What’s On around Ireland

Exhibition Opening: Saturday 9th August, 3.00 – 5.00pm. All Welcome.

Butler Gallery, in association with Kilkenny Arts Festival, is delighted to present an exhibition exploring the theme of ‘Cities of the World’ by two artists, Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach. The two have never met, but are intrinsically linked by this subject matter which they realise in very different ways.

Kathy Prendergast, an Irish London-based artist, is represented by her suite of 113 City Drawings which were begun in 1992. Owned by IMMA, they have not been exhibited in many years. Based on contemporary maps of the world’s capital cities, Prendergast compresses each city, large and small, and follows her own sense of scale to contain each city on the same size paper. Transcribing the network of lines with understated pencil marks she conveys the pattern of routes through, within and around each city, imposing an unfathomable sense of democracy on the world. The skeletal images reduce even the largest and most powerful communities to a delicate network of lines that resemble organic patterns in nature.

Chris Leach, a British Manchester-based artist, began his Capital Cities drawing project in 2012 and continued until 2022. He has completed 196 tiny drawings of every recognised capital city in the world which together functions as one piece of work. Leach’s miniature drawings are solidly three-dimensional, drawn with pencil, scalpel and burnishing tools on the gessoed face of an oak block. Leach is interested in how scale can be used as a tool for both psychological and representational investigation.

The cities work by Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach is a fascinating juxtaposition and prompts wider discussions around geography, architecture and politics—what cities say about us and what they don’t.

Additionally, a film programme ‘City as Character’ will highlight iconic cities in both mainstream and art house cinema. Co-curated by Butler Gallery and Out of Focus, films will be shown in the Digital Gallery and also in collaboration with the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny.

Anna O’Sullivan
Director & Exhibition Curator

Learning & Public Engagement Events:

Artists Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach in conversation with exhibition curator Anna O’Sullivan and Dr Yvonne Scott, Tuesday 12th August 2025 at 12.00pm, Parade Tower, Kilkenny Castle. Free ticketed event, available to book on the Kilkenny Arts Festival website.

Dr Yvonne Scott is an Emeritus Fellow and former Associate Professor of History of Art at Trinity College Dublin.
She was awarded the RHA Gold Medal for 2025 in recognition of her services to Irish art. She has researched and published extensively in modern and contemporary art, including analysis of various aspects of the work of artist Kathy Prendergast. Her most recent book is Landscape and Environment in Contemporary Irish Art, published by Churchill House Press in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2023.

Image: (L) Kathy Prendergast, Mexico City from ‘City Drawings’, 1992, Pencil on Paper, 24 x 32cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase 1996, © Kathy Prendergast. (R) Chris Leach, Tallin, Estonia, Pencil, scalpel, burnishing tool, rabbit skin gesso on quarter sawn oak, 32 x 43mm (From Capital Cities series 2013-2023)

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

Every Saturday
7 Jun. – 16. Aug. 2025, 11 am
€15 pp

Learn all about the art and life of Jack B. Yeats in this 45-minute guided tour of the exhibition The Dreaming Road. Led by an expert curator, the tour explores Yeats’ life, his love of Sligo and how it is reflected in all of his art. Enjoy private time in the gallery for an intimate, focused viewing experience while gaining deeper insight into one of Ireland’s most iconic painters. Perfect for art enthusiasts, curious visitors, and anyone looking to connect with Yeats’ unique artistic legacy.

For larger groups (10 or more) please contact info@themodel.ie before booking.

Join us at Luan Gallery on Saturday 9th August at 12pm for an insightful and engaging talk by artist and researcher Han Tiernan, as they delve into the history of Irish LGBTQIA+ activism.

This talk will shine a light on key moments from the past 50 years of marches and protests in Ireland, with a special focus on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, currently on display at Luan Gallery as part of the group exhibitoon Soft Surge, and a powerful selection of placards and banners that have shaped Ireland’s LGBTQIA+ protest culture.

This event is free to attend and no booking is required.

This event is kindly supported by the Arts Council.

Han Tiernan (they/them) is a researcher, writer and artist based in Dublin. Their key area of interest is contemporary queer history and expanding narratives within the Irish LGBTQ+ community. Since 2022, Han has coordinated REWINDRECORD (RFR) along with Brendan Fox and the Museum of Everyone. RFR is a national touring initiative comprising talks, tours, exhibitions, and workshops exploring queer history and queer representation within a local context. In May 2023, Han co-produced the Unshrinking Violets: 50 Years of Lesbian Activism programme with Francis Fay for the Bealtaine Festival 2023. From September 2021 to April 2023, Han was the Editorial Assistant and Archivist with GCN (Gay Community News). During this time, they oversaw the digitisation and online launch of the GCN Archive. They were the lead researcher of the Queer-in-Progress. Timeline initiative and editor of the Queer-in-Progress. Timeline: Online Archive with Project Arts Centre. They also authored ‘Foul, Filthy, Stinking Muck’: the LGBT Theatre of Project Arts Centre, 1966 – 2000. Han is also the creator of the Ranelagh/Rathmines Queer Walking Tour and is currently the House Manager of Project Arts Centre.

Image details: The Irish Names Project, The Irish Names Quilt (1990 -), mixed media, fabric, found objects, personal belongings of deceased, dimensions variable. Photo by Louis Hough.

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

The Bedding Planes

There is solace in beauty and it nourishes the soul.
‘The Bedding Planes’ documents a moment in time, perhaps with tiny traces on a well worn path. Beauty is at its heart.

In geological terms a bedding plane is a surface representing contact between a deposit and a depositing medium such as water and atmosphere during a time of change and this is reflected in a difference in texture or composition, with a bedding plane representing the visible line of change. This bedding plane however takes a more nuanced form and includes works made from layers of colour, paper and clay. The pop up Gallery lies at the bottom of a long narrow ‘natural’ garden that is a haven for wildlife and biodiversity. As the viewer navigates their way to the room along a winding path through birdsong and dappled light from the surrounding trees the journey itself becomes a contemplative experience and the boundary between art and nature disappears.

The Bedding Planes is curated by Helena Gorey and shows her works on paper alongside forms and vessels in clay by Rob Pearson and Peter Scroope and introduces Roise O’Shea.

Open daily from 2.00pm to 6.00pm from the 10th to 17th August 2025.
Pop Up Gallery during Kilkenny Arts Festival, Burnchurch R95 Y0C8

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.

Exhibition continues 8 August – 3 September 2025.

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

Exhibition continues 7 August – 17 August 2025.

Dublin artist Linda Proudfoot and Latvian artist Dana Sorokina have come together for a two person exhibition during the AKA Fringe Festival in Kilkenny.
Linda will exhibit a selection of her landscapes and seascapes, while Dana will present some of her vibrant flower compositions and her images of VW Classic Beetles.

Exhibition open 10am – 5pm Mon – Sat, and 12-5pm Sunday.
Curated by Tony Strickland

Vertigo 67th celebrates the anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann for their masterpiece with a three-day international film conference that will focus exclusively on all aspects of what makes this movie a masterpiece in cinema. Vertigo67 festival kicks off with a special 4k screening of the 1958 classic film Vertigo starring James Stewart and Kim Novak in the Lighthouse Cinema in Dublin on Tuesday 12 August at 8pm, with a free introductory talk before the movie screening given by Elizabeth
Bullock (San Francisco).

After the evening screening of the movie at the Lighthouse on Tuesday 12 August, the Vertigo67 festival continues over in the Trinity Long Room Hub venue, Trinity College Dublin from Wednesday 13 August to Friday 15 August. The festival events at Trinity College run over three days with presentations, talks, interviews and panel discussions from 20 international scholars, writers, conductors and artists from across the globe: US, UK, Hong Kong, Ireland and Switzerland.

Conference session tickets: €10 cash only (Tickets at door Trinity Long Room Hub)

House on the Beach
Container
Featuring work by artist Nina McGowan, in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin, a recipient of the Creative Climate Action Fund, an initiative from the Creative Ireland Programme. Supported by Wexford County Council’s Climate Action and Culture Teams.

Friday 15th August – Friday 12th September, 2025
Wexford County Council, Carricklawn Wexford, Y35 WY93

Opening Event: Thursday 14th August, 6pm
Guest Speaker: Arts Consultant, Ruairí Ó Cuív

Container, an exhibition by visual artist Nina McGowan opens in County Hall on Thursday 14th August at 6pm. This exhibition, which explores our relationship to climate change, uses familiar, domestic objects transformed into a large-scale sculpture installation.

Over the past two years, Nina worked with Trinity College Dublin as part of “House on the Beach”, a Creative Ireland funded Creative Climate Action project. The exhibition is accompanied by a series of curated round-table talks at beaches throughout Wexford, on topics such as the circular economy, materials, nature-based solutions, and water quality; all very pertinent themes for the times that we live in.

The exhibition, Container, strives to make comprehensible the urgency to act in the face of the threat of the climate crisis. It comprises three sculptural pieces constructed from household objects on a monumental scale. The scale is intended to reflect the magnitude of the challenge we face. The medium conveys the weight of materialism and its contribution to climate change. While the treatment—each piece is charred to reveal a beautiful but dissonant charcoal surface—evokes a sense of what we stand to lose.
The thought-provoking sculptures lead us to question what we have accumulated in our own homes. What is inside our own wardrobes and our houses that we perhaps don’t use or need? All of these accumulations can be a burden and put pressure on the earth’s finite resources. In Ireland, we discard around 110,000 tonnes of textiles as waste every year, of which around 64,000 tonnes are discarded as household waste via kerbside collection, the majority being clothing.

A “House on the Beach” represents an aspiration and an ideal: someone might say they ultimately want to retire to ‘a house by the beach’. But the issue of global warming and the impact of coastal erosion is questioning our value system and whether the way of life we have become accustomed to is sustainable. How do we live, and what might we need to change and leave behind?

This is a work about loss and the prospect of losing not only the natural world but also cultural artefacts and practices. The range of furniture used within the exhibition reflects the architecture and evokes the aspirations of past generations. Yet these old items are not valued in today’s world.

Nina McGowan is a visual artist who has been working in the area of immersive sculptural installation for over 20 years. She is a climate activist and a world champion and world record holder in the growing sport of freediving. She is Ireland’s ambassador for the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, whose mission is to end the destruction of habitats and illegal killing of marine wildlife in our seas.
…………………………………………………………………

Talks on the Tide
Running parallel to the exhibition, curated talks will examine different climate themes and explore the actions we can take together. Guest speakers include local artists and community groups with researchers and staff from Trinity College Dublin. These talks will be held on the beach as the tide approaches. All welcome to join the conversation with artist Nina McGowan, guest speakers and staff from Wexford County Council Climate Action team.

For further information about this project, email houseonthebeachwexford@gmail.com or visit https://www.tcd.ie/sustainability/events-listing/.

Echo/Locate a solo exhibition, by artist Sorcha McNamara, launching in The Linenhall Arts Centre on Friday, August 15 at 5pm. Exhibition runs until Saturday, September 27.
Echo/Locate is a site-specific installation of new and existing work by Sorcha McNamara.
McNamara’s practice engages with deconstructive methods of painting, framing, language and image-making. She repurposes found materials to create lyrical, fragmented compositions that frequently respond to the spaces they are placed in, while questioning personal and conceptual tensions around craft, manipulation, agency and value.
As a process, echolocation is used by certain animals, as well as blind, visually impaired and sighted people, to map or assess their environment. A way of locating distant or invisible objects by making particular noises and paying attention to the sound waves, or echoes, reflected back to them. A way of reading a room, processing spatial information, determining the shape, position and motion of objects. Adapting this notion to the sense of familiarity one might feel in any given space at any given time, Echo/Locate acts as a kind of interlocutor, questioning the ways in which we gauge our surroundings through tangible, sensuous forms.
Navigating this dynamic between space and feeling, the exhibition design was developed in consultation with Aidan Conway of MARMAR Architects. The installation focuses on disrupting and modifying the space using existing gallery structures, as well as dismantling conventional notions of how an artwork is seen, encountered and appreciated.
Echo/Locate is jointly supported by Mayo County Council Arts Office and The Golden Fleece Award.

About the Artist:
Sorcha McNamara is an artist, originally from Co. Mayo, currently based in Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin. Her work was shortlisted for the 2025 Golden Fleece Award. Current and recent group exhibitions include Green on Red Gallery (2025); VISUAL Carlow Centre for Contemporary Art (2024); Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2024); Draíocht Gallery, Dublin (2023); and The LAB, Dublin (2023). Recent residencies include Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2024); Zaratan Arte Contemporanea, Lisbon (2024); Totaldobze Art Centre, Riga (2022); and Tangent Projects, Barcelona (2021). Past solo projects include Fathomless Arms, Ballina Arts Centre (2023); (dis)attachments, The Hyde Bridge Gallery (2022); and Readymade #2, Oonagh Young Gallery (2022). Sorcha’s work has been supported through the Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award (2023, 2022, 2021) and a Mayo Artist Bursary Award (2025, 2023, 2022). She holds an MA in Art + Research Collaboration from IADT Dún Laoghaire (2024) and a BA in Painting from Limerick School of Art & Design (2019).

SerformanceP 2025 – International Performance Art Exhibition in São Paulo. with performance BURNING 15 AUG · PAÇO MUNICIPAL
Attention, performers and allies of living art: we begin the publications of the selected works of the 9th PerformanceP – International Art Performance Show in São Paulo!

Cards from participating artists will begin to appear on our networks and also in the gallery of NFTs from the show (link in bio).

We open with the work of @noelmolloy61, Ireland, who present us a memorial performance about an episode from 1921: the Roscommon community fire, carried out in retaliation by local security forces. The action, arbitrary and violent, echoes what so often happens in Brazilian favelas and suburbs to this day — where entire communities pay for isolated acts.

If at the arrival of the Europeans in 1500, they came from the Middle Ages and we came from the polished stone, today they say we are in the 19th century while the Global North already breathes the 21st century. We continue to burn communities — literally or symbolically.

The Christmas play is similar to commemorating the massacre of Candelaria or Vicar General, after 100 years without incident… it happens that every year we have “fires” in communities; but the numbers indicate improvement, thank God.

Celebrating this event, as the work suggests, is also a gesture of consciousness: what was done to prevent it from repeating there? What’s missing so we can do the same here?

The direction of the show and curation are done by @ismaeltrabuco, artist and master’s in performance and education, idealizer of PerformanceP since 2015, in partnership with @isaactrabuco, corporate and academic, communication specialist, communities and territories. Together, we lead this edition listening to the streets, the sidelines and the most urgent and emerging subjects.

Muine Bheag Arts is pleased to present COMMUNE from 15th – 25th August 2025. Taking place in and around the Muine Bheag Community Centre, the programme unfolds as a collection of live events, workshops and public interventions.

COMMUNE is a site for assembling and disseminating ideas, emerging from a central studio and gathering space shared by artists, community groups, collaborators and graduates-in-residence. COMMUNE can be understood as a series of small collective actions and gestures which reach towards systems of support and connection.

The programme includes contributions from: Anna Aleksejeva, After School Special, Marian Balfe, BEAM Services, boring girls, Bloomers, CATU, Coracle, Ciara Davitt, Nina Fitzgerald Graham & Mica Moroney, Cian Lawler, Chloe Maguire (Distro: Live Publishing), Emily Mc Gardle, Niamh Seana Meehan & Lucie McLaughlin, Liliane Puthod & Ingrid Lyons, Queer Shed Sligo and Lily O’Shea.

You can find more information here: https://muinebheagarts.com/COMMUNE-2025

COMMUNE is kindly supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Carlow Arts Office, Creative Ireland Carlow and Bagenalstown Creative Places

Exhibitions continue 22 May – 8 August 2025.

10am-3pm Monday to Friday.

Admiration Hyperbolique and Touchstone. Fionnuala Quinn, Quadrangle, University of Galway.
Two exhibitions of paintings and installations by Fionnuala Quinn, artist in residence at the James Mitchell Geology Museum 2024-2025 showing in the Quadrangle, University of Galway, H91TK33. Opening hours: 10am-3pm Monday to Friday. Dates: 22 May-8 August.

TOUCHSTONE is in the ground floor Staff Club, ADMIRATION HYPERBOLIQUE is in the James Mitchell Geology Museum.

TOUCHSTONE is a series of responses to the search for solace in our cities. Our profound dependence on all of the materials of the earth may be forgotten when noisy human stories, of feuds and petty detail consistently play centre stage. Mineral pigment, water, paper and wood have been pushed and manipulated to form paintings about living in a restless zone. Respite from daily clock time, however brief, is sought so that the weight of the past can be shed as it tumbles down to join the traces of history retained in the bricks and mortar of the old city.

On the floor directly above in the Geology Museum, founded in the 1850’s, ADMIRATION HYPERBOLIQUE responds to the theme of time amongst the fossils, rocks and minerals. These specimens are deep time in material form and illustrate that, come what may, nature is never, ever, a miser. You are invited to post a comment in the box, if anything comes to mind…

Access: Accessible parking by the Quadrangle arch. The Staff Club is fully accessible from the street with all gender bathroom. Please note that the Museum on the first floor does not have step free access.

BASIC SPACE is delighted to present Laura Ní Fhlaibhín for our August BASIC TALK – 1pm on Friday the 8th of August 2025 online

Laura Ní Fhlaibhín works with materials related to healing and nourishment, both ecological and autobiographical. Sifting stories, materials and traces associated with site, memory, narratives of care and the casting of spells, she creates complex but pithy material scenarios. Her practice makes space for the more than human within the art-institution setting, white cube spaces becoming incubators for living beings such as earthworms, leopard slugs and willow trees. Working across sculpture, installation, writing and drawing, embodied care is both represented and inscribed in the material and narrative improvisations that are interwoven in her sculptural assemblages. She builds installations that operate as symbiotic ecosystems; sculptural assemblages giving structural and biological support, such as a network of soil pipes filled with worm bedding materials or a medicinal, and warming alcoholic tincture offered to gallery visitors over the course of an exhibition. Her assemblages function as nourishing hosts for growth and invite guardianship from the art-institution hosts. The looming threats of the environmental crisis and biodiversity loss echo through the work, and in her attention towards the material entanglements of our worlds, across species and things, she points to vibrant and nourishing kinships that can emerge from such alliances. The political charge and potential of art making to co-exist as an ecological type of caregiving is a constant motivation.

‘Future Fossils: Junk or Jewels’, a solo exhibition, by artist Fiona Mulholland, launching in the Linenhall Arts Centre on Friday, July 4th at 5pm. Exhibition runs until Saturday, August 9th.

The solo exhibition “Future Fossils: Junk or Jewels” by Fiona Mulholland presents new and existing photographic and sculptural works that examine our conflicted and fragile relationship with both the natural and built environment. Over recent decades, the cumulative impact of human activity on the Earth has become impossible to ignore. Along our coastlines, flotsam, industrial detritus, and commercial waste have become a permanent presence—bearing silent witness to a legacy of human-generated ‘natural’ waste.

In these works, the artist juxtaposes industrial materials with references to heritage and archaeology, creating poignant contrasts that prompt reflection on what we consider valuable. These sculptural ‘artifacts’ operate as visual dialogues—inviting viewers to contemplate the tension between the precious and the disposable, the permanent and the perishable.

The exhibition engages with themes of resilience, renewal, and repair, foregrounding the delicate interdependence between humanity, culture, and the environment. Through material transformation and symbolic layering, Mulholland invites viewers to consider what lies beneath the surface — both literally and metaphorically — and to reflect on how place, memory, and belonging are interwoven. The work becomes a space for reflection—on loss, endurance, and thoughtfully navigates the subtle depths of inner and outer landscapes, blending myth with the shape of place.

Fiona Mulholland has been working successfully across a range of visual disciplines and contexts for over twenty-five years. Throughout her career she has moved fluidly between fine and applied art and is motivated by materials, processes and the challenges of contexts. She digs deeply into the psychological dimensions of our human experience within a given environment to communicate contradictions and complex rituals. Fiona has produced award-winning designs, large-scale public art, and work within gallery contexts. Recent public realm artwork includes a major commission, Island City – Cork’s Urban sculpture Trail initiated by Cork City Council in 2023, alongside a solo exhibition, ‘In Search of Pearls & Future Fossils’ with Artlink at Fort Dunree in Co Donegal. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, most recently with the Hamilton Gallery in Sligo. Fiona has regularly lectured in art and design at third level, curated several significant exhibitions and been the recipient of several bursary awards. She currently lives and works between Dublin and the Northwest of Ireland.

The exhibition was kindly facilitated with the support of the Artists Bursary Scheme from Donegal County Council.

Gallery Opening Hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10am to 5pm
Saturday 11am – 4pm

Instagram: @linenhall_arts

SALON OF DIÚLTAÍODH
A joyful uprising in art, spirit, and solidarity.
In 1863, a group of artists rejected by the official Paris Salon sparked something unexpected — not just an exhibition, but a movement. The 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯 𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘙𝘦𝘧𝘶𝘴é𝘴 became a turning point in art history, opening space for bold, new voices and reshaping the future of creativity. This show is offered in that same spirit — a celebration of works that didn’t find a place in the usual halls, but still pulse with life, vision, and possibility. We invite artists to share pieces that were turned away by institutions over the past year — not as an end, but as a beginning. This is about honoring the full creative journey: the misfits, the almosts, the not-yets. It’s about coming together to build something more open, more honest, and more alive. Let’s create a space where refusal becomes resonance — and where connection, not competition, takes the lead.
Curated by @ishmaelclaxtonphotos, Salon of Diúltaíodh is a gathering place for those who make with heart, question the rules, and carry forward the belief that art is for everyone, not just a chosen few. Will have over 50 amazing artist from across the country

Every Saturday
7 Jun. – 16. Aug. 2025, 11 am
€15 pp

Learn all about the art and life of Jack B. Yeats in this 45-minute guided tour of the exhibition The Dreaming Road. Led by an expert curator, the tour explores Yeats’ life, his love of Sligo and how it is reflected in all of his art. Enjoy private time in the gallery for an intimate, focused viewing experience while gaining deeper insight into one of Ireland’s most iconic painters. Perfect for art enthusiasts, curious visitors, and anyone looking to connect with Yeats’ unique artistic legacy.

For larger groups (10 or more) please contact info@themodel.ie before booking.

Join us at Luan Gallery on Saturday 9th August at 12pm for an insightful and engaging talk by artist and researcher Han Tiernan, as they delve into the history of Irish LGBTQIA+ activism.

This talk will shine a light on key moments from the past 50 years of marches and protests in Ireland, with a special focus on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, currently on display at Luan Gallery as part of the group exhibitoon Soft Surge, and a powerful selection of placards and banners that have shaped Ireland’s LGBTQIA+ protest culture.

This event is free to attend and no booking is required.

This event is kindly supported by the Arts Council.

Han Tiernan (they/them) is a researcher, writer and artist based in Dublin. Their key area of interest is contemporary queer history and expanding narratives within the Irish LGBTQ+ community. Since 2022, Han has coordinated REWINDRECORD (RFR) along with Brendan Fox and the Museum of Everyone. RFR is a national touring initiative comprising talks, tours, exhibitions, and workshops exploring queer history and queer representation within a local context. In May 2023, Han co-produced the Unshrinking Violets: 50 Years of Lesbian Activism programme with Francis Fay for the Bealtaine Festival 2023. From September 2021 to April 2023, Han was the Editorial Assistant and Archivist with GCN (Gay Community News). During this time, they oversaw the digitisation and online launch of the GCN Archive. They were the lead researcher of the Queer-in-Progress. Timeline initiative and editor of the Queer-in-Progress. Timeline: Online Archive with Project Arts Centre. They also authored ‘Foul, Filthy, Stinking Muck’: the LGBT Theatre of Project Arts Centre, 1966 – 2000. Han is also the creator of the Ranelagh/Rathmines Queer Walking Tour and is currently the House Manager of Project Arts Centre.

Image details: The Irish Names Project, The Irish Names Quilt (1990 -), mixed media, fabric, found objects, personal belongings of deceased, dimensions variable. Photo by Louis Hough.

Ballaghaderreen Arts Festival is now in its third year and this year, to celebrate the reopening of a town landmark and our library building after a six-year hiatus, the Georgian centrepiece of the town, Dillon House will hold an exhibition featuring art college graduates (BA/MFA) from 2022,23 and 24. Curated by Conor O’Connell.
IMPORTANT: We are restricted to official library opening hours. Please see below:
Tuesday 5th- 10am-1pm
Wednesday 6th, Friday 7th, Saturday 8th- 10am-5pm
Thursday 7th- 1pm-8pm

An exhibition run by Roscommon` artist Conor O’Connell, celebrating one of the richest and most diverse archaeological and ecological sites in the country. Lough Gara boasts archaeological material dating back to the Early Mesolithic (9,000 years ago) and is perhaps best known for its density of crannog (lake dwelling) sites, incomparable with anywhere in Europe.
The exhibition will feature original and replica artefacts from the lake, as well as documents, audio, art, and a large scale model of a crannog made for the exhibition.
IMPORTANT NOTICE RE. OPENING HOURS:
We are bound to the opening hours of Ballaghaderreen Branch Library, which vary from day to day and are as follows:
TUESDAY 5th- 10am-1pm
WED 6th, FRI 8th, SAT 9th- 2pm- 5pm
THURSDAY 7th- 1pm-8pm (late opening).

Supported by Roscommon County Council.

Exhibition continues 20 June – 10 August 2025.

On Waking
Jenny Eden, Christopher Hanlon, Harminder Judge, Gillian Lawler,
Damien Meade, Karen Roulstone and Rebecca Sitar

20th June – 10th August 2025
Preview 19th June from 5-7pm

On Waking is a group painting exhibition featuring new and existing work by seven painters from Ireland and the UK, whose paintings communicate wonder and encounter, things half-glimpsed, remembered and imagined. It brings together paintings with an otherworldly sensibility, where the slippage between recollection and metamorphosis, between what is real or imagined, is played out in a series of new realities.

The title of the exhibition directs us to the ‘waking moment’ when our sense of time and reality is unlike usual conscious experiences. As we leave the cocoon of sleep, the veil between waking and sleeping falls away and the transition from sleep’s slumber ignites continuous time and an openness of the self – nothing is finite. In this ‘preconscious’ state we are open to the possibilities of ‘becoming’. Time feels expansive, fluid not fixed, and divisions between past, present and future dissipate in favour of a temporal fusion. The paintings in On Waking mirror this moment in a myriad of poetic, philosophical and perceptual ways.

Opening up to ‘being in the world’, these paintings also prompt a poetic sensibility and a different viewing, an attentive and participatory gaze. Encouraging an active way of seeing, the paintings do not describe an event, they are an event, resembling poems and Lavinia Greenlaw’s notion of poetic form; “it is this vessel, and, it is a place in which you hope the reader will have something activated for them rather than enacted for them” [1]. And like poems, paintings hold experience and perception acknowledged by the viewer in the act of looking, who changes what is being observed and, through observing, becomes part of the picture.

The paintings in this exhibition invite a slow gaze, a complex ritual in ways of seeing. They pivot between representation and abstraction, looking one way and the other, oscillating productively between the two. Occupying this liminal space, paintings become “potential images”, according to Dario Gamboni, “[…] established – in the realm of the virtual – by the artist but dependent on the beholder for their realization. […] Their property is to make the beholder aware […] of the active, subjective, nature of seeing” [2].

Curated and written by Jenny Eden & Rebecca Sitar

References
[1] BBC Radio 4 (2020) Only Artists: Lavinia Greenlaw meets Charles Avery, 11th March 2020, 14:29. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000g43y].
[2] Gamboni, D. (2002) quoted in B. Schwabsky, ‘Everyday Painting’ (2011) Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting. London: Phaidon Press Ltd, p. 14.

Theoretical and Socio-cultural Context

This exhibition stems from an interest in the human experience of time, presented by phenomenologists Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger. Bergson’s exploration of psychological time, fused and in flux rather than formulaic and structured, has particular relevance to the exhibition. His notion of unfolding time, where the past, present and future converge within the human ‘encounter’, is connected to the making and reception of paintings and central to an interpretation of the period of waking from sleep. In addition, Martin Heidegger’s investigations into the ontology of being and ‘being in the world’ are also poignant, suggesting an empowering responsibility in the durational activities of seeing and thinking.

Siri Hustvedt’s essay ‘The Drama of Perception’ has also been considered in the context of the exhibition. Hustvedt examines the gaze from a neuroscientific perspective, looking at the relationship between the pre-attentive and attentive gaze, claiming a gap between these positions can ‘open up’ embodied engagement and ‘seeing with feeling’.

Within a wider artistic and philosophical context, the works in On Waking highlight painting’s idiosyncratic characteristics as a unique and distinct medium. Paintings hold the possibility of movement within stillness – they are containers of compressed time, records of elongated time and an amalgamation of time-spaces from different periods. Thus, in relation to Eastern Philosophy, the paintings in this exhibition prompt a psychic experience whereby time and presence are refreshed and continuous, and expansive moments of reflection and enlightenment are channelled and processed.

In focusing on transitions and awakenings, this exhibition promotes active looking, mindful thinking and reception, and a deeper appreciation of human time in relation to memory and experience. These paintings provide a counter to recent global socio-technological developments, in the aftermath of lockdown decelerations, addressing positive approaches to health and well-being and an attitude of slow thinking and contemplation.

Enquiries to artgallery@limerick.ie

10 April – 10 August 2025
Beit Wing (Rooms 6-10) | Tickets from €5.

Our major spring exhibition is dedicated to the pioneering Irish modernists Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, and brings together 90 of their works of art. It explores their friendship and shared experiences while studying in Paris during the early 1920s, and traces their careers back to Ireland. The exhibition highlights the early convergences and later divergences in their styles as they developed distinct artistic voices. Featuring paintings, stained glass, and preparatory drawings, it reveals how both women were trailblazers in Irish art although remaining connected to conventional themes such as religion and landscape.

This exhibition is kindly supported by The Klesch Collection, Lead Sponsor; Friends of the National Gallery of Ireland, and the Art of Friendship Giving Circle.

The Gallery would like to thank the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media for their ongoing support.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s work is rooted in an exploration of imperial legacy, human displacement and the Anthropocene. These intertwined subjects are approached through an associative use of narrative and a deeply crafted visual language that verges on the surreal.

For Lismore, Ní Bhriain presents Inscriptions VI, an exhibition bringing together new works in tapestry, print and installation. A large scale tapestry, The Muses V, forms the centrepiece of the exhibition. The Muses series (2018-25) is a pivotal body of work for the artist – the first created in her now-signature medium of Jacquard tapestry. The series references archival photographic portraits from the 1850s, from a genre once termed ‘orientalist photography’. Supposedly an authentic representation of culture, in reality these images existed as projections of western fantasies of the exotic and the erotic. Ní Bhriain works with collage to draw out the darkness behind the fantasy, fusing the portraits with imagery of excavated landscapes and damaged cityscapes. In bringing these disparate images together, the artist suggests intertwined histories of loss and cultural destruction, pointing to the ongoing fused legacies of colonial and industrial forces. In this exhibition, Ní Bhriain presents The Muses V in dialogue with sculptural and photographic elements, extending its motifs into a series of new material and pictorial relationships within the space of St. Carthage Hall.

The exhibition’s title derives from the earliest known museological writing in the western world – Samuel Quiccheberg’s ‘Inscriptions or Titles of the Immense Theatre’ (1565), which details the practice of museums and the organisation of the world’s objects into classes and subclasses. This was essentially an instruction manual for the creation of private collections, with an explicit Western imperialist agenda. Ní Bhriain’s work since 2017 has made reference to this text, as she constructs an enigmatic visual vocabulary to explore the displacement embedded in familiar systems of representation.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s work has been shown widely internationally, at venues including Broad Museum, Michigan; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Hammer Museum, LA; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France and the 16th Lyon Biennale. Current exhibitions include The Dream Pool Intervals, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (Solo, 27 March – 28 September 2025); and Programmed Universes, MAC Lyon, France (Group, 7 March – 13 July). Recent solo exhibitions include An Experiment with Time, Kunsthal Gent, Belgium (2024); Kerlin Gallery (2023); CCA Glasgow (2022). Recent group exhibitions include Lahore Biennale 03: Of Mountains and Seas; Innsbruck International Biennial: Heaven Can Wait; and SUSPENSE, Ulster Museum, Belfast (all 2024); Lagos Photo Festival; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland; Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon; Glucksman Gallery, Cork, (all 2023) and the Lyon Biennale (2022). Public collections include Dallas Museum of Art; MAC Lyon; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Trinity College Dublin; and The Arts Council of Ireland.

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Join us for two exhibition launches on Saturday 14 June:
3pm: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain at St Carthage Hall

4pm: Laura Fitzgerald at The Mill

Open Saturdays and Sundays, 12- 5pm (during exhibitions) & other times by appointment. Admission Free.

Laura Fitzgerald is an artist who creates woven narratives of personal and political reflection in video, drawing, and text, often referencing the artist’s own rural background and general anxieties of international artistic professionalism.

Laura’s work is colourful, playful, and distinctly humorous. Often handwritten comments and narratives accompany her drawings and paintings, sometimes referencing personal experiences and sometimes pointing to much darker issues. The work draws connections between climate change and agriculture while exploring the complicated relationships of land ownership and land occupation.

For Lismore, Laura is making new sculptural work alongside a body of work researching the archive of experimental filmmaker Flora Kerrigan. A screening of Flora’s work will take place on Saturday 19 July, with a live score performed by Peadar-Tom Mercier and Ultan Lavery, of Trá Pháidín.

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Join us for two exhibition launches on Saturday 14 June:
3pm: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain at St Carthage Hall

4pm: Laura Fitzgerald at The Mill

Open Saturdays and Sundays, 12- 5pm

Dysphoric Euphoria presents polarising extremes of queer existence. Within this exhibition Peter Bradley and Stephen Doyle explore the joys and the hardships of Queer experiences through painting. Taking on themes of societal exclusion, religious power, and identity in a contemporary Irish society.

The titular duality is divided by the artists. Doyle manifests Dysphoria by allowing discomfort to become tangible through their handling of paint and installation work. They depict some of the major obstacles facing the community to challenge systems of power and oppression in its various forms. Bradley’s collection portrays the Euphoric through themes of community, joy as a form of resistance, and liberation from gender norms through playful collages of paint, plexiglass and personality.

Accompanying the paintings within the show are texts by El Reid- Buckley, FELISPEAKS and William Keohane.

Live Art Ireland with p(art)y Here and Now, presents CONVERGENCE A BORDERLESS ROMANCE 2025. from 8-10 of August

An Unprecedented Art and Music Festival Celebrating Global Creative Exchange North Tipperary, Ireland – Live Art Ireland, in partnership with p(art)y Here and Now, is proud to announce CONVERGENCE: A BORDERLESS ROMANCE 2025, a ground-breaking three-day festival taking place from August 8-10, 2025.
This is our 3rd Convergence Festival since 2022 and it takes place biennially. This extraordinary celebration represents an art and music festival like no other, bringing together the latest in live art practice with local and national musicians, complemented by workshops designed to foster creative exploration and cultural dialogue.

At its heart, CONVERGENCE embodies the concept of “A Borderless Romance” – a passionate love affair between artistic disciplines, cultures, and creative voices that transcends geographical, stylistic, and conceptual boundaries. This romance speaks to the intimate connections formed when artists from different backgrounds come together to create something entirely new. The festival’s philosophy embraces the idea that art, like love, knows no borders. It celebrates the magnetic pull between diverse creative practices, the seductive dialogue between sound and movement, between tradition and innovation, between the local and the global. This borderless romance manifests in collaborative works that emerge from the intersections of different artistic languages, creating hybrid forms that could only exist in such an open, boundary-dissolving environment.
Just as romance involves vulnerability, trust, and the willingness to be transformed by another, CONVERGENCE invites artists and audiences to step beyond their comfort zones, to engage with unfamiliar forms of expression, and to allow themselves to be changed by the encounter. The festival becomes a space where creative intimacy flourishes – where Irish traditional music might dance with experimental performance art, where international voices blend with local stories, and where the audience becomes part of the romantic embrace between art forms.
Convergence: A Borderless Romance

When: 8th-10th of August

Where: Live Art Ireland, Milford House, Borrisokane, Co.Tipperary.

The Lineup:
Local and national musicians will present original works and
collaborative performances, creating unique sonic experiences that complement the visual arts programming.
The festival will feature innovative live art practices from both
established and emerging artists, pushing the boundaries of contemporary performance art.

Friday
2pm Monstera Deliciosa
3-5pm Maja Zeco, 2 hour durational performance
5.10pm Shirani Bolle
6.15pm – 7.15 pm Laura Leuzzi Keynote Lecture
7.15pm – 8.15pm intermission
8.30pm Andy Spearpoint
9.30pm Nightwood
10.30pm Ian Whitty and the exchange
11.30pm Ruari Santiago McBride

Saturday
11am Juliette Murphy
12pm Fergus Byrne – 1 hour
1.15 pm Katharine Meynell
2-4 pm Workshop by Denys Blacker 1 hour
Performance Denys Blacker 1 hour
4.30pm Nic an tSaoi
6pm Sandra Johnston 1 hour
7-8pm intermission
8.30pm Yael – Film 1.20 minutes ‘ Letter to My Tribe’
9.30pm Mary and the pigeons 1 hour
10.30pm Liam O Maonlai 1 hour
11.30pm VaticanJail 1 hour
00:00 Paul and Marianne Midnight performance

Sunday
12pm – 3pm Party Here and Now Workshop + Group Performance
3.15pm Marie Chantal Hamrock 15 minute performance
3.45pm Renn 1 hour
5pm-6pm Cáit Ní Riain
7pm Film by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens
8.30pm Ritual virtually by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, introduction by Lady Monster in person

Film Program:
A special film screening featuring work by Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens and
b.h.Yael will complement the live performances.

The Patrick Kavanagh Centre and Inniskeen Road July Evening present ‘Moments to see wonders in the grass’ an exhibition of drawings by Irish artist John Price. These drawings are inspired by the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh and will be on display at the Round Tower Church Inniskeen, from Thursday 10th July until Sunday 13th July. Open Reception 7.30pm Thursday 10th July. This exhibition will also be shown in the Carrckmacross Civic Centre for four weeks from Thursday 17th July.

Leave No Plastic Trace is a series of talks, poetry and video presentations taking place on Cape Clear Island (Colaiste) on the 6th August, Heir island(The Boat House) on the 8th August and Sherkin Island on the 11th August. Each event will start at 2:00pm and will run for approximately three hours.
Access by ferry to each event

The title of this exhibition – the last to be held in Vault’s Marlborough House Gallery before we are forced to move once again – is taken from an estate agent’s brochure, which boasted of space that would be ‘suitable for arts or storage purposes’.

The exhibition is a visual and written survey of the conditions that artists in Belfast work in, and a collaboration between Neal Campbell (photographer) and Jane Morrow (curator and writer).

Exhibition continues 15 July – 31 August 2025.

“The Golden Hour” exhibition presents a series of oil paintings inspired by the ever-changing light of sunset along the rugged Galway and Connemara coastline. Using rich colour and expressive, impressionistic brushstrokes, these works seek to capture the transient beauty of the sea and sky at day’s end, moments that vanish almost as soon as they appear. Each canvas is a meditation on atmosphere, movement, and memory, translating the wild Atlantic into vivid, emotional landscapes. The result is not a literal depiction, but a felt experience, a visual echo of light dissolving into water.

Showing at Súil Eile Space in Barna, Co. Galway.

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

Exhibition continues 28 June – 14 August 2025.

An exhibition of new works on paper from Limerick Printmakers.

RISK/ REWARD explores the importance and power in cultivating resilience as an individual and as an artist, while acknowledging the challenges of maintaining this quality in an increasingly complex world. Creative resilience allows artists to simultaneously “trust the process” and trust themselves as they navigate periods of experimentation, exploring risk through problem solving, and defining their own metrics of failure and success when creating art.

For most creators, there is an inextricable link between how their artwork is perceived and how they view themselves. Our societal understanding of failure has shifted in recent years, away from the notion that it is a permanent state, instead, reframing setbacks as an essential catalyst to growth, learning and innovation.

In his exhibition, open from this Thursday, Davy Mahon explores the idea of the eternal apocalypse. Toying with our fetishes of the end of the world, and confronting facets of zen Fascism and neoliberalism that sit at the heart of this, the artist asks, how do you make fun of such grim and grubby stuff?

Davy Mahon is an artist and curator living and working in Belfast. He has a first-class BFA from Ulster University (2011). Mahon has shown works and ‘performed’ across Ireland, the UK and internationally. He works both solo and collaboratively across different mediums. Davy is the Project Curator and Co-Creative Director of PS2, Belfast. He began the post in 2022 to coordinate and curate the programme, develop resources for artists and audiences to utilise. He also takes out the bins and tidies up.

Exhibition runs until 14 August
Open Monday/Tuesday/Thursday/Friday
10am–4pm
5 North Street
Belfast, BT1 1NA

We are delighted to support Bishop Street Artists with this exhibition which will continue until August 15th.

Nine artists working within the beautiful Derry Walls will share their work.

Amanda Walker – Patsy Brennan – Catherine Ellis – Brian Farrell – Peter Davidson – Karl Porter – Kevin Horgan – Anneliese Gregg – Tearlach Rose.

Curated by Sinéad Smyth, Associate Artist at Echo Echo Dance Theatre.

You are invited to join us for the opening of this beautiful exhibition happening in Echo Echo, on the Walls of Derry City, on Friday, April 25th at 7pm.

Enjoy city related art from each artist in their own unique and personal style.

Event Image: Amanda Walker

You’re invited to the launch of HORIZON, a new exhibition featuring audiovisual works by Lucy Tevlin and Ben Malcolmson at FLAX Project Space, Belfast.

Launch Event:
Thursday, 7th August | 18:00–21:00
(Part of Late Night Art Belfast)
belfastartmap.com/latenightart

Exhibition Dates:
8th–15th August | 12:00–16:00
Lucy & Ben will be on site throughout the show’s duration. Ben will be hosting an open studio within Flax.

Location:
FLAX Project Space
Level 3, 7 North Street
Belfast, BT1 1NA

LO-TEK is a 16mm film made during Tevlin’s residency with Harkat Studios, India (2024). Hand-developed and DIY contact-printed, the film engages in the language of experimental filmmaking processes and is material-focused. LO-TEK captures Kalimpong’s Himalayan region, where homes cling to slopes. The relationship between technology and the landscape is ever present, bringing into question historical Western ideas of progress and the mythology of technology. Malcolmson’s Untitled Soundscape #1 (2025) responds to Tevlin’s film. An open studio presents his studio work (2020–25), including sketchbooks, past exhibits, and future projects.

Lucy Tevlin is a visual artist based in Dublin. Her practice is defined by a conceptual approach to image-making. She uses image, text, film, and found materials to interrogate the spatial, mechanical, and historical properties of the photographic image. Her work explores concerns such as the materiality of the photographic apparatus and the dichotomies of truth versus fiction and public versus private.

Ben Malcolmson is a visual artist & curator from Belfast and based in Dublin. His fine art practice explores the parameters of photography, video and sculpture using alternative photographic processes with relation to one’s land and identity. His curatorial interests encompass social engagement and activism through a public-centred approach, particularly for young people.

If you have any access requirements, please do get in touch and we will accommodate as much as possible. FLAX Project Space is not wheelchair accessible. For further details, visit https://flaxartstudios.org/.

Vertigo 67th celebrates the anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann for their masterpiece with a three-day international film conference that will focus exclusively on all aspects of what makes this movie a masterpiece in cinema. Vertigo67 festival kicks off with a special 4k screening of the 1958 classic film Vertigo starring James Stewart and Kim Novak in the Lighthouse Cinema in Dublin on Tuesday 12 August at 8pm, with a free introductory talk before the movie screening given by Elizabeth
Bullock (San Francisco).

After the evening screening of the movie at the Lighthouse on Tuesday 12 August, the Vertigo67 festival continues over in the Trinity Long Room Hub venue, Trinity College Dublin from Wednesday 13 August to Friday 15 August. The festival events at Trinity College run over three days with presentations, talks, interviews and panel discussions from 20 international scholars, writers, conductors and artists from across the globe: US, UK, Hong Kong, Ireland and Switzerland.

Conference session tickets: €10 cash only (Tickets at door Trinity Long Room Hub)

Exhibition continues 17th April – 16th August 2025.

Waterford Gallery of Art are delighted to present a new solo exhibition of retrospective paintings from 2010 – 2025 by Dungarvan based award winning artist, Catherine Barron. Salvaged metal plates, vintage 78rpm records, book covers, and playing cards serve as the artists canvas to reveal a deeply personal, as well as allegorical, biographical journey.

“The power of the imagination does not lie in its ability to invent, but to see more deeply, what is. And what is, is so awesome, you couldn’t make it up! “

Catherine Barron was born in Co. Carlow, lives and works in Dungarvan co. Waterford since 2017, and is represented by the Molesworth Gallery.

Opening reception: Saturday, the 21st of June, 12 to 2pm.

“There is something musical in how Helen Blake’s work unfolds over time. This is true of the artist’s process; it is also true for the viewer. The longer you spend with Blake’s work, the more it yields. Blake paints meticulously, in oils, on an increasingly small scale in recent years, using canvases at times no larger than an average paperback. At first impression, these works convey a bright, orderly abstraction, composed of diamonds, lozenges, triangles, and jagged serrations, interlocked with a grid-like rectilinear formality. However, upon closer inspection, these repeated shapes and geometric impressions are not so streamlined or symmetrical as they appear; they are not the product of careful planning but the result of gradually accreted layers of colour, one laid one on top of the other, affecting one another without intermingling.”

Dr. Nathan O’Donnell
From ‘Recent Works’ Molesworth Gallery, March 2017

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, she constructs overtly hand-made paintings which record and examine colour conversations within accumulating pattern structures, embracing accidents, flaws and discrepancies within their rhythms.

Starting from an imprecise grid structure, and rejecting the use of pre-drawn lines or tape, she build up layers of simple hand-painted lines and geometric shapes – square, triangle, rectangle, chevron – to create intricate surfaces where colour fragments can interact, sing together, harmonise, and sometimes jar.

Blake grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and graduated with an honours degree in Visual Art from Aberystwyth University, Wales. She lives and works in County Wicklow, Ireland. She was runner-up for the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2022.

Other awards include the Arts Council of Ireland Visual Arts Bursary Award; The Model Cara Award, Sligo; County Wicklow Visual Arts Open, Overall Winner, Mermaid Art Centre, Bray, adjudicated by Patrick T Murphy, Director, RHA. Eleven solo exhibitions to date include Molesworth Gallery, Dublin; Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast; Limerick Museum; Mermaid Art Centre, Bray; FUTURES14, RHA, Dublin.

Her paintings been shown in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including in the RHA Dublin and RA London Annual Exhibitions. She is represented by Molesworth Gallery, Dublin and Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast.

The Cash Shop is a curatorial project by artist Jim Ricks and is a community-engaged contemporary visual arts hub in South County Galway.

Exhibition continues 14 June – 16 August 2025.

These Magnetic Magnitudes
Cecilia Danell
Curated by Brenda McParland

These Magnetic Magnitudes is a solo exhibition of new and recent paintings, textiles, ceramics and film by Cecilia Danell, curated by Brenda McParland. The exhibition explores the overarching theme of contemporary landscapes and our unfulfilled yearning for that which is primal and unspoilt, filtered through the lens of psychogeography, Science Fiction and the sublime. In a practice which is rooted in materiality and process, the starting point for Danell’s work is a first-hand engagement with the landscape of the area in Sweden where she grew up. Bodily memories of moving through the places she depicts are mirrored in the physical endeavour of painting on a large scale, which creates its own spatial choreography. The landscapes Danell depicts are real places that she has encountered and photographed. However rather than offering a documentary view of these places, she uses fiction and the imaginary to speak about present and possible futures through a Science Fiction reading of the landscape. A new series of large paintings considers ideas around spectatorship and participation, inspired by the large nature dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. We are presented with scenes that invite the viewer to step into them, yet the 2D surfaces of her paintings prevent us. Danell continuously points back to this push and pull between realism, abstraction and the materiality of paint itself. She uses oil and acrylic on canvas in vivid shades of greens, purples and pinks, using acrylic washes and layers beneath the oil paint, and acrylic for drips because of its viscosity and velocity.

Danell is predominantly a painter, but also makes textile tapestries, ceramic and fabric sculptures and occasionally films. Danell recalls idyllic summer childhood memories of the Swedish countryside in her oversized fabric sculpture Lupin, 2024 which is both beautiful and treacherous as lupins are listed as an invasive species in Sweden, that should be eradicated when found in the wild. A series of ceramic sculptures in pastel shades and three large colourful appliqúe tapestries memorialise snow for future generations by playing with its properties of hiding and abstracting the underlying shapes. Echoing the snowy vistas in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, these are imaginary “ur-forms” that touch upon the primeval, merging colourful playfulness with a solemn reminder of climate change and the state of our planet. In the same room, the film Snow Day, 2025 (15 mins) camera/editing by Danell; soundtrack by Keith Wallace/Loner Deluxe captures a first-person view of the artist moving through the snowy woods in Sweden which is both immersive and atmospheric.

A hardback catalogue with texts by Aidan Dunne and Charity Coleman will be published by Solstice Arts Centre and Kevin Kavanagh in autumn 2025.

The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday 11am – 4pm.

Exhibition continues 2 – 16 August 2025.

The ever changing light on the water, gentle tides on hot days, boulders older than time become like sleeping figures nestling on the glass turquoise sea, seaweed hair, dream like with rocks for shoes. These observations have informed Rosie McGurran’s new suite of works. With nods to the writings of Tim Robinson and Ithell Colqhuon, Mc Gurran embraces what Colqhoun describes during her time in Roundstone in the 1950s as ‘suaimhness’ the Gealic word that expresses luxuriating in quiet. This exhibition presents works based on daily drawings, often returning to the same places to examine and explore the gentle and fragile environment of Connemara.

Opening reception Saturday August 2nd @6PM
Guided tour and artist’s talk, Sunday August 10th @1PM
Daily painting demonstrations, @2PM
Open 11AM-6PM until August 16th

Exhibition continues 19 July – 16 August 2025.

Fragments is a two person show by artists Lorraine Lawlor and Melissa Corish. These artists explore themes of lost stories and memory, preserving fragments of time that hold a poetic and factual resonance.

Tuesday to Sunday 10.15am – 5.30pm until August 16th

Proudly sponsored by Mill Cove Gallery. This year’s Kenmare Arts Festival invites you to pause, explore, and reconnect through art in all its forms. Running from 3–17 August, the festival transforms Kenmare into a living gallery, fills the Carnegie Theatre, and invites everyone to take part. With exhibitions, performances, poetry events, literary launches, and hands -on workshops, this two-week celebration reflects the vibrant spirit of artistic collaboration and community. Whether you’re a local resident or a visitor, Kenmare warmly welcomes you to be inspired and enjoy a truly memorable experience. John Goode Festival Director

Kilkenny Celebrates 10 Years of Creative Community at AKA 2025
This August, the streets, galleries, and green spaces of Kilkenny will once again pulse with creativity as the Alternative Kilkenny Arts (AKA) Fringe Festival celebrates ten years of community-led, volunteer-powered artistic expression.
Running from 7–17 August, the 2025 programme features an impressive line-up of over 120 events, showcasing the talents of visual artists, performers, writers, musicians, makers, and creative collectives from across Kilkenny city and county.
This year’s highlights include a special outdoor screening of animated short films scored live by the Irish Composers’ Collective in collaboration with Cartoon Saloon, a retrospective talk on cultural figure Peter Brennan, and a landmark Emerging Artists Exhibition featuring ten rising talents at 1st floor, The Bank, Rose Inn Street, R95 Y672.
AKA remains a proud celebration of Kilkenny’s independent arts scene, placing accessibility and community engagement at its core. With events spanning theatre, craft, literature, film, music, workshops, and more, this year’s festival offers something to inspire every audience.
AKA invites locals and visitors alike to immerse themselves in ten unforgettable days of artistic exploration, connection, and celebration.
The full programme will be available on www.akafringe.com for the 18th July.

Exhibition continues 7 August – 17 August 2025.

Dublin artist Linda Proudfoot and Latvian artist Dana Sorokina have come together for a two person exhibition during the AKA Fringe Festival in Kilkenny.
Linda will exhibit a selection of her landscapes and seascapes, while Dana will present some of her vibrant flower compositions and her images of VW Classic Beetles.

Exhibition open 10am – 5pm Mon – Sat, and 12-5pm Sunday.
Curated by Tony Strickland

Through her unique interpretation of batik techniques, Trini Kenny pushes the medium beyond craft into the realm of fine art, making her work recognisable and deeply evocative. Visit her inspirational exhibition and open studio during the Kilkenny Arts Festival in the beautiful gardens of Lavistown House and step into the world batik and wax resist painting.

The Bedding Planes

There is solace in beauty and it nourishes the soul.
‘The Bedding Planes’ documents a moment in time, perhaps with tiny traces on a well worn path. Beauty is at its heart.

In geological terms a bedding plane is a surface representing contact between a deposit and a depositing medium such as water and atmosphere during a time of change and this is reflected in a difference in texture or composition, with a bedding plane representing the visible line of change. This bedding plane however takes a more nuanced form and includes works made from layers of colour, paper and clay. The pop up Gallery lies at the bottom of a long narrow ‘natural’ garden that is a haven for wildlife and biodiversity. As the viewer navigates their way to the room along a winding path through birdsong and dappled light from the surrounding trees the journey itself becomes a contemplative experience and the boundary between art and nature disappears.

The Bedding Planes is curated by Helena Gorey and shows her works on paper alongside forms and vessels in clay by Rob Pearson and Peter Scroope and introduces Roise O’Shea.

Open daily from 2.00pm to 6.00pm from the 10th to 17th August 2025.
Pop Up Gallery during Kilkenny Arts Festival, Burnchurch R95 Y0C8

SerformanceP 2025 – International Performance Art Exhibition in São Paulo. with performance BURNING 15 AUG · PAÇO MUNICIPAL
Attention, performers and allies of living art: we begin the publications of the selected works of the 9th PerformanceP – International Art Performance Show in São Paulo!

Cards from participating artists will begin to appear on our networks and also in the gallery of NFTs from the show (link in bio).

We open with the work of @noelmolloy61, Ireland, who present us a memorial performance about an episode from 1921: the Roscommon community fire, carried out in retaliation by local security forces. The action, arbitrary and violent, echoes what so often happens in Brazilian favelas and suburbs to this day — where entire communities pay for isolated acts.

If at the arrival of the Europeans in 1500, they came from the Middle Ages and we came from the polished stone, today they say we are in the 19th century while the Global North already breathes the 21st century. We continue to burn communities — literally or symbolically.

The Christmas play is similar to commemorating the massacre of Candelaria or Vicar General, after 100 years without incident… it happens that every year we have “fires” in communities; but the numbers indicate improvement, thank God.

Celebrating this event, as the work suggests, is also a gesture of consciousness: what was done to prevent it from repeating there? What’s missing so we can do the same here?

The direction of the show and curation are done by @ismaeltrabuco, artist and master’s in performance and education, idealizer of PerformanceP since 2015, in partnership with @isaactrabuco, corporate and academic, communication specialist, communities and territories. Together, we lead this edition listening to the streets, the sidelines and the most urgent and emerging subjects.

Exhibition continues 24 July – 17 August 2025.

Custom House Studios + Gallery cordially invites you to the official opening reception for Caught in Blue a solo exhibition by Sarah Wren Wilson. Please join us on the evening of Thursday 24th July 2025, 6-8pm, opening remarks by the artist.

This exhibition invites the viewer into a liminal space—a deep blue space within another space. Blue, with its associations of depth, vastness, and the unknown, creates an atmosphere of openness and quiet immersion.

By entering, the viewer becomes more than a passive observer; they become part of the artwork. This immersive encounter opens a dialogue between the inner and outer worlds, between what is seen and what is felt.

The paintings explore the relationship between the psyche and the external environment, reflecting how perception shapes our understanding of reality. Often, the outer world mirrors our internal landscape. A recurring motif—the net—serves as both container and filter: a web of memory, emotion, and subconscious patterns. It maps the inner world, and in doing so, transforms our perception of the outer one.

Image: Sarah Wren Wilson ‘Overtly Held’- Acrylic Ink on Canvas, 80x60cm, 2025

The Custom House Studios + Gallery cordially invites you to the official opening reception for InHouse ’25, a Custom House Studio Artist’s Group Exhibition. Please join us on the Evening of Thursday 24th July 2025, 6-8pm. Opening remarks by Chairperson Simon Wall.

Exhibiting Artists: Emma Bourke | Tom Brawn | Breda Burns | Mags Duffy | Ralph Gelbert | Pauline Garavan | Genevieve King | Christine Prescott | Betsy Stirratt | Ian Wieczorek | Sarah Wren Wilson |

Image: Floodways, Gouache on Paper, 2025, Betsy Stirratt

Proudly sponsored by Mill Cove Gallery.
This year’s Kenmare Arts Festival invites you to pause, explore, and reconnect through art in all its forms. Running from 3–17 August, the festival transforms Kenmare into a living gallery, fills the Carnegie Theatre, and invites everyone to take part.
With exhibitions, performances, poetry events, literary launches, and hands-on workshops, this two-week celebration reflects the vibrant spirit of artistic collaboration and community. Whether you’re a local resident or a visitor, Kenmare warmly welcomes you to be inspired and enjoy a truly memorable experience.
John Goode
Festival Director

Three of my sculptures selected for Eco Aware Art Gallery ® Art Gallery
Our Vision Is To Reduce Waste In world through Art. We promote Artwork Made by Waste ,Recycle , And Found Material.

https://visit.virtualartgallery.com/ecoawareartgallery

This gallery exhibition centers on the textile installation by artist Varvara Keidan Shavrova, born in Soviet Russia and now living in England and Ireland. The installation features eight screen-printed felt blankets, each depicting images from her family photo album. This social and performative artwork invites interaction: visitors are encouraged to touch the blankets or drape them over their shoulders.

Juxtaposed with the artwork are historical objects from the Documentation Centre’s collection, including a tablecloth from East Prussia, a bedspread from Bohemia, and a small table cover from Brandenburg.

Textiles such as blankets, tablecloths, handkerchiefs, traditional costumes, coats, cloaks, scarves, and throws are poignant witnesses to hardship and suffering. They serve as relics of loss and deprivation, embodying the deeply human desire to connect with warmth, familiarity, and family. These objects offer a sense of solace against the painful experiences of displacement, loneliness, and uprootedness.

Varvara Keidan Shavrova’s work speaks to these shared experiences of millions of refugees, displaced persons, and emigrants, resonating with their enduring stories.

Exhibition Dates: February 2- November 16, 2025

IMMA Collection: Art as Agency is a major three-year display celebrating IMMA’s Permanent Collection as a source of agency and knowledge. Featuring over 100 artists, from the 1960s to the present, it highlights key works, including many recent acquisitions. This ambitious exhibition invites engagement and research over time, allowing for a rich durational experience of Ireland’s Modern and Contemporary Art Collection.

Through thematic, chronological, geographical, and media-based approaches, the exhibition examines how artworks connect across time and contexts, fostering new interpretations and relevance. Works from the 1960s to the 1980s evoke the foundational story of the Irish art world. While acknowledging the context of the modernist, predominantly male dominance of that era, the exhibition also spotlights the material innovation and socially engaged practices of others who persisted despite the relatively conservative status quo.

The exhibition also presents more recent practice that explores urgent global themes such as gender, hybridity, cultural histories, de-colonialism, diaspora, migration, food injustice, climate, and ecological change. Memory, imagination, and storytelling play pivotal roles in these works, offering generative ways to process fragmentation, dislocation, and survival in unfamiliar spaces. New and existing works in the IMMA grounds will extend these themes.

The exhibition includes a specially created ‘white cube’ gallery space inspired by Brian O’Doherty’s renowned series of essays Inside the White Cube – The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976), that critiques the auratic, market-driven effects of the white cube gallery format. Likewise the choice of works curated for this space pushes back by highlighting works by Post-War American women, pioneering conceptualist artworks by Marcel Duchamp and Brian O’Doherty as well as a contemporary feminist response by Andrea Geyer.

By interweaving historical and contemporary narratives, Art as Agency invites audiences to reflect on the evolving meanings and possibilities of art in shaping our understanding of and action in the world.

Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend is a group exhibition featuring the work of African American women from a small Alabama community whose work have become symbols of Black empowerment and cultural pride. This stunning collection of textile works celebrates African American culture and heritage.

28 Feb 2025–27 Oct 2025
Gallery 3

IMMA presents Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, the first exhibition of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers in Ireland, co-organised with Souls Grown Deep. The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, a group of African American women from a small Alabama community with a 200-year tradition of quilt making, have created quilts that hold both artistic and political significance. Artistically, their work is renowned for its improvisational style, bold colours, and abstract designs, often compared to modernist art movements like abstract expressionism. Their quilts, made from recycled fabrics, are deeply rooted in African American textile traditions and showcase unique creativity in geometric patterns.

Politically, the quilts reflect resilience and self-sufficiency, as they were born out of necessity in an economically deprived, racially segregated region. The civil rights movement brought attention to these women, who became symbols of Black empowerment and cultural pride. Their craft has been exhibited in museums worldwide, highlighting the importance of marginalised voices in American history. The quilts serve as both a celebration of African American heritage and a testament to the strength and creativity of women in the face of systemic oppression.

Through the public programme IMMA will explore parallels with the textile and quilt-making traditions in Ireland.

IMMA TALKS / Lecture & Launch
The Quilts of Gee’s Bend
Raina Lampkins-Fielder
Join Raina Lampkins-Fielder, chief curator for the Souls Grown Deep Foundation for a talk on the unique quilt making tradition of Gee’s Bend, a community of over five generations of Black American quiltmakers located on the banks of the Alabama River. This talk coincides with the launch of the exhibition Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.

Thurs 27 Feb 2025, 5pm – 6pm
Johnston Suite, IMMA
Booking required – Free

In 2025 Lismore Castle Arts will celebrate 20 years by presenting an exhibition dedicated to the theme of Kunstkammer, curated by art historian & writer, Robert O’Byrne.

Kunstkammer is a form of museum in which strange or rare objects are exhibited together, also known as a Cabinet of Curiosities. Once widespread throughout Europe, these private museums were renowned for featuring a broad range of objects, including Arteficialia (products of man) and Naturalia (products of nature) together with scientific instruments, clocks and automaton.

Priceless works of art were shown alongside strange curiosities, antiquities next to the latest inventions. They were united in their diversity, and their beauty. Kunstkammer at Lismore Castle is both a re-creation and a reinvention of the genre. Through a series of rooms, each one different in size and form, historical objects from private and public collections will share space with works by leading Irish and international contemporary artists.

The exhibition creates new encounters with the familiar and uncanny, inviting timely conversations about display, collections, and contemporary practice as the artefact of the future. Drawing on themes of display the work invites audiences to engage with contemporary art in an accessible way, referring to one of the original ambitions of the Cabinet of Curiosity to foster learning through encounter.

Robert O’Byrne is one of Ireland’s best known writers and lecturers specializing in the fine and decorative arts. A former Vice-President of the Irish Georgian Society, he is the author of more than a dozen books, a former columnist for Apollo magazine, and a contributor to both The Burlington Magazine and the Irish Arts Review. Robert has curated many exhibitions, including Ireland’s Fashion Radicals for The Little Museum in Dublin, and In Harmony with Nature: The Irish Country House Garden for the Irish Georgian Society, both of which drew record attendances. For the past twelve years, he has written an award-winning blog The Irish Aesthete.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive programme of events, talks, screenings, and a far-reaching learning programme. A catalogue will be published in Summer 2025 to accompany the exhibition.

Pallas Projects/Studios are delighted to announce the participating artists in our Arts Council funded programme of Artist-Initiated Projects 2025. The series of 8 x 3-week exhibitions between March–November 2025 will present exhibitions of new work by:

Cillian Finnerty, Michella Randilu Perera, Niamh Coffey, Reuben Brown, Lucy Andrews, Kathryn Maguire, Gary Farrelly, Caroline Mac Cathmaoil.

Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 8 x 3-week exhibitions taking place between March and November 2025. This unique programme of funded, artist-initiated projects selected via open call is highly accessible to artists, with a focus on early career, emerging artists and recent graduates. Projects are supplemented with artists’ talks, texts, workshops or performances, and gallery visits by colleges and local schools.

Cillian Finnerty — March 27th – April 12th

Michella Randilu Perera — April 24th – May 10th

Niamh Coffey — May 22nd – June 7th

Reuben Brown — June 19th – 5th July

Lucy Andrews — July 17th – August 2nd

Kathryn Maguire — September 11th – 27th

Gary Farrelly — October 9th – 25th

Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil — 6th – 22nd November

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Pallas Projects/Studios is one of Ireland’s longest running artist-run spaces, with a dedicated tradition over 28 years towards the professional development of artists in a peer-led, supportive environment, providing opportunities for emerging and mid-career artists to develop and exhibit new work. PP/S have established a nationwide and international reputation among artists and organisations, and a public profile through successful and critically engaged exhibitions, publishing, collaborations and partnerships, and education programmes for schools. Recent projects include the 4-year research project and publication ‘Artist-Run Europe’, published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven in 2016, and the annual ‘Periodical Review’ exhibition now in its thirteenth year.

Thylacines, snakes and birds of prey are the unlikely animals that navigate fractured environments in the work of Ailbhe Ní Bhriain. Through ancient tales of the mythic underworld, and recurring images of stalactites and stalagmites, we experience scenes set in caves and tunnels populated by ethnic stereotypes.

‘Ní Bhriain seeks to locate our growing anxieties of crises within an odd, orphic world, where colonial and industrial legacies are fused with the consciousness of our current moment’ – Michael Dempsey.

A new series of works created for Hugh Lane Gallery, The Dream Pool Intervals is a meditation on the spectre of loss that haunts the contemporary imagination. Images of rehearsed poses and gestures, appropriated from the early days of photography (an era designed to project stability, status, worldliness and superiority) are assembled by Ní Bhriain in the works we encounter. They belie the individuals represented and concentrate instead on the construct of the medium of photography itself.

‘in the tapestries are images of destroyed architecture – gathered from multiple sources, icons of war and climate disaster that seem to define this period’ – Ailbhe Ní Bhriain.

Five large-scale jacquard tapestries form the exhibition’s centre and create a journey through emblematic iconography of past colonial repression and early technological aspirations. Powerful and eloquent, they convey complex political and dynastic messages that resist singular interpretation and echo the fragmented nature of how information is gathered and absorbed in our subconscious.

The Dream Pool Intervals is curated by Michael Dempsey, Head of Exhibitions, Hugh Lane Gallery, and will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain: The Dream Pool Intervals officially opens to the public on 27 March 2025 and runs until 28 September 2025. Admission is free.

Exhibition continues 25th March – 1st November 2025.

Jack Butler Yeats; The Dreaming Road
Tue. 25 Mar. – Sat. 1 Nov. 2025

The Dreaming Road presents audiences with the opportunity to trace Jack Butler Yeats’ extraordinary journey as an artist through four important, interconnected stages of his life and work. The show touches on the legacy of his unique artistic family, as well as the indelible influence of his early life in Sligo on his entire career. A selection of his politically charged paintings of the 1920s are on view alongside a number of the great masterpieces of his later years, which are noted for their wildly romantic and expressionistic style. While Jack was notably reluctant to discuss his creative practice, the exhibition is augmented with a number of statements by the artist himself that shed light on aspects of his attitudes and approaches to painting.

The Yeats Family was one of the most creative and accomplished in the literary and cultural world of early twentieth century Ireland. Patriarch, John Butler Yeats was distinguished as an artist, and particularly noted for his work in portraiture. Jack’s three siblings William, Susan, Elizabeth made significant contributions to literature, publishing and education throughout their lifetimes. Their mother, Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a wealthy Sligo merchant family, and imbued in her children a deep love for the people, landscape, and mythology of the county.

Jack Butler Yeats remains one of Ireland’s best loved and most accomplished artists. Unlike his siblings, Jack was sent to his maternal grandparents in Sligo, where he lived between the ages of eight and 16 years. He cut his creative teeth on the deep experience of Irish life he encountered in the town, and its western characters and dramatic landscape populated his works until the end of his life. While his subject matter remained the same throughout his long career, his style of painting, and the meaning he gave his works changed over time. His initial depictions of western life was marked by a strong sentimentality, which he expressed in watercolours during the period 1898–1910. This gave way, in his early oil period (1910–1925), to the pronounced realism that he developed to make political and social commentary.

Jack had been on a visit back to Sligo in 1898, when he witnessed some of the centenary re-enactments of the 1798 Rebellion. The spectacle of the event appealed to Jack’s love of the drama of everyday life, and he was inspired to create one of his first political scenes, Robert Emmet – Procession at Carricknagat, Co. Sligo, 1898. The more serious concern of Ireland’s nationhood that the centenary celebrations brought to the fore, also impacted the young artist. From 1898 onwards he became more convinced of the right to Irish self-determination. He went on to paint several, more overtly political works, some of which are also on view in this exhibition, culminating in the masterworks The Funeral of Harry Boland, 1922, and Communicating with Prisoners, c. 1924.

From the 1920s and into the later part of his career, another more marked development took hold. Jack’s subject matter became imbued with a deeper mysticism and symbolism. His handling of paint became much freer, he abandoned his palette and brush, and worked directly onto the canvas using only the primary colours. Throughout the 1940s, his paintings increasingly present us with apocalyptic visions. He developed a highly personal technique, which placed less emphasis on composition. He focused more on creating work in a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ style and termed the paintings he made in this way as ‘happenings’.

The exhibition continues until 1st November. In depth Curator’s Tours will run on each Saturday at 11am throughout June, July and August, and can be booked at the front desk or at www.themodel.ie.

We keep all of our exhibitions free of charge and open to everyone. We kindly ask that those who can afford to, make a donation of €5 for this exhibition. This can be done by contactless payment at the station in this gallery.

10 April – 10 August 2025
Beit Wing (Rooms 6-10) | Tickets from €5.

Our major spring exhibition is dedicated to the pioneering Irish modernists Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, and brings together 90 of their works of art. It explores their friendship and shared experiences while studying in Paris during the early 1920s, and traces their careers back to Ireland. The exhibition highlights the early convergences and later divergences in their styles as they developed distinct artistic voices. Featuring paintings, stained glass, and preparatory drawings, it reveals how both women were trailblazers in Irish art although remaining connected to conventional themes such as religion and landscape.

This exhibition is kindly supported by The Klesch Collection, Lead Sponsor; Friends of the National Gallery of Ireland, and the Art of Friendship Giving Circle.

The Gallery would like to thank the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media for their ongoing support.

Exhibition continues 17th April – 16th August 2025.

Waterford Gallery of Art are delighted to present a new solo exhibition of retrospective paintings from 2010 – 2025 by Dungarvan based award winning artist, Catherine Barron. Salvaged metal plates, vintage 78rpm records, book covers, and playing cards serve as the artists canvas to reveal a deeply personal, as well as allegorical, biographical journey.

“The power of the imagination does not lie in its ability to invent, but to see more deeply, what is. And what is, is so awesome, you couldn’t make it up! “

Catherine Barron was born in Co. Carlow, lives and works in Dungarvan co. Waterford since 2017, and is represented by the Molesworth Gallery.

We are delighted to support Bishop Street Artists with this exhibition which will continue until August 15th.

Nine artists working within the beautiful Derry Walls will share their work.

Amanda Walker – Patsy Brennan – Catherine Ellis – Brian Farrell – Peter Davidson – Karl Porter – Kevin Horgan – Anneliese Gregg – Tearlach Rose.

Curated by Sinéad Smyth, Associate Artist at Echo Echo Dance Theatre.

You are invited to join us for the opening of this beautiful exhibition happening in Echo Echo, on the Walls of Derry City, on Friday, April 25th at 7pm.

Enjoy city related art from each artist in their own unique and personal style.

Event Image: Amanda Walker

Titanic Belfast has announced that in collaboration with the V&A it is set to host a free exhibition of the work of one of the foremost British artists of the 20th-century, Lucian Freud, from 2 May – 30 September 2025.

Belfast will be the first port of call of the Lucian Freud’s Etchings: A Creative Collaboration exhibition as part of a global tour. The world-leading visitor attraction is the only location on the island of Ireland that the artwork is being displayed.

Lucian Freud’s Etchings: A Creative Collaboration will feature highlights from a unique collection of etchings, many of which have never been previously exhibited. The trial proofs tell the story of Freud’s long collaboration with master printer, Marc Balakjian including one of his most contemplative and psychologically rich achievements in Donegal Man (2007). The sitter for Donegal Man was Pat Doherty, Chairman of Titanic Belfast, giving this exhibition a very special connection to the venue.

The pieces are on loan from the V&A, a family of museums dedicated to the power of creativity. Its mission is to champion design and creativity in all its forms, advance cultural knowledge, and inspire makers, creators and innovators everywhere. This is the first time the exhibition has ever been seen outside of London.

Judith Owens MBE, Chief Executive of Titanic Belfast said: “It’s an honour to announce that Titanic Belfast will be the first venue to host Lucian Freud’s Etchings: A Creative Collaboration as part of a global tour. We are thrilled to display never seen before pieces from one of the world’s most renowned artists and bring yet another reason for people to visit Belfast. The exhibition is particularly special for Titanic Belfast given its links to our Chairman Pat Doherty and will be free for people to view, and we are delighted to enhance our visitor experience over the busy summer period.”

Gill Saunders, Curator of the V&A’s Lucian Freud’s Etchings exhibition said: “Made over a period of 25 years, Lucian Freud’s extraordinary etchings demonstrate his developing mastery of this challenging medium. Shown together for the first time, this unique collection of trial proofs offers fascinating insights into Freud’s working process, and shows us how his achievements in print depended on his close collaboration with the master printer Marc Balakjian.”

This exhibition has been sponsored by Loftlines, Northern Ireland’s first build-to-rent development located in Titanic Quarter, following a £150m investment by Legal & General.

Adam Burney, Senior Fund Manager, Asset Management at L&G said: “Lucian Freud’s Etchings: A Creative Collaboration celebrates artistry, collaboration and culture — values that sit at the heart of Loftlines and L&G’s vision for a vibrant new community.

“We’re proud to support this world-class exhibition alongside our closest neighbour, Titanic Belfast, and to celebrate the city’s growing cultural momentum whilst marking the beginning of the Loftlines journey which will redefine city centre living here in Belfast.”

Lucian Freud’s Etchings: A Creative Collaboration will be open to the public daily from 2nd May – 30th September. The free exhibition is located within the Andrews Gallery on Level 2 of Titanic Belfast.

An ambitious new group exhibition, Staying with the Trouble, inspired by author and philosopher Donna Haraway’s seminal work of the same name, opens at IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) on Friday 2 May 2025. The exhibition features over 40 Irish and Ireland-based artists whose diverse practices explore urgent themes of our time.

Pushing against social norms, Staying with the Trouble challenges us and attempts to make sense of the present, questioning interspecies relationships, ideas of transformation, and renewal. The exhibition challenges human-centric narratives, advocating for a multi-species/multi-kin perspective through sculpture, film, painting, installation and performance.

The exhibition follows Haraway’s propositions such as “Making Kin”, “Composting” and “Sowing Worlds”, inviting visitors to rethink their connections with humans, animals, and ecosystems. Other propositions include “Critters”, emphasising the agency of non-human life, while “Techno-Apocalypse” critiques dystopian views on technology, proposing a more nuanced, interconnected future.
Commenting on the exhibition Mary Cremin, Head of Programming, IMMA, said; “Staying with the Trouble is a call to rethink, reshape our views — to stay present in complexity, to unlearn human-centric ways of seeing, and to lean into the radical potential of kinship across species, materials, and worlds. This exhibition is both a provocation and an invitation — to reimagine our place in a shared, entangled future.”
There will be a screening programme of film and moving image works as part of Living Canvas at IMMA, running throughout May to September.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a live performance series on Saturday 26 July 2025.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Farouk858, Kian Benson Bailes, George Bolster, Renèe Helèna Browne, Myrid Carten, Elizabeth Cope, Redd Ekks, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Andy Fitz, Laura Fitzgerald, Marie Foley, Paddy Graham, Aoibheann Greenan, Kerry Guinan, Austin Hearne, Atsushi Kaga, Michael Kane, Sam Keogh, Caoimhe Kilfeather, Diaa Langan, Áine Mac Giolla Bhríde, Marielle MacLeman, Alan Magee, Christopher Mahon, Michelle Malone, Colin Martin, Maria McKinney, Bea McMahon, Thaís Muniz, Bridget O’Gorman, Venus Patel, Samir Mahmood, Alice Rekab, Eoghan Ryan, Jacqui Shelton, Sonia Shiel, Katie Watchorn, Luke van Gelderen, amongst others.

Image credit: Venus Patel, ‘Still from Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse’ (2023). Courtesy of the Artist

Entangled Life
Curated by Cristina Nicotra
May–December 2025

Entangled Life, supported by Community Foundation Ireland, is a programme exploring the deep connections between climate, society, and the ecosystems where art and community intertwine. This initiative unravels heterogeneous climate and social topics, by understanding ecology as a complex web of relationships—between humans, the more-than-human world, and political and natural environments.

Entangled Life aims to provide space to facilitate a network of relationships, collaboration and engagement within the community. Over the course of 8 months the project will bring together community participants, artists and experts – including Lisa Fitzsimons (Strategy and Sustainability Lead at Irish Museum of Modern Art), Eileen Hutton PhD (Head of Art and Ecology at Burren College of Art), and Gareth Kennedy (artist, lecturer and lead coordinator on NCAD FIELD) – for a series of monthly panel talks, workshops and artistic interventions at Pallas Projects, culminating in an exhibition in December 2025.

The project draws inspiration from Merlin Sheldrake’s book of the same name, which explores the interconnected mycelium worlds that allow for unexpected possibilities, and Joanna Macy’s principles of ‘Active Hope’, which emphasize knowledge, compassion and action. With the final goal of promoting a decarbonised future, the project explores the links between climate issues and society, and shows how they are relevant in our daily life and our community.

The events series will provide diverse perspectives and room for direct interaction among participants through a non-linear, non-hierarchical approach, fostering exploration and critical thinking, considering mental wellbeing. This multidisciplinary initiative feeds the need to provide opportunities for influencing and activating change effectively. It allows the community to learn about climate issues, react, and co-create diverse, dynamic and unpredictable connections and inspirations. Feedback and reactions collected throughout the programme will be compiled into a toolkit report.

In all, seven topics will be unravelled and discussed through open panel discussions, workshops beginning with The Art of Just Transition on Wednesday 14th of May, with Rachel Fallon, Artist; Dr Egle Gusciute, Assistant Professor in Sociology, UCD; and Michelle Murphy, Research & Policy Analyst with Social Justice Ireland and member of Just Transition Commission.

Events Schedule

14th May The Art of Just Transition (Talk)

11th June Discovering biomaterials in art and society (Talk)

9th July Art and biomaterials (Workshop)

3rd September Beyond Words: communicating sustainability (Talk)

1st October Intersectionality in art and climate (Talk)

29th October Climate and Art: programming & advocacy (Talk)

27th November Entangled Life (Exhibition opening)

3rd December Climate crisis and mental health (Workshops)

17th December Climate activism and socially engaged art (Talk)

Events take place Wednesdays, 6–8pm. Participants are welcome to attend some or all events. Places can be booked via Eventbrite, but there will be a places for walk-ins subject to availability

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.

To be Opened by Niamh Flanagan, Artist, Master Printer and Program Coordinator at Graphic Studio Dublin
On Wednesday 11th June 2025 at 7pm

Navigating Space is a solo exhibition by Maria Atanacković. Bringing together works on paper, wood, and linen, the exhibition explores the construction of space through assemblage and printmaking.

Atanacković’s practice is grounded in the process of breaking down and rebuilding form, using geometric shapes, layering, and composition to investigate the balance between structure and spontaneity.

This new body of work reflects her ongoing exploration of spatial relationships. Through bold, graphic elements and carefully considered arrangements, she creates abstract compositions that echo the ways we navigate our surroundings – both physically and emotionally. Some works have a precise, architectural quality, while others evolve through a more intuitive process, where forms emerge, shift, and settle into place.

Atanacković’s interest in space extends beyond the visible, delving into the underlying frameworks that shape our sense of place and belonging. She is particularly drawn to the tension between familiarity and displacement, and how we create connections within unfamiliar environments. Navigating Space considers these ideas through material and form, inviting the viewer to engage with the work as a process of movement and discovery.

Navigating Space by Maria Atanacković will be accompanied by a programme of engagement for young people, including a response space in our First Floor Gallery.

IMMA presents a solo exhibition by Sam Gilliam (1933 – 2022), one of the great innovators in post-war American painting, co-organised with the Sam Gilliam Foundation. Emerging in the mid-1960s, his canonical ‘Drape’ paintings merged painting, sculpture, and performance in conversation with architecture in entirely new ways. Suspending unstretched lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed.

Sewing Fields highlights Gilliam’s connection to Ireland, where a transformative residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in the 1990s reshaped his artistic practice. Gilliam embraced new materials, working with pre-stained fabrics that he had shipped to Ireland, cutting and layering them into sculptural compositions. A collaboration with a local dressmaker further expanded this process, reinforcing his innovative fusion of painting and textile techniques.

The dramatic, undulating forms in his work resonate with the vastness and wildness of the Irish coast, featuring loose, flowing compositions that reflect the organic and unpredictable nature of the land and sea. Gilliam’s signature vibrant colour fields were influenced by the unique Irish light, resulting in atmospheric, almost translucent hues. By moving away from the rigid geometry of modernism, Gilliam’s work in Ireland fostered an intuitive dialogue with the surrounding environment, celebrating the physicality of painting and the emotional resonance of place through abstraction and materiality.

This exhibition continues IMMA’s engagement with artists whose work has received renewed attention and accolades in recent years that has included Howardena Pindell (2023), Derek Jarman (2019), and Frank Bowling (2018).

Visit The Douglas Hyde’s Summer exhibitions:
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Mohammed Sami ‘To Whom It May Concern’⁠
Gallery 1⁠
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The Artist’s Eye: Bas Jan Ader⁠
Gallery 2⁠
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13 June – 14 September 2025 ⁠

Mohammed Sami has gained recognition for his charged paintings exploring memory, conflict and loss through the familiar made strange. His first solo exhibition in Ireland brings together a group of major new canvases alongside a selection of works made over the last five years. He is one of four artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize.⁠
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Working directly onto canvas with brushes, pallet knives and spray paint, Sami creates textures, surfaces and details building the composition as a whole. Mining personal experiences to ground his work and influenced by Arabic literature and poetry, Sami replaces images of trauma with oblique references to loss or conflict. Although absent of the human form, the settings, everyday objects, and shadows, in his paintings convey traces of human presence. He uses medium, scale, and title, each cultivating the other to create charged and haunting works.⁠
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Acknowledging the crucial role artists play in influencing and shaping other artistic practices, ‘The Artist’s Eye’ series asks those exhibiting in Gallery 1 to invite an artist of influence to present work in Gallery 2. In this instalment Mohammed Sami has selected the work of artist Bas Jan Ader entitled ‘I’m Too Sad To Tell You’ (1971) to be presented.⁠
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Visit The Douglas Hyde on Wednesday – Sunday 12pm – 5pm, Thursday 12pm – 6pm.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s work is rooted in an exploration of imperial legacy, human displacement and the Anthropocene. These intertwined subjects are approached through an associative use of narrative and a deeply crafted visual language that verges on the surreal.

For Lismore, Ní Bhriain presents Inscriptions VI, an exhibition bringing together new works in tapestry, print and installation. A large scale tapestry, The Muses V, forms the centrepiece of the exhibition. The Muses series (2018-25) is a pivotal body of work for the artist – the first created in her now-signature medium of Jacquard tapestry. The series references archival photographic portraits from the 1850s, from a genre once termed ‘orientalist photography’. Supposedly an authentic representation of culture, in reality these images existed as projections of western fantasies of the exotic and the erotic. Ní Bhriain works with collage to draw out the darkness behind the fantasy, fusing the portraits with imagery of excavated landscapes and damaged cityscapes. In bringing these disparate images together, the artist suggests intertwined histories of loss and cultural destruction, pointing to the ongoing fused legacies of colonial and industrial forces. In this exhibition, Ní Bhriain presents The Muses V in dialogue with sculptural and photographic elements, extending its motifs into a series of new material and pictorial relationships within the space of St. Carthage Hall.

The exhibition’s title derives from the earliest known museological writing in the western world – Samuel Quiccheberg’s ‘Inscriptions or Titles of the Immense Theatre’ (1565), which details the practice of museums and the organisation of the world’s objects into classes and subclasses. This was essentially an instruction manual for the creation of private collections, with an explicit Western imperialist agenda. Ní Bhriain’s work since 2017 has made reference to this text, as she constructs an enigmatic visual vocabulary to explore the displacement embedded in familiar systems of representation.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s work has been shown widely internationally, at venues including Broad Museum, Michigan; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Hammer Museum, LA; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France and the 16th Lyon Biennale. Current exhibitions include The Dream Pool Intervals, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (Solo, 27 March – 28 September 2025); and Programmed Universes, MAC Lyon, France (Group, 7 March – 13 July). Recent solo exhibitions include An Experiment with Time, Kunsthal Gent, Belgium (2024); Kerlin Gallery (2023); CCA Glasgow (2022). Recent group exhibitions include Lahore Biennale 03: Of Mountains and Seas; Innsbruck International Biennial: Heaven Can Wait; and SUSPENSE, Ulster Museum, Belfast (all 2024); Lagos Photo Festival; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland; Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon; Glucksman Gallery, Cork, (all 2023) and the Lyon Biennale (2022). Public collections include Dallas Museum of Art; MAC Lyon; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Trinity College Dublin; and The Arts Council of Ireland.

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Join us for two exhibition launches on Saturday 14 June:
3pm: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain at St Carthage Hall

4pm: Laura Fitzgerald at The Mill

Open Saturdays and Sundays, 12- 5pm (during exhibitions) & other times by appointment. Admission Free.

Laura Fitzgerald is an artist who creates woven narratives of personal and political reflection in video, drawing, and text, often referencing the artist’s own rural background and general anxieties of international artistic professionalism.

Laura’s work is colourful, playful, and distinctly humorous. Often handwritten comments and narratives accompany her drawings and paintings, sometimes referencing personal experiences and sometimes pointing to much darker issues. The work draws connections between climate change and agriculture while exploring the complicated relationships of land ownership and land occupation.

For Lismore, Laura is making new sculptural work alongside a body of work researching the archive of experimental filmmaker Flora Kerrigan. A screening of Flora’s work will take place on Saturday 19 July, with a live score performed by Peadar-Tom Mercier and Ultan Lavery, of Trá Pháidín.

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Join us for two exhibition launches on Saturday 14 June:
3pm: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain at St Carthage Hall

4pm: Laura Fitzgerald at The Mill

Open Saturdays and Sundays, 12- 5pm

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.

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

Official opening: Sunday 15 June, 3:00pm
Olivier Cornet Gallery, Dublin

Artists: Annika Berglund, Hugh Cummins, Mary A. Fitzgerald, David Fox, Nickie Hayden, Miriam McConnon, Sheila Naughton, Yanny Petters, Kelly Ratchford, Vicky Smith and Colin Eaton.

As this year marks the 100th anniversary of the 1925 Paris Art Deco Expo, the Bloomsday exhibition at the Olivier Cornet Gallery is an artists’ response to this period during which James Joyce’s Ulysses was published. The show features work by our gallery artists and invited artists who have explored exterior signs of art deco in Dublin, from architectural features in government buildings, through bathing shelters, libraries to hotels and cinemas, for instance. The show also showcases personal interpretations of that period from family lore through shared stories to current events.

This exhibition is part of this year’s official programme of the Bloomsday Festival organised by the James Joyce Centre Dublin. Out of Lines runs until the 24th of August 2025.

Image: Yanny Petters, ‘Daisy, The language of Flowers’, enamel on glass, 24.5cmx19.5cm. Based on the Language of Flowers mentioned in The Lotus Eaters chapter when Bloom gets a letter from Martha.

‘Art in Motion’ Exhibition to Open at Baile Mhuire Day Centre.

Tralee Art Group is delighted to announce their latest collaborative exhibition, ‘Art in Motion’, which will be officially opened on Tuesday, June 17th at 2.30pm at Baile Mhuire Day Centre, Balloonagh, Tralee. The opening will be led by special guest Paddy Garvey, Chairperson of Baile Mhuire, and all are welcome to attend. Guests can enjoy an afternoon of art, music and refreshments in a warm and inclusive setting.

This special exhibition is the result of a unique collaboration between members of Tralee Art Group and the clients of Baile Mhuire Day Centre, showcasing the creative energy and expression of both groups. Featuring a variety of works in different media, styles and subjects, Art in Motion celebrates movement, creativity, and community spirit.

TAG is committed to enriching the cultural life of Tralee and surrounding areas. The group regularly holds exhibitions, workshops, and community projects, and has built strong relationships with local organisations—including an ongoing volunteering partnership with Baile Mhuire.

This exhibition reflects that partnership, with art created not only by TAG members but also by clients of the Day Centre who engage weekly in creative workshops facilitated by the group volunteers from Tralee Art Group. The result is a joyful and inspiring collection of artworks, each piece telling its own story of imagination, connection, and collaboration.

All are welcome to attend the opening and celebrate this uplifting display of artistic expression in our community. The exhibition will run for a year and be available to the public weekdays between 4pm and 5pm.

We are delighted to bring an exhibition by Sophie Calle, one of the most celebrated and influential conceptual artists in the world, to audiences in Northern Ireland for the first time. Beyond the Gaze – Shared Perspectives presents video works (Voir la Mer, 2011) and photographic pieces (L’Hôtel, 1981-1983).

For Voir la mer, Sophie Calle invited inhabitants of Istanbul, who often originated from central Turkey, to see the sea for the first time. “I took 15 people of all ages, from kids to one man in his 80s … once we were safely by the sea, I instructed them to take away their hands and look at it. Then, when they were ready-for some it was five minutes and for others 15-they had to turn to me and let me look at those eyes that had just seen the sea.”

One of her most famous works, Calle took the photographs of strangers’ bedrooms that make up L’Hôtel over two years.

“On Monday, February 16, 1981, I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. On Friday, March 6, the job came to an end.”*

The work presented in the exhibition has been generously loaned from the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and supported by Galerie Perrotin.

Opening reception: Saturday, the 21st of June, 12 to 2pm.

“There is something musical in how Helen Blake’s work unfolds over time. This is true of the artist’s process; it is also true for the viewer. The longer you spend with Blake’s work, the more it yields. Blake paints meticulously, in oils, on an increasingly small scale in recent years, using canvases at times no larger than an average paperback. At first impression, these works convey a bright, orderly abstraction, composed of diamonds, lozenges, triangles, and jagged serrations, interlocked with a grid-like rectilinear formality. However, upon closer inspection, these repeated shapes and geometric impressions are not so streamlined or symmetrical as they appear; they are not the product of careful planning but the result of gradually accreted layers of colour, one laid one on top of the other, affecting one another without intermingling.”

Dr. Nathan O’Donnell
From ‘Recent Works’ Molesworth Gallery, March 2017

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, she constructs overtly hand-made paintings which record and examine colour conversations within accumulating pattern structures, embracing accidents, flaws and discrepancies within their rhythms.

Starting from an imprecise grid structure, and rejecting the use of pre-drawn lines or tape, she build up layers of simple hand-painted lines and geometric shapes – square, triangle, rectangle, chevron – to create intricate surfaces where colour fragments can interact, sing together, harmonise, and sometimes jar.

Blake grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and graduated with an honours degree in Visual Art from Aberystwyth University, Wales. She lives and works in County Wicklow, Ireland. She was runner-up for the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2022.

Other awards include the Arts Council of Ireland Visual Arts Bursary Award; The Model Cara Award, Sligo; County Wicklow Visual Arts Open, Overall Winner, Mermaid Art Centre, Bray, adjudicated by Patrick T Murphy, Director, RHA. Eleven solo exhibitions to date include Molesworth Gallery, Dublin; Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast; Limerick Museum; Mermaid Art Centre, Bray; FUTURES14, RHA, Dublin.

Her paintings been shown in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including in the RHA Dublin and RA London Annual Exhibitions. She is represented by Molesworth Gallery, Dublin and Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast.

The Cash Shop is a curatorial project by artist Jim Ricks and is a community-engaged contemporary visual arts hub in South County Galway.

Exhibitions continue 22 May – 8 August 2025.

10am-3pm Monday to Friday.

Admiration Hyperbolique and Touchstone. Fionnuala Quinn, Quadrangle, University of Galway.
Two exhibitions of paintings and installations by Fionnuala Quinn, artist in residence at the James Mitchell Geology Museum 2024-2025 showing in the Quadrangle, University of Galway, H91TK33. Opening hours: 10am-3pm Monday to Friday. Dates: 22 May-8 August.

TOUCHSTONE is in the ground floor Staff Club, ADMIRATION HYPERBOLIQUE is in the James Mitchell Geology Museum.

TOUCHSTONE is a series of responses to the search for solace in our cities. Our profound dependence on all of the materials of the earth may be forgotten when noisy human stories, of feuds and petty detail consistently play centre stage. Mineral pigment, water, paper and wood have been pushed and manipulated to form paintings about living in a restless zone. Respite from daily clock time, however brief, is sought so that the weight of the past can be shed as it tumbles down to join the traces of history retained in the bricks and mortar of the old city.

On the floor directly above in the Geology Museum, founded in the 1850’s, ADMIRATION HYPERBOLIQUE responds to the theme of time amongst the fossils, rocks and minerals. These specimens are deep time in material form and illustrate that, come what may, nature is never, ever, a miser. You are invited to post a comment in the box, if anything comes to mind…

Access: Accessible parking by the Quadrangle arch. The Staff Club is fully accessible from the street with all gender bathroom. Please note that the Museum on the first floor does not have step free access.

Exhibition continues 20 June – 10 August 2025.

On Waking
Jenny Eden, Christopher Hanlon, Harminder Judge, Gillian Lawler,
Damien Meade, Karen Roulstone and Rebecca Sitar

20th June – 10th August 2025
Preview 19th June from 5-7pm

On Waking is a group painting exhibition featuring new and existing work by seven painters from Ireland and the UK, whose paintings communicate wonder and encounter, things half-glimpsed, remembered and imagined. It brings together paintings with an otherworldly sensibility, where the slippage between recollection and metamorphosis, between what is real or imagined, is played out in a series of new realities.

The title of the exhibition directs us to the ‘waking moment’ when our sense of time and reality is unlike usual conscious experiences. As we leave the cocoon of sleep, the veil between waking and sleeping falls away and the transition from sleep’s slumber ignites continuous time and an openness of the self – nothing is finite. In this ‘preconscious’ state we are open to the possibilities of ‘becoming’. Time feels expansive, fluid not fixed, and divisions between past, present and future dissipate in favour of a temporal fusion. The paintings in On Waking mirror this moment in a myriad of poetic, philosophical and perceptual ways.

Opening up to ‘being in the world’, these paintings also prompt a poetic sensibility and a different viewing, an attentive and participatory gaze. Encouraging an active way of seeing, the paintings do not describe an event, they are an event, resembling poems and Lavinia Greenlaw’s notion of poetic form; “it is this vessel, and, it is a place in which you hope the reader will have something activated for them rather than enacted for them” [1]. And like poems, paintings hold experience and perception acknowledged by the viewer in the act of looking, who changes what is being observed and, through observing, becomes part of the picture.

The paintings in this exhibition invite a slow gaze, a complex ritual in ways of seeing. They pivot between representation and abstraction, looking one way and the other, oscillating productively between the two. Occupying this liminal space, paintings become “potential images”, according to Dario Gamboni, “[…] established – in the realm of the virtual – by the artist but dependent on the beholder for their realization. […] Their property is to make the beholder aware […] of the active, subjective, nature of seeing” [2].

Curated and written by Jenny Eden & Rebecca Sitar

References
[1] BBC Radio 4 (2020) Only Artists: Lavinia Greenlaw meets Charles Avery, 11th March 2020, 14:29. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000g43y].
[2] Gamboni, D. (2002) quoted in B. Schwabsky, ‘Everyday Painting’ (2011) Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting. London: Phaidon Press Ltd, p. 14.

Theoretical and Socio-cultural Context

This exhibition stems from an interest in the human experience of time, presented by phenomenologists Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger. Bergson’s exploration of psychological time, fused and in flux rather than formulaic and structured, has particular relevance to the exhibition. His notion of unfolding time, where the past, present and future converge within the human ‘encounter’, is connected to the making and reception of paintings and central to an interpretation of the period of waking from sleep. In addition, Martin Heidegger’s investigations into the ontology of being and ‘being in the world’ are also poignant, suggesting an empowering responsibility in the durational activities of seeing and thinking.

Siri Hustvedt’s essay ‘The Drama of Perception’ has also been considered in the context of the exhibition. Hustvedt examines the gaze from a neuroscientific perspective, looking at the relationship between the pre-attentive and attentive gaze, claiming a gap between these positions can ‘open up’ embodied engagement and ‘seeing with feeling’.

Within a wider artistic and philosophical context, the works in On Waking highlight painting’s idiosyncratic characteristics as a unique and distinct medium. Paintings hold the possibility of movement within stillness – they are containers of compressed time, records of elongated time and an amalgamation of time-spaces from different periods. Thus, in relation to Eastern Philosophy, the paintings in this exhibition prompt a psychic experience whereby time and presence are refreshed and continuous, and expansive moments of reflection and enlightenment are channelled and processed.

In focusing on transitions and awakenings, this exhibition promotes active looking, mindful thinking and reception, and a deeper appreciation of human time in relation to memory and experience. These paintings provide a counter to recent global socio-technological developments, in the aftermath of lockdown decelerations, addressing positive approaches to health and well-being and an attitude of slow thinking and contemplation.

Enquiries to artgallery@limerick.ie

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.

Exhibition Dates: 27.06.25 – 13.09.25
Launch Event: Friday, June 27th from 6pm

Exhibiting Artists: David Beattie, Ala Buisir, Cecilia Bullo, Pauline Cummins, Lauren Kelly, Maria McKinney, and Fiona Whelan

Together in Commune, is the first exhibition of Rua Red’s Studio Programme, curated by Marysia Wieckiewicz and featuring work by Rua Red’s current resident studio artists: David Beattie, Ala Buisir, Cecilia Bullo, Pauline Cummins, Lauren Kelly, Maria McKinney, and Fiona Whelan.

This exhibition marks an important moment for Rua Red, highlighting the depth and breadth of the practices nurtured and supported within these walls. Working closely with the curator in the months leading up to the exhibition, each artist presents work that reflects their individual practice, while collectively exploring themes central to socially engaged contemporary art.

Rua Red’s Studio Programme, awarded through panel selection for a period of one to three years, is a core pillar of the organisation’s mission; to support artists at every stage of their career. The studios at Rua Red provide artists with time, space, and a supportive community that encourages sustained and critical artistic practice. In turn, the presence of these artists in the building fundamentally shapes Rua Red as a centre for enquiry and experimentation. Their work contributes to a vibrant and evolving ecology of ideas that extends beyond the studio walls, enriching both the organisation and the wider cultural landscape of South Dublin County and beyond.

Dysphoric Euphoria presents polarising extremes of queer existence. Within this exhibition Peter Bradley and Stephen Doyle explore the joys and the hardships of Queer experiences through painting. Taking on themes of societal exclusion, religious power, and identity in a contemporary Irish society.

The titular duality is divided by the artists. Doyle manifests Dysphoria by allowing discomfort to become tangible through their handling of paint and installation work. They depict some of the major obstacles facing the community to challenge systems of power and oppression in its various forms. Bradley’s collection portrays the Euphoric through themes of community, joy as a form of resistance, and liberation from gender norms through playful collages of paint, plexiglass and personality.

Accompanying the paintings within the show are texts by El Reid- Buckley, FELISPEAKS and William Keohane.

Love is blindly reaching out rhizoids and anchoring them to a rock is the newest manifestation of the world of Xenophon, a collaborative world-building project by McGibbon O’Lynn.

Rooted in the fictional world of the Xenothorpians – a fluid species mutating across vegetal, human, and ecological entanglement – the exhibition activates a multispecies romance beyond the species and the sexual. The project expands ideas of intimacy and relations through flings, courtships, longings, and liaisons with the garden.

The artistic duo consider how the gamification of dating has shaped how humans relate to one another, from 1960s TV shows like The Dating Game to 1990s board games like Dream Phone, and today’s swipe-based apps like Tinder and Bumble. These formats reduce love to strategy, speed, and surface, often reinforcing transactional and disposable dynamics. This exhibition responds to that shift, questioning what we lose when intimacy becomes a game. it proposes a radical reimagining of connection – towards a more expansive, inclusive, and multispecies form of love and relationality.

The audience is invited into this multispecies dating game through ritual, material, and speculative storytelling. The project asks: what new intimacies arise when we love without species’ boundaries?

Maeve O’Lynn is a writer, filmmaker and researcher based in Belfast. Siobhán McGibbon is a visual artist and researcher based in Cork. They began world-building together as McGibbon O’Lynn in 2015.

This project is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Derry City & Strabane District Council and Cork County Council.

For more information visit CCADLD.org/exhibitions

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

Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present Pictures of You, guest curated by Miles Thurlow (Co-founder of WORKPLACE).

The exhibition brings together 16 international and multigenerational artists, whose of images, objects and actions evoke specific, often fleeting, moments whilst simultaneously revealing incisive reflections on time, memory and social structures.

Eve Ackroyd | Simeon Barclay | James Cabaniuk | Samuel Laurence Cunnane | Hollis Frampton | Ryan Gander | Nan Goldin | Merlin James | Sooim Jeong | Laura Lancaster | Rachel Lancaster | William McKeown | Robin Megannity | Wang Pei | Hannah Perry | Ki Yoong

Opening Reception: Thursday 3 July, 6–8pm
4 July – 23 August 2025.

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

‘Future Fossils: Junk or Jewels’, a solo exhibition, by artist Fiona Mulholland, launching in the Linenhall Arts Centre on Friday, July 4th at 5pm. Exhibition runs until Saturday, August 9th.

The solo exhibition “Future Fossils: Junk or Jewels” by Fiona Mulholland presents new and existing photographic and sculptural works that examine our conflicted and fragile relationship with both the natural and built environment. Over recent decades, the cumulative impact of human activity on the Earth has become impossible to ignore. Along our coastlines, flotsam, industrial detritus, and commercial waste have become a permanent presence—bearing silent witness to a legacy of human-generated ‘natural’ waste.

In these works, the artist juxtaposes industrial materials with references to heritage and archaeology, creating poignant contrasts that prompt reflection on what we consider valuable. These sculptural ‘artifacts’ operate as visual dialogues—inviting viewers to contemplate the tension between the precious and the disposable, the permanent and the perishable.

The exhibition engages with themes of resilience, renewal, and repair, foregrounding the delicate interdependence between humanity, culture, and the environment. Through material transformation and symbolic layering, Mulholland invites viewers to consider what lies beneath the surface — both literally and metaphorically — and to reflect on how place, memory, and belonging are interwoven. The work becomes a space for reflection—on loss, endurance, and thoughtfully navigates the subtle depths of inner and outer landscapes, blending myth with the shape of place.

Fiona Mulholland has been working successfully across a range of visual disciplines and contexts for over twenty-five years. Throughout her career she has moved fluidly between fine and applied art and is motivated by materials, processes and the challenges of contexts. She digs deeply into the psychological dimensions of our human experience within a given environment to communicate contradictions and complex rituals. Fiona has produced award-winning designs, large-scale public art, and work within gallery contexts. Recent public realm artwork includes a major commission, Island City – Cork’s Urban sculpture Trail initiated by Cork City Council in 2023, alongside a solo exhibition, ‘In Search of Pearls & Future Fossils’ with Artlink at Fort Dunree in Co Donegal. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, most recently with the Hamilton Gallery in Sligo. Fiona has regularly lectured in art and design at third level, curated several significant exhibitions and been the recipient of several bursary awards. She currently lives and works between Dublin and the Northwest of Ireland.

The exhibition was kindly facilitated with the support of the Artists Bursary Scheme from Donegal County Council.

Gallery Opening Hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10am to 5pm
Saturday 11am – 4pm

Instagram: @linenhall_arts

Mairead O’hEocha; Extra Alphabets
Sat. 5 Jul. – Sat. 20 Sep. 2025
Curated by Michael Hill

Mairead O’hEocha’s recent paintings cast an array of extraordinary and everyday tabletop scenes that float in and out from the facts and furnishings of their surrounds: birds invade a garden lunch, an octopus coils its tentacles in a trophy room, a fake loaf of bread sits solemnly at the tenement museum; a blizzard is observed from the comfort of a home workspace.

O’hEocha’s paintings consolidate a variety of recurring themes: how to depict ‘the natural world’ and our relationship with it, sensory encounters and digital space. Extra Alphabets is the largest gathering of O’hEocha’s work in an exhibition to date. The focus is on a group of new large-scale oil paintings, with a number of unseen works, plus a selection from international exhibitions, adding to this overview of the artist’s practice. The exhibition also includes painted interventions that charge the gallery’s walls, bringing O’hEocha’s work into close conversation with The Model’s unique architecture. These painted elements play with the perimeters of the exhibition space, so the cabinets, windows, animals, glass objects, tables and their horizon lines – O’hEocha’s register of motifs – expand, absorb and reflect her approach to painting, and its forms of display.\

Artist Talk
Sat. 5 Jul. 3pm

At the opening of the exhibition Ben Eastham will talk to Mairead O’hEocha about her work.

Ben Eastham is a writer and editor based in Rome and London. He is editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism and co-founder of The White Review. His second book, The Imaginary Museum, was published in September 2020; his debut novel, The Floating World, is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

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

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

Exhibition continues 28 June – 14 August 2025.

An exhibition of new works on paper from Limerick Printmakers.

RISK/ REWARD explores the importance and power in cultivating resilience as an individual and as an artist, while acknowledging the challenges of maintaining this quality in an increasingly complex world. Creative resilience allows artists to simultaneously “trust the process” and trust themselves as they navigate periods of experimentation, exploring risk through problem solving, and defining their own metrics of failure and success when creating art.

For most creators, there is an inextricable link between how their artwork is perceived and how they view themselves. Our societal understanding of failure has shifted in recent years, away from the notion that it is a permanent state, instead, reframing setbacks as an essential catalyst to growth, learning and innovation.

Exhibition continues 14 June – 16 August 2025.

These Magnetic Magnitudes
Cecilia Danell
Curated by Brenda McParland

These Magnetic Magnitudes is a solo exhibition of new and recent paintings, textiles, ceramics and film by Cecilia Danell, curated by Brenda McParland. The exhibition explores the overarching theme of contemporary landscapes and our unfulfilled yearning for that which is primal and unspoilt, filtered through the lens of psychogeography, Science Fiction and the sublime. In a practice which is rooted in materiality and process, the starting point for Danell’s work is a first-hand engagement with the landscape of the area in Sweden where she grew up. Bodily memories of moving through the places she depicts are mirrored in the physical endeavour of painting on a large scale, which creates its own spatial choreography. The landscapes Danell depicts are real places that she has encountered and photographed. However rather than offering a documentary view of these places, she uses fiction and the imaginary to speak about present and possible futures through a Science Fiction reading of the landscape. A new series of large paintings considers ideas around spectatorship and participation, inspired by the large nature dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. We are presented with scenes that invite the viewer to step into them, yet the 2D surfaces of her paintings prevent us. Danell continuously points back to this push and pull between realism, abstraction and the materiality of paint itself. She uses oil and acrylic on canvas in vivid shades of greens, purples and pinks, using acrylic washes and layers beneath the oil paint, and acrylic for drips because of its viscosity and velocity.

Danell is predominantly a painter, but also makes textile tapestries, ceramic and fabric sculptures and occasionally films. Danell recalls idyllic summer childhood memories of the Swedish countryside in her oversized fabric sculpture Lupin, 2024 which is both beautiful and treacherous as lupins are listed as an invasive species in Sweden, that should be eradicated when found in the wild. A series of ceramic sculptures in pastel shades and three large colourful appliqúe tapestries memorialise snow for future generations by playing with its properties of hiding and abstracting the underlying shapes. Echoing the snowy vistas in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, these are imaginary “ur-forms” that touch upon the primeval, merging colourful playfulness with a solemn reminder of climate change and the state of our planet. In the same room, the film Snow Day, 2025 (15 mins) camera/editing by Danell; soundtrack by Keith Wallace/Loner Deluxe captures a first-person view of the artist moving through the snowy woods in Sweden which is both immersive and atmospheric.

A hardback catalogue with texts by Aidan Dunne and Charity Coleman will be published by Solstice Arts Centre and Kevin Kavanagh in autumn 2025.

The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday 11am – 4pm.

In his exhibition, open from this Thursday, Davy Mahon explores the idea of the eternal apocalypse. Toying with our fetishes of the end of the world, and confronting facets of zen Fascism and neoliberalism that sit at the heart of this, the artist asks, how do you make fun of such grim and grubby stuff?

Davy Mahon is an artist and curator living and working in Belfast. He has a first-class BFA from Ulster University (2011). Mahon has shown works and ‘performed’ across Ireland, the UK and internationally. He works both solo and collaboratively across different mediums. Davy is the Project Curator and Co-Creative Director of PS2, Belfast. He began the post in 2022 to coordinate and curate the programme, develop resources for artists and audiences to utilise. He also takes out the bins and tidies up.

Exhibition runs until 14 August
Open Monday/Tuesday/Thursday/Friday
10am–4pm
5 North Street
Belfast, BT1 1NA

The Patrick Kavanagh Centre and Inniskeen Road July Evening present ‘Moments to see wonders in the grass’ an exhibition of drawings by Irish artist John Price. These drawings are inspired by the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh and will be on display at the Round Tower Church Inniskeen, from Thursday 10th July until Sunday 13th July. Open Reception 7.30pm Thursday 10th July. This exhibition will also be shown in the Carrckmacross Civic Centre for four weeks from Thursday 17th July.

Sarah Buckley is hosting her second solo show ‘Everything I couldn’t leave behind’ in Blackwater Valley Makers, Fermoy, from the 12th July to the 24th August 2025. Sarah Buckley is a visual artist based in North Cork. Working mainly in textiles while also incorporating sculpture and installation, Sarah’s work is a personal exploration of childhood memory, trauma, experience and identity. Playing on emotive motifs of childhood, her work delves into the psychological impact of having two infantile haemangiomas (benign vascular birthmarks). This exploration has led her to expand her curiosity and enquiry into psychic wounds, social acceptance of difference and visual impairment. Interested in engaging discussion around childhood memory and perception, she uses the medium of textiles for its accessibility of understanding, associations of childhood and slow, mediative production. Her exploration of childhood memory, trauma, and identity through the medium of textiles offers a deeply personal yet universally resonant perspective, addressing the complexities of difference and the lingering impacts of early experiences.

Sarah graduated with a BA in Visual Art (Sherkin Island) in 2018 and is currently undertaking a Special Award in Textiles (Level 8) in the Crawford College of art and design. Her work has been exhibited in Ireland and the UK and she received an Arts Council Agility Award in 2021. She was curator for the 2024 EMERGE exhibition by Cork Craft and Design. Sh regularly facilitates workshops for adults and children in all things textiles.

An exhibition from Crawford Art Gallery Collection selected by Salt & Pepper LGBTQI+ Art Collective with Toma McCullim

Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre – alongside the Salt & Pepper group (West Cork’s elder LGBTQI+ arts collective) – has partnered with artist Toma McCullim to curate an invigorating exhibition for summer 2025. Titled Grá, this exhibition celebrates love in all its forms and draws from the collection of Crawford Art Gallery. Accompanying this curated selection are responses to individual artworks in the exhibition made by artists from the Salt & Pepper Collective.

While this National Cultural Institution is closed for its major redevelopment – Transforming Crawford Art Gallery – the opportunity arose to share parts of its collection with other organisations across the island of Ireland to create meaningful encounters for the public. With the guidance of Dr. Michael Waldron Curator of Collections and Special Projects at Crawford Art Gallery, Salt & Pepper has explored the collection to shape a diverse, inclusive showcase for Uillinn, accompanied by a rich programme of talks, tours, workshops, and events.

Grá features key works from the 20th and 21st centuries, including the iconic Portrait of Fiona Shaw (2002) by Victoria Russell, The Red Rose (1923) by John Lavery, and Patrick Hennessy’s Self Portrait and Cat (1978), as well as Paul La Rocque’s In Her Own Garden (1998) and the photographic series Hi, Vis (2020-21) by Dragana Jurišić. The exhibition also includes works by, among others, Sara Baume, Margaret Clarke, Tom Climent, Gerard Dillon, Stephen Doyle, Mainie Jellett, Harry Kernoff, Janet Mullarney, Isabel Nolan, John Rainey, Patrick Scott, Edith Somerville, Niamh Swanton, and Mary Swanzy.

A highlight of the exhibition is the formation of the Grá Choir led by singer-songwriter Liz Clark in collaboration with Salt & Pepper. The choir will perform Beloved, a choral piece and a moving tribute to enduring love, composed by Carol Nelson for her wife Deborah, at the opening of the Grá exhibition. A further performance will take place in St. Barrahane’s Church, Castletownshend later in the summer.

Developed through a series of workshops by West Cork Rainbow Families in collaboration with Toma McCullim, the Grá Discovery Box will be available throughout the exhibition. It invites families to explore the exhibition together, encouraging interaction with the artwork and offering insights into the artists’ creative processes. It’s free to use, and no booking is required.

Developed and facilitated by artist Toma McCullim and health professional Sarah Cairns, In the Picture, le Grá is a dementia-friendly gallery programme thoughtfully designed for small groups. Participants are given time to explore the space and artwork at their own pace, with light refreshments included to support a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere.

Film screenings include a short film programme curated by Kai Fiáin reflecting the exhibition’s themes of intimacy, resistance and renewal on Saturday 23 August at 7.00pm; Aideen Barry’s Not to be Known (single channel film, 5.5 mins, Crawford Collection) on Friday 1 August from 10.00am to 4.30pm and Clare Langan’s The Heart of a Tree (HD digital film, 12 mins, Crawford Collection) on Saturday 23 August, 10.00am to 3.30pm.

Grá Gallery Talk and Tours with Dr. Michael Waldron will take place on Thursday 24 July at 1.00pm and Thursday 18 September at 1.00pm, free event, no booking necessary.

For further information on these and other events please see our web and social media channels.

Image: Paul La Rocque, In Her Own Garden. Collection Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. © the artist

This summer marks a transformative moment for Kilmacthomas as the historic Old Woollen Mill reopens its doors, with the first floor of the mill reimagined as the 8 Arch Gallery—a new cultural space in the heart of the town. To celebrate this reopening, the gallery proudly presents its inaugural exhibition, featuring work by seven of Ireland’s most significant living artists.
Charles Tyrell
Bernadette Kiely
Gerda Teljeur
Paul Mosse
Eilis O’Connell
Eamon Colman
Pat Harris
This landmark show brings together an exciting collection of drawings, paintings and sculptures. Each artist has been carefully selected for their contribution to the visual arts, and the unique voice they bring to Ireland’s evolving cultural narrative.

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.

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.

In December 2017, artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (b. 1969, London, UK) made an artwork in response to the fire that took place earlier that year on 14 June at Grenfell Tower, North Kensington, West London. 72 people died in the tragedy. Filming the tower before it was covered with hoarding, McQueen sought to make a record.

Following the fire, a Government Inquiry ran from September 2017 until September 2024. The resulting recommendations are yet to be implemented, meaning a similar tragedy could happen again. There is an ongoing criminal investigation, with potential charges including corporate manslaughter. No trials are expected until 2027 at the earliest, over a decade since the fire.

Grenfell was first presented in 2023 at Serpentine in London’s Kensington Gardens, following a period of private viewings, prioritising bereaved families and survivors. Following its presentation at Serpentine the work was placed in the care of Tate and the London Museum’s collections.

Please note screenings of Grenfell will take place at set times. Doors open fifteen minutes before the screening time and the screening will commence promptly. This work is intended to be seen from the start, so unfortunately latecomers cannot be admitted. The film is 24 minutes long.

The film contains close-up imagery of the tower six months after the fire. Please let a member of our team know if you need space to pause, rest and reflect afterwards.

Filming or photography is not permitted in the gallery space. Please ensure your phone is on silent.

This national tour is being coordinated by Tate in collaboration with the partner venues and is made possible thanks to public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England and from Art Fund.