of care, community, and relationships. Kathy Tynan was born and works in Dublin. Her recent solo exhibitions include Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2024); Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise (2022); Highlanes Gallery (with Andrew Vickery), Drogheda (2020); The LAB, Dublin (2019).

Ramon Kassam is an Irish artist. Painting forms the basis of his practice. His approach involves casting paintings into semi-fictional worlds, aiming to connect the medium’s visual tradition to the landscape and psyche of our environments. Solo exhibitions include Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (2022) and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin (2018 & 2016). Group exhibitions include The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (Michigan, USA), The Lewis Glucksman Gallery (Cork), and EVA International – Ireland’s Biennale (Limerick).

Event location Information: This event takes place in a ground-floor, street-facing Gallery. The space contains free standing installations, sculptures and wall-hung paintings. For further accessibility information please contact Learning + Public Engagement Curator Órla Goodwin.

Booking link: https://www.templebargallery.com/whats-on/events/gallery-talk-kathy-tynan-in-conversation-with-ramon-kassam

Curated by Francis Halsall and Belinda Quirke

Of Peras and Apeiron is a group exhibition of artists who explore systematic processes as an inherent part of their practice. Halsall and Quirke have curated a selection of work that explores the different numerical, geometrical and methodical systems that can be used to make art. They have found artists who both explore the potential of the infinite and unbounded (Aperion) whilst acknowledging they will always be bound by limits (Peras). The resulting work reveals approaches that are mathematical and rational, fictional and personal whilst exploring the deep creativity of systems made by humans and other agents.

Gerard Caris (Nederlands) devoted his arts practice to endless applications of what he termed pentagonism in drawing, print and sculpture.

Channa Horwitz’s (US) extraordinary system of notation, Sonakinatography embeds colour, sound and motion into unparalleled logic scores. Working methodically on common US graph paper with eight squares to the inch, Horwitz’s Sonakinatography allows the artist to “see time visually”, and create a universal notational language for creative interpretation.

Roy Johnston’s (NI) work of the late sixties to early eighties, employs rigorous Pythagorean rationalism and colour permutation both in sculptural form and 2D relief. Neil Clements (NI/Scotland) sets the year 1968 as a control method in deference to Johnston’s “Systems”. Facsimiles of abstract paintings characterised as peripheral to central art historical narratives are recreated by the artist in tread plate. Ronnie Hughes (IRE) memetic paintings thwart mathematical exactitudes through symmetrical slippages that optically and somatically perplex the viewer.

The grid is often referenced in Grace McMurray’s (NI) practice as both a tool, and framing device to the quiet, hidden fabrication of gendered labour. McMurray uses drawing, patchwork, knitting, and weaving within their work, seeking succor in memetic, geometric construction of handcrafted textiles.

Possible Utopian futures are explored in both Dannielle Tegeder’s (US) and Suzanne Treister’s (UK) practice. Tegeder summons the cosmological and the spiritual by means of invented sigils within fabricated urban schematics, whilst Treister’s multi-planetary, fictional persona, and tech futurism frequently allude to the Kabbalistic gematria and mystic systems.

Exhibition Opening: Friday 5th September at 6pm, all welcome

A bent knee at a vaguely familiar stranger
Another known face driving a taxi,
An accent switch when new friends appear
– only to be switched once more when they leave,
Ori on forehead

This series of collages explores how class and race affect how people move through the world, the jobs taken, spaces occupied. Reflecting on the lives of the Nigerian diaspora living in Ireland these works display the oddities of finding a home in a ‘foreign’ land while maintaining, engaging in and creating culture. Family Trees hang over Property Lines showcases the small encounters, subtle gestures and interactions that are kin to Black and Irish people.

Fiyin Oluokun is recipient of the 2024 ‘Emerging Visual Artist Bursary Award’ supported by Kildare County Council Arts Service and Riverbank Arts Centre.

McKenna Gallery
Friday 5 September-Saturday 25 October
Monday-Friday 9:30am-5pm | Saturday 10am-4pm
Admission Free

Congruence: New Works by Emmanuel Matt & Pascal Ungerer.
SO Fine Art Editions is delighted to present Congruence, a two-person exhibition bringing together recent works by French-Swiss artist Emmanuel Matt and Irish visual artist Pascal Ungerer. This exhibition explores liminal landscapes, both real and imagined, seen through two very unique but complementary artistic perspectives. Together, Ungerer and Matt’s works transform the landscape into a site of memory, tension and possibility.

Grief’s Current Shape – a new thread based exhibition by Ciara O’Connor
“If I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it’s inescapable.”
-Edna O’Brien

Grief has seeped into my bones and I suspect it will never leave. But it is so much more than sorrow and despair. It is an ever changing expression of love. We loved them and they loved us. For me, sometimes that love is a rush of warmth when I look down at my hands and see hers.

Sometimes it’s a stab of regret for the hurtful thing I said to him. Sometimes it’s a crumble to the floor when I am overcome by the loss and cruelty of it all. But sometimes now, as the waves of sadness move further and further apart, it is bountiful gratitude for everything it has taught me.

Grief’s Current Shape is an exploration of the various stages of grief, and a personal attempt to lean into it all.

About Ciara
Ciara O’Connor is a Kerry based visual artist who works primarily with textiles and free motion embroidery. Her work is figurative and deals with themes of identity, feminism, trauma and recovery. She is interested in pushing the boundaries of traditional techniques to tell contemporary stories.

Since returning to her practice in 2019 she has been selected for 15 group shows, including Following Threads in Crawford Art Gallery, and RUA and RSA Annuals. She had her first solo show in Garter Lane Arts Centre, 2022, and has featured in FAIRE, Image Magazine, The Irish Examiner, The Kerryman, and VAN Jan/Feb 2024. Her second solo show opens from Sept 6 in Garter Lane Arts Centre.

Signals is a solo exhibition exploring the shifting conditions of the Atlantic Ocean—its waves, winds, and invisible frequencies. These natural forces generate a continuous stream of signals that often go unnoticed, yet they are deeply connected to our environment and health. The artworks in Signals translate these subtle oceanic rhythms into visual form. From the pulse of waves to the patterns of wind, the exhibition reveals how the Atlantic communicates. By making the invisible visible, Signals invites us to reflect on how closely our lives are intertwined with the ocean’s rhythms—and how tuning into these signals can deepen our understanding of both nature and ourselves. Rather than viewing the ocean as empty space, Signals encourages us to see it as a living presence with stories to tell.
The exhibition also features thoughtful reflections on the ocean by Ms. Moreland’s 3rd Class at Scoil Ursula.
All are welcome!

Linda Fährlin is a visual artist and illustrator based in Sligo. She is the illustrator of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Irish Lighthouses and the upcoming Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Irish Seashore (publishing September 2025). Linda has participated in numerous school-based art residencies and is a Reading Champion for Children’s Books Ireland (2022–2025). She is a member of Visual Artists Ireland and Illustrators Ireland.

Join us at Luan Gallery on Saturday 6th September at 2pm for the Soft Surge Artists and Curator talk

This roving in-conversation event, led by Luan Gallery curator Aoife Banks in dialogue with Soft Surge exhibiting artists Shirani Bolle, Ursula Burke, Rachel Fallon, and Lucy Peters, will guide visitors through exhibited artwork. Together, the curator and artists will address and unravel the themes encountered in the exhibition. As we move through the gallery, the discussion will critically engage with the conceptual frameworks and thematic concerns underpinning the works, offering insight into the curatorial rationale and the artistic practices of the exhibiting artists.

SOFT SURGE is a group exhibition featuring artists Shirani Bolle, Ursula Burke, Rachel Fallon, Dee Mulrooney, Lucy Peters, Emily Waszak, and selected work on loan from The Irish Names Project. Soft Surge critically engages with themes of identity, motherhood, women’s collectivity, grief, resistance, activism, and sociopolitical dissent within the context of contemporary Ireland. Through a range of practices and processes including sculpture, embroidery, weaving, knitting, tapestry, film, photography, and mixed media, the artists featured in this exhibition explore the soft power and radical potential of textiles.

Curated by Aoife Banks

RUNNERS is a circus show that combines excellent juggling, stunning objects and incredible sounds.

Two jugglers, Alex and Jonas find themselves bound to the rules of running machines while a musician, Moises, orchestrates them through a series of games and experiments. This vivid circus performance celebrates juggling and running.

Lucy Peters is a visual artist based in Co.Monaghan, Ireland. Her work consists of large textile sculptures, paper and text. She is interested in consumerism and how we hold value in certain items, especially clothing. Her sculptures are made by dismantling discarded items of clothing into material strips, which are then slowly woven and knotted into large textured forms. Each piece can take up to five months to complete, and each work is composed of material that has been recycled, donated or discarded.

Our First Solo Award offers support and funding at a key point in the careers of professional visual artists in the North East region who have yet to present a solo show.

Opening reception Friday 18 July, 5.30-7.30pm

Exhibition tour with Gallery Director, Brian Mac Domhnaill Saturday 09 August, 12pm

Running over six weeks, the Summer Exhibition at Lavit Gallery is an annual group show featuring painting, print, photography, sculpture and craft at a variety of price points. This year exhibiting artists and makers include Wendy Dison, Michael Duhan, Patricia Doherty, Grainne Dowling, Ana Duncan, James English, Angela Fewer, Felicia Garrivan, Etain Hickey, Antonio Julio Lopez Castro, Andrew Ludick, Damaris Lysaght, David Magee, Michaela McCann, Isobel McCarthy, Kate Mac Donagh, Peter McTigue, Paul Murphy, Claire O’Reilly, John O’Reilly, Jenny Richardson, Katherina Tremil, Zoe Velthuysen, Sarah Walker, Catherine Weld.

Cork Arts Society (est 1963), trading as Lavit Gallery, is a not-for-profit arts organisation, registered charity (CHY 13297) and CLG dedicated to promoting an appreciation of art in Cork City through the provision of a gallery space in which artists can exhibit their artwork for public patronage. Lavit Gallery also serves the art community and the public through its non-commercial activities such as artist talks, exhibition tours, continued professional development and the provision of two graduate awards given annually to students at MTU Crawford College of Art & Design.

Representing Nature – An Exhibition by Colin Watson RUA

ArtisAnn Gallery, 70 Bloomfield Avenue, Belfast, BT5 5AE

Wed 2nd July to Sat 30th August

Late Night Opening: WED 2nd July from 6 to 8pm

Wed – Sat: 11am to 5.30pm

( Gallery closed Fri July 11th and Sat July 12th)

www.artisann.org

The paintings in the show all have great personal significance to Colin. These smaller paintings are more spontaneous that his larger works, but there remains a desire to infuse each picture with a certain degree of mystery.

Although the choices of subject are personal, the paintings, hopefully, are also universal and have meaning beyond the painter’s initial inspiration.

Alongside studies towards fully realised paintings this exhibition also presents stand alone, spontaneous, intuitive works that directly respond to observed natural phenomena. This selection of works represents a cross section of his working methods beyond the finished paintings.

Colin Watson lives and works in Belfast. He has held seven solo exhibitions in London, as well as in Dublin, Northern Ireland and Morocco. In October 2008, Colin was invited by HRH The Prince of Wales to accompany him on the Royal Tour of Japan, Brunei and Indonesia, as his official Tour Artist.

Colin Watson has exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, the Royal Ulster Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy, winning awards at the latter two including two gold medals at the Royal Ulster Academy, one awarded by the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Christopher Le Brun. He was also awarded the Ireland Fund of Great Britain Annual Arts Award in 1999. His work has been included in the BP Portrait Prize Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, The Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibitions and at the Discerning Eye at the Mall Galleries in London.

Colin Watson’s work is held in collections worldwide, including the Royal Collection of His Majesty King Charles III and in the collection of the King of Morocco. He is also represented in a number of public collections, including the Ulster Museum, Moroccan Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Arts Council for Northern Ireland, the National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland, Limerick and the Royal Geographical Society, London with a portrait of Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the British explorer and travel writer.

At noon Sat 26th July, as part of EastSide Arts Festival, there will be a special British Sign Language event with BSL interpretation of a gallery tour by gallery owner Dr Ann McVeigh. This is free, with no booking required.

All artworks are available to buy.

You can also buy art from this exhibition through the Own Art scheme which gives you an interest-free loan over 10 months (and you still get to take the art home immediately the exhibition ends).

ArtisAnn Gallery, 70 Bloomfield Avenue, Belfast, BT5 5AE
Wed – Sat: 11am to 5.30pm

INTERRUPTED (JOURNEYS)
Brain Injury Matters NI
8 July– 30 August
Explore Interrupted (Journeys), a large-scale collaborative installation inspired by aural histories from Limavady. It tells the story of the lost Ross Sea Party, part of Shackleton’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition, highlighting courage, survival, and hope through an intricate origami display reflecting their perilous journey and determination.

EXHIBITION LAUNCH: Tuesday 8th July 2pm | Free Admission | All welcome
Brain Injury Matters (NI) was established in 2013 as an independent regional third sector organisation supporting, promoting and empowering those individuals and families affected by acquired brain injury.

For more information, please email ciara@braininjurymatters.org.uk or telephone 02890705125 or 07516629856

Opening Thursday 7 August at 7.00pm

This body of work explores the hand movements made during speech as a form of subconscious drawing. The series seeks to reconcile production in an abstract expressionist aesthetic with the desire to make work which contains and contributes to constructive narratives regarding cultural diversity and society. The work connects the artist’s definition of drawing as ‘to describe a path’ into the verbal field.

The work is initiated from hand movements taken from primary school Principal Mary Harbinson, describing ‘Different Journeys to the Same Place’, as an educational objective in the multi-cultural school. For other works the artist recorded his own hand movements as he described his consideration of the need to simultaneously respect and protect cultural diversity.

Michael Doherty paints in oils, in an expressive abstract aesthetic grounded in his drawing practice. His works are rooted in narratives around cultural diversity, society and the environment. While practicing as an architect he qualified from the Ulster University in 2023 with a First Class Honours degree in Fine Art. The boundaries of perceived surfaces, and places where line and surface meet, are critical in his approach to the resolution of his drawings and paintings.

Exhibition continues 5 July – 30 August 2025.

Naomi Draper’s work references a diverse range of research sources that are centred around botany and botanical activity throughout history. It investigates processes of collecting, preserving, and archiving natural particles, fragments and found objects harvested from our landscape.

Naomi is interested in the role process’ of production and making can play in the negotiation of relationships between humans and other matter. Her work looks for moments when materials become active participants in our learning and development.

This exhibition will present a large collection of objects and materials that the artist accumulated and kept over the past five years. Many of the works explore the internal cavity of plants, seedpods, shells and other things, investigating unseen hidden spaces and giving form to invisible entities.

Through various and repeated casting process’ there is an intention to forge a relationship with an object that can never be fully understood, accessed or grasped, acknowledging an attachment and melancholy for particular objects and plant species.

Exhibition continues 5 July – 30 August 2025.

David Fox has become renowned for his compelling connection with the contemporary Irish landscape, where in recent work he juxtaposes the vibrant essence of street art and graffiti within the bustling cities, with the often quiet and overlooked built structures and walls that are seen scattered across rural Ireland. Working primarily with oil paints, Fox brings these walls, alleys and derelict structures to life on canvas, transforming the often-overlooked art of graffiti into evocative pieces that resonate with a modern audience. His paintings are not merely visual explorations but rather profound dialogues with the culture, identity and rebellion found within the modern landscape.

Through meticulous attention to detail and a nuanced understanding of colour and form, Fox’s works serve as a testament to the hidden beauty and enduring spirit of street art and graffiti , weaving a tangible connection between the every day and the extraordinary. His collection is a love letter to the streets, a celebration of the unspoken, and a compelling journey through contemporary Ireland’s visual voice.

Throughout August, Ards Arts Centre will play host to the principle Creative Peninsula exhibition, featuring exclusive works by the finest Artists and Makers from the Ards and North Down Borough

This exhibition will feature unique pieces of art and craftwork in a variety of mediums, specially selected for display in Ards Arts Centre and created in our Borough. This exhibition is a celebration of the exclusivity and quality of the artwork produced by local artists and makers and a fantastic opportunity to purchase a beautiful piece of art.

The theme of this year’s exhibition is ‘Reflection’ with each work taking inspiration from this concept.

Artworks are for sale, and many artists accept commission work too.

Be sure to pick up a Creative Peninsula programme for more information on other events and activities taking place during the festival.

Exhibition Preview: Thurs 31 July, 7 – 9pm

Join us for this open reception and enjoy a glass of wine or soft drink as you view the artworks on display. Meet the artists and makers, and chat about their work.

This exhibition is part of the programme of events for Creative Peninsula 2025.

An Exhibition of Immersive Audio-Visual Work by David Ian Bickley

Romancing the Soil explores the deep connections between landscape, memory, and technology. This immersive audio-visual exhibition draws on mythological and spiritual traditions while using advanced digital tools to examine our relationship with the natural world.

David Ian Bickley’s work is rooted in a belief that landscape is not merely a backdrop to human activity—it is a living archive of movement, memory, and transformation. As a canvas for time, these places embody a continuous dialogue between presence and absence, between the physical trace and the invisible resonance of experience. The terrain holds not just history, but the imprint of intention and the rhythm of existence itself. Influenced by folklore and folk memory, prehistoric monuments, and the elemental power of place, his practice blends field recordings, ambient composition, symbolic imagery, and experimental film techniques to evoke “the spirit of place.”

At the same time, the work is grounded in contemporary processes. Bickley uses modular synthesisers, micrographic textures, and custom-built projection systems to create environments that are both ancient and futuristic. His concept of a “particle accelerator for the mind” reflects this duality—where myth and machine meet to uncover hidden layers of perception.

This exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the evolving relationship between humans, land, and technology. It is a journey through time and terrain, where the soil becomes a medium for both memory and transformation.

Exhibition continues 19th July – 30th August 2025

An exhibition by artists Miriam de Búrca, Pascal Ungerer, Sally O’Dowd, Rita Duffy, and Maria Anastassiou.
Open 10am to 4pm Tuesday to Friday
11am to 4pm Saturday or by appointment
@borderbiennale2025

Exhibition continues 4 July – 30 August 2025.

For his third solo exhibition at the Molesworth Gallery, Alan Phelan showcases his distinctive RGB palette, blending photography, painting, print and sculpture. The works address numerous temporal moments, toying with understandings of time and history.

Temporal Furniture is part of Alan Phelan’s ongoing investigation into the invention of colour photography. This is rooted in the work of John Joly and his colour screen process which gives the stripes and colours that pervades most of Phelan’s recent work.

Opening hours during August are irregular so please email or phone ahead to make an appointment.

Exhibiting a sculpture relief titled, Gospel of Abhainn / Naomh Abhainn/ carpet page -exhibition in the historical Hamilton Vault Studios between 21st August and 28th August 2025 for a group exhibition. Medieval marginalia- illustrations or notations in the margins of manuscripts. We will be exploring the fascinating and insightful world of the drawings and writings created in the margins of old manuscripts by monks, nuns and scholars. These varied from the highly decorative to the humorous; think animals playing musical instruments.

Exhibition continues 2nd August – 30th August 2025.

This exhibition features a collection of book illustrations, artwork and new etchings by artist Shona Shirley Macdonald. An award-winning illustrator and author living in Co. Waterford, she specialises in children’s books and large-scale murals. Her debut picture book, ‘The Pooka Party’ was selected for the 2020 IBBY Honour List and received multiple award nominations. Her recent collaboration, ‘Girls Who Slay Monsters’, won the Children’s An Post Book of the Year Award 2022 and was nominated for the 2024 Yoto Carnegie Medal for illustration.
Exhibition runs untils 30th August.

We are delighted to invite you to the opening of Tadgh McSweeney’s exhibition, Saoirse, on 2 August at 12 noon.
The exhibition will be introduced by Tadgh’s friend and film-maker, Vivienne Dick.

McSweeney was an exceptionally individual artist who found extraordinary beauty in the absolutely ordinary, in the landscapes, animals and everyday objects of his home surroundings.

The poet Brian Lynch wrote, ‘the simplicity, the stubbornness, the freshness, and the joy he finds in nature are facets of an ongoing self-portrait, expressions of the soul of an original artistic personality. He is in the tradition of Irish genius, but there is no genius like him. Tadgh McSweeney is unique’.

McSweeney studied in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, between 1959 and 1960, and later studied printmaking techniques, such as etching and silkscreen printing, in London. He exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy, the Oireachtas, Group 65 and the Independent Artists annual exhibitions, and had fourteen solo shows in Cork, Dublin, San Francisco, Hamburg, Killarney and London. He passed away on 29 August 2018, aged 82.

The exhibition runs until 31 August, open Wed—Sun, 12—5pm or by appointment.

Dublin Maker is a free, family-friendly festival that will turn this year’s venue, Leopardstown Racecourse, into a bustling showcase of invention, creativity, and resourcefulness. It’s a celebration of the maker movement, where makers from across Ireland (and beyond) come together to share their projects, passions, and skills with the public in a vibrant, interactive environment. The aim of the festival is to showcase making in all its different forms, to entertain the public, to provide a meeting place for the maker movement and to inspire the next generation of creatives and inventors.

VISUAL is pleased to present Dreamtime Ireland, an exhibition and research project by artist Sean Lynch at VISUAL and Carlow County Museum, and Artworks 2025, in conjunction with Carlow Arts Festival.

Drawn from historical and contemporary artworks and artefacts, over thirty presentations are spread throughout Carlow’s gallery and museum spaces, each exploring art’s potential to provoke, investigate and critique the shape and purpose of Irish culture.

With an emphasis on public art, social and conceptual practice, Dreamtime Ireland reveals an undercurrent of exchange and interaction between art and society, proposing artmaking as a way to live, make and share the complex world and environments we encounter today.

Featuring artworks and contributions from:

Seanie Barron, David Beattie, Mairéad Byrne, John Carson & Conor Kelly, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty, Richard Collier, Brian Connolly & Maurice O’Connell, Avril Corroon, Alan Counihan, Paddy Critchley, Martin Folan, Paul Gregg, Raymond Griffin, Kerry Guinan, Léann Herlihy, Michael Higgins & Juana Robles, Michele Horrigan & the EVA International archive, Bernadette Kiely, Sarah Lincoln, Irish Architectural Archive, Jane McCormack & Kingscourt Brick Sculpture Symposium, Yvonne McGuinness, Nollaig Molloy, Tom Molloy, Gina Moxley, NAMACO (Han Hogan and Donal Fullam), Tom Ó Caollaí, Tina O’Connell, Olivia Plender, Robin Price, Rónán Ó Raghallaigh and George Hooker, Seán O’Riordan, John Reardon, Theo Sims, Lily Van Oost, Hermione Wiltshire.

Dreamtime Ireland and Artworks 2025 span all of VISUAL’s gallery spaces and continues in Carlow County Museum.

Welcome to the artist job centre!

What job could you imagine in your wildest dreams? What if you got paid to put whoppee cushions on all the seats in the train, or make recordings of all the birds in your neighbourhood. Artists invent their own jobs.

Artists might spend everyday drawing or dancing; making sculptures in supermarkets or performances on football pitches. They might decide to make an enormous piece of clothing or bury a time capsule. Doing the job of an artist isn’t just about making artworks in galleries, it’s about asking big questions, dreaming up ideas and imagining new ways of being in the world.

This all-ages interactive space invites you to step into an imaginary universe where there are no rules and no limits to what an artist can do. Here, you get to imagine, design and create your very own artistic job — a role that lets you explore, question, play and express yourself.

Kilgraney Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition featuring a collection of work in jewellery, textiles, ceramics, sculpture and prints. This exhibition brings together a range of handcrafted pieces, all made with care, attention to detail, and a strong connection to natural materials and traditional techniques. From delicate jewellery and richly textured textiles to expressive prints and hand-formed ceramics, each piece reflects the artist’s love of making and working with their hands.

Exhibition continues 5 June – 31 August 2025.

‘All in Colour’, an exhibition of new paintings by Louise French at Shankill Road Library. It is the eleventh of Flax Art Studios’ annual exhibitions in partnership with the library – an opportunity for an artist to present their work in a community setting.

‘All in Colour’ is a new series of paintings made on surfaces with pre-existing imagery. Through experimentation with materials and processes, the paintings explore colour and form. Referring to still life and domestic representations of nature, the exhibition reflects on the act of painting itself.

Opening: Thursday 5 June 2025, 6.00pm–7.45pm
Exhibition dates: 5 June–31 August 2025

Opening hours:
Monday and Tuesday: 9.30am–5.30pm
Wednesday: 1pm–5.30pm
Thursday: 12–6pm
Friday: 9.30am–5.30pm
Saturday: 9.30am–1pm

Louise French completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School, Australia, 2022. In March 2023 she joined Flax Art Studios (Belfast) Emerging Artist Programme. She has had solo exhibitions at Threshold Gallery, Belfast, and Ards Art Centre, Newtownards and group shows in Northern Ireland and London. In 2025 she was granted ACNI SIAP funding.

Jane Arden (1927-1982) was a leading figure in experimental British theatre and cinema, and an important radical feminist voice of the 1960s and ‘70s. Born in Wales, this director, actor, musician, and poet initially trained as a professional actress, a future derailed by marriage and children. Arden turned to writing, and had some success with stage and television projects. With her work increasingly informed by her politics, the beginning of a personal and professional relationship with director Jack Bond facilitated the move to film, and the small body of work for which she is here celebrated. Following her death, Bond withdrew these often strongly autobiographical films from circulation, only relenting decades later. Arden’s work is raw, perceptive, disturbing, vital, and often beautiful. We are pleased to present the work of an overlooked filmmaker wholly deserving of greater acclaim.

Films:
Separation – Screening Saturday 9th (in-cinema and on IFI@Home)
The Other Side of the Underneath – Screening Sunday 10th, Streaming from Saturday 9th on IFI@Home
Anti-Clock – Screening Wednesday 13th (+ short film Vibration), Streaming from Saturday 9th on IFI@Home

RADICAL ACTS
JARED DEERY, JUDI KEESHAN, PAZ MALLEA, RACHEL OSTROW, TIL WILL

It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

When you think of New York, you think of art. The city has vied for contention of Capital of the art scene for a century, just as countries clamber over each other for geopolitical positioning.
The art scene of New York is tremendous. The myriad of galleries offer spaces where you get fully absorbed in art. It shocks and it awes. The Metropolitan, the Whitney, the Guggenheim. Legendary spots for art gazers. A compendium of art history contained in a few square miles of land. The array is astonishing.
New York has sent out ripples of influence and inspiration for decades. There is a vision and quest among the practitioners of art of New York that sets the cadence for the rest of the art world. The energy is real. You can feel it. Amidst this competitive and vigorous scene there is a generation of painters, raising their heads above the parapet, poking their brushes trough the dense city jungle. Signalling to the world their creations that have gestated in quiet, old industrial corners of Brooklyn. Amidst the exaggerated mayhem of the city, imagine a painter completely absorbed by the canvas, in an epicentre of perfect calm, painting for now.
In this light we present five radical painters currently working in Brooklyn, New York who present their work together in Dublin for the first time.

Image: Rachel Ostrow, She’s Got It, 2022.

“Chomh bán le bainne /Chomh milis le mil / Chomh dearg le fuil.”
as white as milk/ as sweet as honey / as red as blood . (trans.)

(NFC, 0023 : 190)

(Anna Ní Fhathaigh, School’s Collection, Duchas c. 1920s. )

Joyce says that the soul of Ireland is trapped in a net; it is also collected there. To create ourselves we must reach into that fishing net, that lacework, that woven basket. Do our fingers catch in the gaps?

Owing a great debt to the scholarship of Martín Mac Con Iomaire, Bríd Mahon, Kevin Danaher, Jennie Moran and the thousands of voices woven into the Dúchas Schools collection, my art practice explores and reimagines the patchwork history of cooking culture in Ireland. It does so in the hopes of easing a painful cultural memory of famine, fasting, hunger strikes, institutionalization and food insecurity, which today manifests in the prevalence of disordered eating and Ireland’s disregard for the nutritional needs of those in our care.

Drawing on the aforementioned scholarship, persevering folklore, medieval Irish literature, traditional craft methods (patchworking, Irish lace, delft ceramics), as well as my love of cooking with my friends, the work develops a joyful visual language for Irish cooking. The artistic outcomes of my research into food history tend to root themselves in Irish craft traditions, such as Irish lace crochet, quilting and weaving, underscoring the idea that Irish cooking deserves to be revived with the same significance in our culture as the aforementioned crafts.

The exhibition opening will feature hand-drawn looping animations showing step-by step instructions of how to cook some traditional regional dishes which have fallen out of the culture as a result of colonisation, famine, etc.,

Knowing the level of destruction to people and culture caused by orchestrated famine, in Ireland historically and now as it happens in Gaza, I believe in the significance of reconstructing our food culture in a way which contradicts the individualistic and destructive philosophy of colonization. If the art of colonization is line and boundary, our art must be holding, gathering, sharing.

Last Chance to See | Exhibition continues 2 – 31 August 2025.

‘Anarchive’, curated by Ciara Corscadden Hennessy of the 126 Gallery Board of directors

Exhibiting Artists:
Amanda Hunt – Aisling Monds – Amanda Walker – Aodán McCardle – Barbara Allen – Brian Brown – Caroline Kuyper – Caroline Vesey – Catherine Canning – Ian Handschuh – David Gepp – Deborah Stockdale – Deirdre Doherty – Fiona Carlin – Frances Bermingham Berrow – Frank Boyce – Gillian Wright – Hans van Meeuwen – Heather McLaughlin – Helen Hancock – Ian Wieczorek – Jacqui Deveney-Reed – Joanne McLaughlin – John McCarron – Josephine Kelly – Karen McLaughlin – Kevin Harkin – Maeve Peoples – Martin Hughes – Mary Connors – Mary-Joyce Davis – Melissa Carton – Myriam Rommers – Nina Quigley – Noel Connor – Paul Campbell – Rikki Louise van den Berg – Seamus Gallagher – Sinéad Smyth – Sinéad Walsh – Stella Norrby – Stephen Cavanagh – Sue Morris – Susan Kyle – Una Walker – Vanessa Marsh – Veronica Buchanon – William-Alexander

Kilgraney Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition featuring a collection of work in jewellery, textiles, ceramics, sculpture and prints.
This exhibition brings together a range of handcrafted pieces, all made with care, attention to detail, and a strong connection to natural materials and traditional techniques. From delicate jewellery and richly textured textiles to expressive prints and hand-formed ceramics, each piece reflects the artist’s love of making and working with their hands.

Lightbox Commission.

Flax is delighted to present our second Lightbox Commission, now illuminated at our Bedford Street site – Louise French’s ‘Scaling Structure’.

Like the paintings in French’s current exhibition ‘All in Colour’, this lightbox piece plays with colour saturation, layering and reversal. It draws on diagrammatic compositions, such as for Sogetsu ikebana, along with ongoing studio experiments with colour and form using a restricted palette and inventing rules for dividing space.

Louise French completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School, Australia, 2022. In March 2023 she joined Flax Art Studios (Belfast) Emerging Artist Programme. She has had solo exhibitions at Threshold Gallery, Belfast, and Ards Art Centre, Newtownards. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions including at RuptureXIBIT (London), R-Space (Lisburn), Arcade Studios and Catalyst, Belfast.

‘Scaling Structure’ is on view 24 hours a day at 29 Bedford Street, Belfast, BT2 7EJ until 31 August.

In parallel, ‘All in Colour’ at Shankill Road Library is on until 31 August 2025 and is the eleventh annual exhibition made in collaboration between @flaxartstudios and @librariesni

Louise French is grateful to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for their Support for Individual Artists grant.

Exhibition continues 1 June – 31 August 2025.

The “Wild Atlantic Way” exhibition showcases a series of large-scale oil paintings capturing the raw power and shifting moods of the Atlantic Ocean as it crashes against the Galway and Connemara coastline. Inspired by the wild storms of the west, these works use sweeping impressionistic brushstrokes and a palette of deep blues, slate greys, and sea greens to evoke the drama and energy of the sea in motion. Rather than still scenes, these paintings are moments suspended, weather-lashed, untamed, and alive. Each canvas reflects the elemental force of nature at its most turbulent, offering a visceral response to the rhythm and restlessness of the Wild Atlantic Way.

Showing at Anú Wellness Hub in Barna, Co. Galway.

https://www.instagram.com/michellecampionart/

EXHIBITION OPENING: Sunday Aug. 10th 3pm to 5pm – ALL WELCOME

Runs until Sunday, August 31st.

“Say Again, This Place”, is a new body of site-responsive works by artist Shane Malone-Murphy marking his first solo exhibition. Developed for the unique architectural context of the Courthouse Tinahely, this exhibition highlights a continued inquiry into place, memory, and materiality.

more information on Artist: https://www.courthousearts.ie/whats-on-event/shane-malone-murphy-residency-say-again-this-place

Viewing: Wednesday to Saturday – 10am to 4pm
Sundays: 12 noon to 4pm
courthousearts.ie
Y14 X099

Drawing on the Past – Wicklow Discoveries.
Exhibition: 18–31 August 2025 | Signal Arts Centre, Bray.
Heritage Week Workshop: 19 August 2025.

Signal Arts Centre presents Drawing on the Past – Wicklow Discoveries, an exhibition curated by Déantán and supported by the Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland (IAI). Running from 18–31 August 2025, the exhibition features work by artist Róisín O Meadhra, who reimagines Wicklow’s archaeological artefacts through the traditional craft of archaeological illustration and contemporary artistic interpretation.
“This project reawakens archaeological artefacts through visual interpretation, connecting people with their cultural heritage in fresh and accessible ways,” says curator Joanne O Meadhra.

As part of National Heritage Week, a free workshop on 19 August (10 am – 1 pm) introduces participants to the art of archaeological illustration. All materials provided; BOOKING REQUIRED See Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/archaeological-artefact-drawing-workshop-with-roisin-o-meadhra-tickets-1474609228899?aff=oddtdtcreator
Both events form part of Déantán Micro Events, celebrating heritage through creative programming.

Exhibition continues 24th July 2025 to 31st of August.

Sample-Studios is delighted to host our Annual Members Summer Exhibition 2025 in Sample-Studios Gallery, The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion in Fitzgerald’s Park. 40 of our 160+ members will be represented in a wonderfully rich and diverse exhibition, showcasing the richness and diversity of work being produced by our community of contemporary artists. This exhibition is a unique opportunity for audiences to engage with new work across a range of media by a significant number of emerging and established contemporary artists working in and around Cork.

This exhibition features painting, print, drawing, and photography by 40 Sample-Studios members: Hina Khan, Viktoria Kondratieva, Etaoin Melville, Struàn Bell, Annie Forrester, Anthony Murphy, Tetiana Milshyna, Amal Hope, Chris Finnegan, Niamh Hughes, Kim-Ling Morris, Laurie Legrand, Siobhán Gillies, Jacqueline O’Driscoll, Barbara Diener, Rebecca Bradley, Joseph Heffernan, Ben Reilly, Thea Mercer, Éadaoin Glynn, Aisling MacCallion, Grace Haynes, Fiona Boniwell, Sarah Buckley, Amna Walayat, Síomha Callanan, Oonagh Hurley, Leah Murphy, Angela Gilmour, Bernadette Doolin, Michaela McCann, Ann Lambe, Siobhán Collins, Sinéad Barrett, Emma Jacobs, Aisling Roche, Leslie Allen Spillane, Dee Hurley, Mary Cooke, Catherine Callanan.

Gerard Sexton, Creative Director of The Market Gallery, Douglas, will offer opening remarks at the Opening Reception on 24 July from 7:30-9pm. Light refreshments will be served and all are welcome to attend.

This year, we are particularly excited to bring our Annual Members Summer Exhibition on tour! After it concludes in Sample-Studios Gallery, The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, the works will travel to The Market Gallery in Douglas, where the exhibition will be on display from 5 September – 4 October.

The members of Dublin Print Club are delighted to present their second group show, ‘Abhaile’. The exhibition will explore the themes of home and belonging in relation to personal, environmental, social and political concepts. Using screen printing as the unifying medium, the artists will draw from their experience seeking a home to work in as a collective and their recent establishment in FLUX Studios. ‘Abhaile’ follows from the success of Dublin Print Club’s first exhibition ‘Arise’, held by the members last December.

The participating artists are:
Clare Blackwell
Conor Nolan
Ciarán Crowe
Manal Mahamid
Sinead McCormack
Maria Baez Troin
Joanne Clerkin
Izzy Rose Grange

‘Abhaile’ is co-curated by Dublin Print Club and curator AnneMarie Saliba.

The exhibition opens on the 29th August from 18:00. 

Visiting hours on Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st are:
11:00 – 17:00

On Dublin Print Club:
Launched in September 2024 on Culture night, Dublin Print Club is a member run screen printing studio and workspace operating at FLUX Studios on 4, Chatham Row, Dublin 2.

Exhibition continues from the 27th of July 2025 to the 31st of August 2025

Art + Soul, the International Art & Sculpture Exhibition, will showcase artwork and sculptures by some of the biggest names in international and Irish art from Sunday, 27th July to Sunday, 31st August 2025, in collaboration with Gormleys Fine Art and supported by Ards and North Down Borough Council.

The event, held over 5 weeks, will showcase over 350 artworks by some of the biggest names in international and Irish art, including Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Julian Opie, and Salvador Dali. The highlight will be an outdoor display of over 100 sculptures carefully curated throughout the hotel’s private gardens.

On display within the hotel itself, there will be over 200 artworks by many leading Irish and international artists, including Peter Monaghan, Gordon Harris, Martin Mooney, John Redmond and Stephen Forbes.

Art and Soul is open to the public daily from 11am to 7pm. Why not enhance your experience and take a guided tour delivered by the experts at Gormleys each day at 12pm, 2pm and 4pm to learn about each sculpture and artwork on display.

Exhibition continues 11 June – September 2025.

SOFIA
Irish Printmaker, Paula Pohli, exhibits her Linocuts in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Paula is delighted to announce a special presentation of her handburnished prints in the LESSEDRA GALLERY (& Contemporary Art Projects).

Lessedra: Paula has a long engagement with the International Lessedra Annual Mini Print Exhibition. Organised by Georgi Kolev.

The Special presentation is on display 11th June until September 2025. During the 2025 Annual Print Mini Print Exhibition.
Launched by Georgi Kolev 11th June 2025

Maeve McCarthy, Returning / Heritage

Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council is pleased to present Returning / Heritage, an exhibition of new artworks by Maeve McCarthy. The exhibition opens at the Municipal Gallery, dlr LexIcon in Dún Laoghaire on Sunday 6 July and runs until Wednesday 3 September 2025, admission is free.

The exhibition features new paintings, charcoal drawings, objects and a film. Through her work, McCarthy explores her mother’s family story, from their roots in County Down to her grandparents’ move from Kilmainham to Sandycove in the 1930s. She revisits gardens, houses, and familiar paths from the past. Some are still standing, others have changed or disappeared. The exhibition invites visitors to think about what is passed down through generations and how memories continue to live on even after physical places change. It is a gentle and thoughtful look at identity, belonging, and the power of letting go.

Returning / Heritage is the result of a dlr Visual Art Commission, which was awarded to Maeve McCarthy. The commission gives artists the opportunity to create a new body of work that is responsive to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. It is funded by the Arts Council and supported by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.

Alongside the exhibition, dlr Arts Office will run a programme of accompanying talks, workshops and events. This offers many opportunities for people of all ages to interact with the gallery in different ways, learning about and trying out different art-making techniques. For further details, visit the website: www.dlrcoco.ie/arts

Contact: Ciara King/Carolyn Brown DLR Arts Office, T:236 2759 /
Email: arts@dlrcoco.ie

Exhibition continues 8 August – 3 September 2025.

A group show – artists exploring family journeys, personal journeys, emigration and emigration experiences .

Panel talk: Beyond Words: Communicating sustainability

6-8PM, Wednesday, 3rd September

Bookings via EventBrite.

Lisa Fitzsimons (Strategy and Sustainability Lead at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA))
Noel Kelly (Chief Executive Officer of Visual Artists Ireland)
Gareth Kennedy (Artists and lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practice at the National College of Art and Design)

Communicating an ecological approach is complex, especially when it comes to visual art, and also reaching our neighbourhoods and communities. It’s a nuanced space where values, habits, and systems intersect.

This cross-disciplinary panel explores how artists, galleries and art institutions communicate their efforts in ways that are honest, hopeful, and engaging. A view of the behind-the-scenes decisions that institutions employ, with the aim of supporting sustainable exhibition-making, artistic practices and choices, and leading-by-example strategies. Whether the art is transdisciplinary, embedded in social action and deeply rooted in natural ecology, or sustainability is an underlying concern in an artist’s practice (or in an art programme), there’s value in making the invisible work visible.

How do we give space to small actions and highlight the relevance of what often goes unseen? How do we communicate this work in ways that resonate with others? And how can we do all of this without leaning on narratives of doom while remaining factual? Beyond Words: Communicating sustainability is about language and strategies that are hopeful and grounded. It’s about exploring approaches to communicating the quiet labour of care, the strength of collective effort, and the possibility of change toward a sustainable art ecosystem.

We invite the wider community and communities of interest to join us in this open conversation, and share their insights and perspectives. Time is set before and after the talk to gather informally. Participants will be encouraged to ask questions and share their thoughts and experience in a relaxed exchange, blurring the usual roles of panellist and audience.

Biographies

Lisa Fitzsimons is the Strategy and Sustainability Lead at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), where she leads the implementation of IMMA’s five-year strategy and produces Earth Rising, an annual festival exploring the intersection of contemporary art, ecological innovation, and community resilience.
With a background in brand and communications leadership across cultural, corporate, and non-profit sectors, she is passionate about using storytelling to deepen understanding, shift mindsets, and inspire action. Her work bridges strategy, creativity, and public engagement, demonstrating how cultural institutions can be powerful platforms for climate communication and change.

Noel Kelly is the Chief Executive Officer of Visual Artists Ireland, a role he has held since 2007, He is a Life Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and serves on the International Programming Panel for Cukrarna, Ljubljana. He acts as policy expert on a number of local government committees. His governance portfolio includes previous board roles with the Irish Visual Artists Rights Organisation (IVARO), The Butler Gallery, and the Royal Dublin Society. Under his stewardship, VAI launched initiatives such as Get Together, the national day for visual artists; the Social, Economic and Fiscal Status Survey; the Payment Guidelines for Visual Artists, and Job Seeker Allowance for Visual Artists. Noel’s advocacy focuses on equitable treatment of artists and expanding networking and development opportunities that support artists at every career stage. His most recent project is that development of The Visual Artists’ Bill of Rights, research into workspaces in Ireland, and the on-going development of a green approach to the visual arts.

Visual artist Gareth Kennedy’s work explores the social agency of the handcrafted in the 21st century and generates ‘communities of interest’ around the production and performance of experimental material cultures. Informed by an anthropological approach these works draw on the layered histories of a location. Projects are embedded, evolve over time, and are enacted by diverse publics and individuals. His practice to date includes public art commissions, workshops, education projects, exhibitions, residencies and collaborations. He is a lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practice at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Since 2020, he is lead coordinator of NCAD FIELD, a site beside the college which through radical pedagogies is being appraised as a novel ecology, a taskscape and an experiment in the urban commons. Kennedy runs accredited courses at undergraduate level and together with artist colleagues Seoidin O’Sullivan and Mark Clare, runs the Creative Futures Academy Professional Certificate and Diploma in Art and Ecology. In 2024-25, he is an Urban Fields artist in residence as part of L’Internationale Museum of the Commons Climate Assembly and was the resident artist on the Rhizome Residency with Kilkenny Arts Office which formed part of research into the Roots for the Future Climate Art Assembly. He is a member of the All-Island Climate and Biodiversity Research Network.

Join us in conversation with Sara Sassanelli, who joins us at FSAS as our next visiting curator in 2025 as part of the FSAS International Curator Residency programme.

Curator and producer Sara Sassanelli traces their journey from London’s DIY dance, music and club scenes into institutional contexts and, more recently, independent producing. Inspired by Michael Clark, whose practice fused ballet, punk, fashion, queer nightlife, Sassanelli reflects on how early encounters with skill, collaboration, and friendship shaped their approach to dance and curatorial work.

They situate their beginnings in resourceful, collective experimentation, working closely with artists on commissions, workshops, and live performances. At the ICA (2019–2024), Sassanelli re-established the experimental dance programme, developing hybrid formats that blurred boundaries between performance, exhibition, rave, and live music. Projects included commissions with choreographer Eve Stainton (Dykegeist, IMPACT DRIVER) and large-scale all-night events that expanded conventional performance frameworks.

Last year Sara founded Alice Agency with Jared Davis, producing international projects that support experimental dancers and musicians. As a producer and curator they work with artists including Eve Stainton, Billy Bultheel, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Jack Hogan and Florence Sinclair.

Through their work, Sassanelli examines how curating and producing can create conditions for liveness and experimentation, even amid diminishing institutional support. Sara will introduce their Fire Station project, focusing on ‘groupwork’ in choreographic practices.

Askeaton Contemporary Arts presents Aurora Tang, Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) Programme Director, to talk about her recent projects.

CLUI Programme Director Aurora Tang will share recent curatorial and research projects from the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a non-profit research organisation interested in exploring and understanding contemporary landscape issues in the United States. Founded in 1994 and headquartered in Los Angeles, the organisation has been continuously producing and presenting exhibitions, publications, research resources, tours, lectures, and public programming—all about the built landscape of the USA as a reflection of its culture and economy.

Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher based in Los Angeles, California. She has worked with the Center for Land Use Interpretation since 2009, and currently serves as its programme director. As an independent curator Tang has organized recent exhibitions at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (West Hollywood, California), MOCA Tucson (Tucson, Arizona), and Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, California). Tang was managing director of High Desert Test Sites (Joshua Tree, California).

Askeaton Contemporary Arts is an artist-led organisation based out of a small town in Limerick since 2006. An ongoing residency programme creates critical cultural encounters in the midst of the Irish countryside each summer, while public programmes, a dedicated publishing press and exhibitions in Askeaton and elsewhere over two decades all aim to find innovative public contexts and resilient relationships for new forms of artmaking to emerge. For current programming and updates please see www.askeatonarts.com

This event is supported by Free Space at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Free Space creates opportunities for artists to access space in the city for peer learning, artist exchanges, project development and presentations.

Event Information: This event will take place on the first floor accessible via lift and stairs. Seating will be theatre style. The room will be low lit with a projector. This room has limited ventilation and can become warm at busier events. For further access information contact Learning + Public Engagement Curator Órla Goodwin.

Join us for an artist talk with Leah Davis as she discusses her exhibition The Human Condition.

Belfast-based artist Leah Davis, graduated in Fine Art from The Belfast School of Art in 2021.

As a contemporary figurative painter, her work explores the human condition through body language, gesture, and the figure’s relationship with space. Blending painting and drawing, Davis delves into the dialogue between form and negative space, revealing intimacy, vulnerability, and shared human experiences.

Davis will give an informal Artists’ Talk before the preview of her exhibition, The Human Condition, giving further insight to her work and inspirations.

You are very welcome to join us in the Gallery directly after this talk from 7pm for the preview opening reception of Leah’s exhibition, The Human Condition

In this ‘In Conversation’ event, artist Fiona Whelan will reflect on the content and process of making The River – a large-scale visual mapping of the processual features of her arts practice which engages with systemic power relations and inequalities through long-term collaborations.

Fiona will be in conversation with artist and researcher Dr Ciaran Smyth who supported her in a process of recursive mapping, as the pair explored new cartographic strategies for visualising this collaborative and socially engaged practice.

The conversation will be moderated by Carolann Courtney (Create).

ERLEND EVENSEN

CELESTE SHIMOURA GOEDERT

ELIZA GUION

GENEVIEVE MOBERLY

MELISSA STIEFEL

August 15-September 5, 2025

Opening Reception | August 15 | 6:00-8:00pm

Opening Remarks by Taim Haimet

Future Artifacts presents the artistic research of five 2025 MA Candidates at the Burren College of Art. Bringing together painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and experimental material processes, our work is rooted in a refusal to lose the imagination battle with facism. In a time of genocide and ecocide, we draw upon history, myth, folklore, and alchemy in our attempts to metabolize collective grief and insist on speculative futures of survival and interdependence

Join exhibiting artist Kathy Tynan in conversation in the Gallery with artist Ramon Kassam. The talk includes a short introduction to Kathy Tynan’s work which is on view as part of the group exhibition ‘Faigh Amach’, 01 August – 21 September 2025.

Kathy Tynan, along with Ella Bertilsson and Emily Waszak, was selected through an open call process and to take part in this group exhibition. ‘Faigh Amach’ (Irish, roughly translated as ‘discover’) is a new initiative by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in partnership with Culture Ireland and Southwark Park Galleries (SPG), London, to support an artist in presenting their first solo exhibition outside Ireland. One of the three exhibiting artists will be invited to present their first international solo exhibition at SPG Lake Gallery in Spring 2026.

Kathy Tynan’s paintings of familiar cityscapes and domestic scenes illuminate moments of affection, intimacy and curiosity. Rather than focussing her gaze on monumental landmarks, Tynan instead attributes value to that which is otherwise overlooked. Her semi-autobiographical subjects include her own family and friends but speak more broadly to shared enthusiasms, experiences of care, community, and relationships. Kathy Tynan was born and works in Dublin. Her recent solo exhibitions include Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2024); Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise (2022); Highlanes Gallery (with Andrew Vickery), Drogheda (2020); The LAB, Dublin (2019).

Ramon Kassam is an Irish artist. Painting forms the basis of his practice. His approach involves casting paintings into semi-fictional worlds, aiming to connect the medium’s visual tradition to the landscape and psyche of our environments. Solo exhibitions include Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (2022) and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin (2018 & 2016). Group exhibitions include The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (Michigan, USA), The Lewis Glucksman Gallery (Cork), and EVA International – Ireland’s Biennale (Limerick).

Event location Information: This event takes place in a ground-floor, street-facing Gallery. The space contains free standing installations, sculptures and wall-hung paintings. For further accessibility information please contact Learning + Public Engagement Curator Órla Goodwin.

Booking link: https://www.templebargallery.com/whats-on/events/gallery-talk-kathy-tynan-in-conversation-with-ramon-kassam

A Walk & Talk Tour with the Artist, facilitated by Gillian Lattimore of Irish Seed Savers will take place on Sat 12 Jul at 10am. All welcome.

Heirloom is an installation of works created by artist Rachel Doolin. The project stems from a culmination of experiential research undertaken during an Arctic-based residency programme, later informed by a creative partnership with the Irish Seed Savers Association.

In 2017, Doolin embarked on a research residency in Longyearbyen, an industrial frontier town situated in Svalbard, a remote Arctic archipelago located midway between continental Norway and the North Pole. Here, buried deep beneath a permafrost mountain, lies a backup of the world’s largest collection of agricultural biodiversity, cryogenically preserved within the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimates that 75% of the genetic diversity in agricultural crops has been lost since the 20th century. As risks from the climate crisis and global conflict escalate, seed banks are increasingly considered a precious resource that could one day prevent a worldwide food crisis.

Heirloom presents a series of visual, installation, and digital works that celebrate the ‘profundity of seeds’ by exploring the human thread that articulates the connection between our past, present, and future. It places the humble seed as a profound nexus in the nature-culture relationship.

This exhibition will be accompanied by a number of workshops and activities. Please see website for details.

Samir Mahmood is a Pakistani artist based in Dublin. In his country of origin, Mahmood trained as a medical doctor, and he immigrated to Ireland in 2008 to undertake further studies in the field. But he abandoned this career to pursue art, and has been working as an artist in Ireland since the mid-2010s. The exhibition Symplegmatic Portals features numerous newly created works alongside an extensive selection of works made between 2017 and 2024. It is the largest presentation of the artist’s work to date.

Symplegmatic Portals is produced by SIRIUS and curated by Miguel Amado, Director.

LAUNCH EVENT

SIRIUS
Saturday, 12 July
2-4pm
Free; no booking required

Samir Mahmood in conversation with Seán Kissane, moderated by Miguel Amado

Samir Mahmood and Seán Kissane, Curator at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, discuss the exhibition’s vision, key works on display, the politics and aesthetics informing Mahmood’s practice and his wider artistic intentions.

Accessibility Note
Our building has accessibility limitations. There are three steps to the front door and a temporary wheelchair ramp is available upon request. Elements of this exhibition are accessed via stairs. Our toilets are also accessed via stairs and are not open to visitors. Public toilets are beside the Titanic Experience, on The Promenade.

Samir Mahmood’s practice encompasses painting, textiles, objects and video, with a particular focus on themes of identity, representation, bodily awareness and spiritual transformation. Specifically, he makes large-scale scrolls and small-format paintings. Both draw from the techniques and materials of miniature painting on the Indian subcontinent – for example rich detail, intricate storytelling and the use of wasli, a specific type of handmade paper, as a substrate. The typical imagery features landscapes or scenes of people that indicate power relations and structures, wildlife or mythology. Mahmood subverts all of this through motifs that explore his lived experience as a queer person with an Islamic upbringing.

Mahmood is influenced by multiple intellectual and visual references: Sufism (a chapter of Islam) and Christianity; the writings of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez; architecture, ritual objects and practices, ceremonies, mysticism, folklore and iconographies from the Indian subcontinent and/or Islam; alternative theories of consciousness; and narratives of queer existence.

Mahmood depicts the male form in states of introspection or conviviality. Figures appear within or surrounded by nature – trees, vegetation, water, mountains and more – in varying expressions of intimacy. In addition, he shows figures in dialogue with sites of politics, including courthouses and administrative chambers, which suggest conservative customs and values. In the work, these bodies undergo a transcendence that speaks to a personal transformative potential, representing a union with the divine or, more broadly, a spiritual awakening, as well as a subversion of normative lifestyles.

A key feature of the exhibition is the series of large-scale scrolls portraying joyous celebrations of sexual freedom, and the garden as a symbol of paradise and utopia across religions. The artist calls these works ‘queerscapes’ – spaces of liberation where bodies are interacting, mutating, coalescing.

The title of the exhibition invokes yet more of Mahmood’s key interests. ‘Symplegma’ can mean renderings of sexual intercourse, composite drawings in miniature painting from the Indian subcontinent or anything that is entwined or entangled. Overall, these interpretations speak to the artist’s embrace of hybridity, especially gender indeterminacy and fluidity, as well as his own blended cultural experiences.

Samir Mahmood lives and works in Dublin, where he operates from Fire Station Artist’s Studios. He has held a solo show at Mart Gallery, Dublin, and has participated in group shows in venues such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin; and The Glucksman, Cork. He holds a BA in Art from the Atlantic Technological University, Galway. His work is in the collection of University College Cork. He received awards from the Arts Council, including the Next Generation, Bursary and Agility.

The Courthouse Gallery Studios in Ennistymon is delighted to announce the opening of its Summer Open Exhibition, launching on Tuesday, July 4th, and running throughout the summer season.

Curated by acclaimed artist and curator Gabhann Dunne, the exhibition showcases an exciting and diverse collection of work from selected artists across Ireland. Visitors can expect a rich display of creativity, including paintings, sculpture, and mixed-media works, offering something for art lovers of all tastes.

The Summer Open celebrates both emerging and established artists, providing a platform for vibrant artistic voices and fresh perspectives. All exhibited artworks will also be available for purchase, making this an excellent opportunity for collectors and visitors to take home a piece of contemporary Irish art.

The Courthouse Gallery Studios invites the public to join them for the opening and enjoy an inspiring evening of art, community, and conversation.

Location:
The Courthouse Gallery & Studios
Ennistymon, Co. Clare, Ireland

Opening Reception:
Friday, July 4th, 2025

‘Matters of Process’ – Exhibition Launch Friday 8th August 5-8pm.

Niamh Fahy, Lucy Mulholland, Blaine O’Donnell, Kate Oram, Sonya Swarte.

Matters of Process is a new series of exhibitions that explores the work of artists who completed a Technical Development Research Residency (TDR) the previous year at the Centre. During their research phase, artists conducted experiments with diverse materials and objects, examining the often hidden processes and energies involved in their creation. Matters of Process highlights these processes and showcases how they influenced the generation of new work and ideas.

Niamh Fahy’s approach examines how disembodied forms might metamorphose into speculative bodies within the landscape. Working with the malleable and translucent qualities of wax, the artist introduces the disobedient cow’s tongue, detached from notions of human ownership. Her series of ‘roaming’ sculpture works forms a playful engagement with imagined worlds and unseen relationships in the landscape. Lucy Mulholland’s sculptural practice explores ecological precarity, interspecies entanglement, and the ethics of care through labour-intensive processes like mould-making, slip-casting, and metal casting. She works primarily with clay, metal, and paper, investigating how these raw materials are transformed through process. Humour and play are key strategies in her work — ways of navigating the emotional complexity of living through ongoing crisis. Her recent work examines how small, seemingly futile gestures can take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of climate anxiety and collective denial. Blaine O’Donnell has created new work investigating the sculptural potential of electro-mineral accretion processes, where limestone deposits gradually build up on wire forming an Irish word in a tank of mineral-enriched water. O’Donnell explores the art object as a site for the meeting of disparate things – limestone dust, metal, electricity, water, solar energy, and the Irish language – tracing points of separation and connection between the material and incorporeal, presence and absence, artwork and place. Kate Oram’s large-scale welded steel installation features fractal-inspired branching forms, echoing the self-similar, repeating patterns of tree growth. These sculptures are rooted in an exploration of recursive geometry, mirroring the natural logic of tree development and limb structures. The works aim to translate natural growth systems into durable, tactile forms that provide space for quiet observation and bodily resonance. Sonya Swarte’s installation employs the mechanics and processes associated with the early stages of photography and animation to reconfigure images from mobile phones, old photographs, postcards, drawings, animation, and diaries. Inspired by the persistence of images from the past, as in the concept of ‘hauntology’, Sonya works with print, drawing and photo-reel manipulation to develop an experimental work-in-progress installation using a self-made mutoscope, a praxinoscope and series of wall-mounted drawings.

Bio’s

Niamh Fahy is a visual artist and researcher from Galway, she has worked as a Research Associate at the Centre for Print Research (CFPR) at the University of the West of England. She completed her BA in Fine Art Printmaking at the Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland and holds her MA in Multidisciplinary Printmaking, University of the West of England (2019) and she is currently studying towards completing her PhD. Through her practice, Niamh investigates the possibilities and capacity for the print artist to challenge and expand modes of understanding anthropogenic changes within landscape. Between 2021 and 2023 she was awarded the UWE HAS-ACE connecting research project grant for the project Slow Violence and River Abuse: The Hidden Effect of Land Use on Water Quality. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at shows including The Masters: Relief, Bankside Gallery, London. The RWA, Bristol. The TYPA letterpress and Paper Arts Centre, Estonia. International Printmaking Conference Impact 9, Hangzhou, China and Woolwich Contemporary Printmaking Fair, London.
http://www.niamhfahy.com/

Lucy Mulholland (b. 1999) is an emerging artist based in Belfast. Working across sculpture and installation, her practice playfully investigates connections and exchanges between humans and the more-than-human world. She focuses on actions or gestures that may seem insignificant or even futile, reimagining them as catalysts for potential future action. Lucy holds a First-Class Honours degree in Sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art (2022) and was recently awarded the 2025 Gilbert Bayes Award by the Royal Society of Sculptors and the Meyer Oppenheim Prize at the 195th RSA Annual Exhibition. She has exhibited across Ireland and the UK, including Hidden Door Arts Festival Edinburgh, AWAKEN (Artlink, Buncrana), Materials, Messages and Meanings (R-Space, Lisburn), and They Had Four Years (GENERATOR projects, Dundee).

Blaine O’Donnell received the 2019 Emerging Irish Artist Residency Award at the Burren College of Art, followed by the exhibitions CAOL AIT, BCA, Clare (2019) and CAOL AIT Cuid a Do, 126 Gallery, Galway (2020). In 2021, he created a permanent sculptural installation at VOID, Derry, for Office of the Rest, a Forerunner project commissioned by Mary Cremin. O’Donnell’s essay Things to Do With Photographs was shortlisted for the Source Magazine Writers Prize 2021. Recent exhibitions include hinder/further, The Complex, Dublin (2022), and TWO PHOTOGRAPHS AWAY, Ardgillan Gallery, Balbriggan (2024). Residencies include the Temple Bar Gallery+Studios / HIAP Residency Exchange (2023), the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico (2024), and Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin (2024/5). Awards include the EMERGENCE Award, Wexford Arts Centre (2024) and the Paul Robinson Award, TBG+S (2025).

Kate Oram was awarded a Bachelor’s degree in Wood, Metal, Ceramics and Plastics in Brighton in 1991. After thirty years in the studio producing finely crafted bronze and stone sculpture, in 2021 she completed an MA in Creative Practice at IT Sligo during which she engaged with new processes, exploring the depths of her connection to the landscape. Her work has evolved towards a more conceptual, ecologically-focused art practice, allowing the creative forces of nature to shape her work. Exhibitions include King House, Boyle Arts Festival 2012-2023; Sculpture in Context, Botanic Gardens, Dublin 2015- 2023; Ballymaloe Sculpture Exhibition, Co. Cork, 2018; Sculpture at the Castle, Blarney, Co. Cork 2019, 2023/24; Tread Softly Festival, Sligo, 2021 and ‘Bloodroot’, Pulchri Studio, The Hague, Netherlands and Hamilton Gallery, Sligo 2025.

Sonya Swarte grew up in The Netherlands where she acquired a BA in Archaeology in 2005 at Leiden University. In 2007 she came to Ireland and has since been based in Leitrim where she lives with her three children. Swarte finished an Art and Design course (ETB) in 2017 and a Masters in Creative Arts (ATU Sligo) in 2022. During the Masters she started working in film photography and (stop motion) animation and later made a collaborative work entitled Bridey, with M. Blake, which was shown at the Galway Film Festival that year. In 2023 Swarte took part in the Chervona Kalyna animation project for Creative Leitrim and is based at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre where she continues to explore various ways of printing, developing photos and super 8 film. In 2025 Swarte joined the art collective ^ in Manorhamilton and is also a member of the Manorhamilton Print group where she facilitates print workshops with other artists.

Image credit: Kate Oram, Work in Progress. LSC 2025

Clare Arts Office in conjunction with Cultúrlann Sweeney Library Gallery is delighted to present ‘Painting through the lens” an art exhibition by Pauline Dunleavy.

Pauline Dunleavy is a prominent Irish artist, art-teacher, and community advocate rooted in the dramatic landscapes of West Clare. Born and based in the Kilrush area, she draws endless inspiration from the shifting moods of the River Shannon and the Atlantic coast.

Mediums: Primarily works in oils, but also acrylics, charcoal, and encaustic (pigmented beeswax). Over 25 years of painting, her style has matured into vibrant pieces rich in texture and transparency, often incorporating abstract elements layered with pastel, charcoal, and acrylic before final oil or wax finishes.

She loves nothing more than getting out into the landscape to sketch. Her creative approach begins with music, layered gesso, and quick studies. Uses photo references and mirrors to evaluate composition, spraying, erasing, and layering until the piece feels complete. She finds beauty in the ordinary local scenes such as boglands, seascapes, coastlines and this comes through in her work.

Pauline often photographs landscapes before painting. Referencing photos during her process helps capture the authenticity of light, mood, and composition. She waits days before signing the work to ensure total satisfaction of the piece.

Exhibitions & Community Involvement
2022: First solo exhibition “On Our Doorstep” at Cultúrlann Sweeney Gallery, Kilkee, Officially opened by Artist Ruth Wood.
2024: Exhibition “Inspired Landscapes and Beyond” at Clare Museum, officially opened by wildlife expert Éanna Ní Lamhna.
June 2025: Exhibition “Breaking Borders” in Kinvara.
July 2025: Part of the Summer Exhibition at the Kenny Gallery, Galway. Her other pieces are on display all year round.
July 2025: Kilrush Art Group exhibition at Kilrush Library.
Works can be viewed also at The Kilbaha Gallery throughout the year.
Runs her own Gallery & Craft Shop (Anchor Crafts, Kilrush).
Community Engagement:
Former lifeboat crew and Station Manager with the Kilrush Rnli for over 25 years, it has given her a deep connection to the sea which she portrays on almost every canvas. Pauline is very well regarded in West Clare.

Featured Image: Poster for upcoming exhibition

Exhibition continues 9th August – 6th September 2025

Presenting new works by members of Graphic Studio Dublin and invited artists.

Now in its 65th year, Graphic Studio Dublin continues to be a vital space for fine art printmaking in Ireland. The Summer Exhibition brings together new work by current members and invited artists, reflecting the wide range of styles, subjects, and printmaking techniques being explored in the studio today.  From etching and lithography to carborundum and screenprint, the show celebrates the work, experimentation, and community that has defined the studio for more than six decades.

Join us at Luan Gallery on Saturday 6th September at 2pm for the Soft Surge Artists and Curator talk

This roving in-conversation event, led by Luan Gallery curator Aoife Banks in dialogue with Soft Surge exhibiting artists Shirani Bolle, Ursula Burke, Rachel Fallon, and Lucy Peters, will guide visitors through exhibited artwork. Together, the curator and artists will address and unravel the themes encountered in the exhibition. As we move through the gallery, the discussion will critically engage with the conceptual frameworks and thematic concerns underpinning the works, offering insight into the curatorial rationale and the artistic practices of the exhibiting artists.

SOFT SURGE is a group exhibition featuring artists Shirani Bolle, Ursula Burke, Rachel Fallon, Dee Mulrooney, Lucy Peters, Emily Waszak, and selected work on loan from The Irish Names Project. Soft Surge critically engages with themes of identity, motherhood, women’s collectivity, grief, resistance, activism, and sociopolitical dissent within the context of contemporary Ireland. Through a range of practices and processes including sculpture, embroidery, weaving, knitting, tapestry, film, photography, and mixed media, the artists featured in this exhibition explore the soft power and radical potential of textiles.

Curated by Aoife Banks

RUNNERS is a circus show that combines excellent juggling, stunning objects and incredible sounds.

Two jugglers, Alex and Jonas find themselves bound to the rules of running machines while a musician, Moises, orchestrates them through a series of games and experiments. This vivid circus performance celebrates juggling and running.

SOFT SURGE

Shirani Bolle | Ursula Burke | Rachel Fallon | Dee Mulrooney | Lucy Peters | Emily Waszak | The Irish Names Project.

The exhibition will be launched by Laura McCormack, Acting Arts Officer for Westmeath Arts Office on Friday 27th June at 6:00pm. All are welcome to attend. The exhibition will continue until Sunday 7th September.

SOFT SURGE is a group exhibition that critically engages with themes of identity, motherhood, women’s collectivity, grief, resistance, activism, and sociopolitical dissent within the context of contemporary Ireland. Through a range of practices and processes including sculpture, embroidery, weaving, knitting, tapestry, film, photography, and mixed media, the artists featured in this exhibition explore the soft power and radical potential of textiles.

SOFT SURGE features newly commissioned works by Emily Waszak and Dee Mulrooney, alongside existing works by contemporary female artists who mobilise cloth and fibre as both tactile material and affective framework. Drawing inspiration from the Moirae, the Greek Fates who spun, measured, and cut the threads of life, Soft Surge posits its exhibiting artists as weavers of narratives shaped by trauma, resilience, and embodied political agency.

This exhibition has been kindly supported by The Arts Council.