What’s on in Connaught

Kinvara Area Visual Artists (KAVA) are pleased to present a new exhibition, Darryl Vance: Situated, opening Friday, August 29th, 2025 with a public reception from 7 to 9pm at The Courthouse in Kinvara, County Galway. The exhibition will open with remarks by artist and musician Cath Taylor and music by singer songwriter Mick Brown. The gallery will be open daily from 11am until 5pm through Sunday, September 7th.
In this new work, artist Darryl Vance continues his exploration of the transformative qualities of paint. Developing his process over the past eight years, Vance has arrived at works of increasing complexity, bold colour and uneasy coherence. Juxtaposing the classic modernism of Mondrian, Paul Klee and Frank Lloyd Wright with the aesthetics of funk and the handmade, his geometry is surprisingly warm, inviting and sensual. His work appears initially comforting, yet on closer viewing subtle tensions emerge.

“I’ve been using this method of painting – slicing up cardboard moving boxes into rectangles and then painting and arranging them – as a way to imagine the notion of dramatic change and to channel it into something unexpected,” Vance explains. “`It became a way of using painting without making a picture of something, which is kind of funny considering the new series I’m doing.”

Over the past few years, as he became settled in the village of Kinvara, Vance began to look at his place in it. “So many things came to mind. The land and the things on it – livestock, boats, buildings in all states of ruin, walls, hedges – compelled me to paint a sort of ‘thank you’ note to it all.” he says.

Last year he came upon an idea for a different tool to paint with: rushes. “I’d learned to make Brigid’s crosses with them, and it got me thinking that they were an apt tool to use in painting about this place.” Vance would later find out they’re quite versatile, and depending on how many you use, the strokes can be broad as a broom or needle thin. He continues, “I use them to add paint and also add texture, making a subtle surface of marks and patterns that recall the ancient and the prehistoric.”

Combining those wild Irish weeds with the usual brushes and palette knives lets Vance continue the nervous energy of his geometric paintings. His new series depicts more familiar aspects of the world through the artist’s idiosyncratic vision. A cow stands in a boat, a Flake bar in its back. A sunken boat creates a small bowl of calm water. A herd of painted rocks. A broken necklace.

“The subjects all seem to have a peculiar narrative in common: that something has happened to them.”

Together with his painted cardboard sculptures – “house-shaped paintings” as Vance calls them – the exhibition’s trio of simultaneous series embodies the work of an endlessly inquisitive creativity.

Darryl Vance (American-Irish, b.1954) is a visual artist living in Kinvara, County Galway. His work is shown and collected internationally, most recently selected for Ballinglen Art Museum’s Biennial. Other juried shows include Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar (2023), Art Fair in Waterford (2021), The Courthouse in Ennistymon (2019), and The Westport Music + Arts Festival (2018 and 2019). Recent solo exhibitions include The Galway Fringe Festival (2020), A Space Gallery (2020) and KAVA (2017, 2019 and 2023). He was awarded a BFA from The Atlanta College of Art and has worked in photography, video, public media, performance, conceptual art and painting.

Cath Taylor is a multidisciplinary artist and musician.

Mick Brown is a Galway-based singer, songwriter, folk musician and community music facilitator.

Exhibition continues 1 June – 31 August 2025.

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

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

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

Kinvara Area Visual Artists (KAVA) are pleased to present a new exhibition, Darryl Vance: Situated, opening Friday, August 29th, 2025 with a public reception from 7 to 9pm at The Courthouse in Kinvara, County Galway. The exhibition will open with remarks by artist and musician Cath Taylor and music by singer songwriter Mick Brown. The gallery will be open daily from 11am until 5pm through Sunday, September 7th.
In this new work, artist Darryl Vance continues his exploration of the transformative qualities of paint. Developing his process over the past eight years, Vance has arrived at works of increasing complexity, bold colour and uneasy coherence. Juxtaposing the classic modernism of Mondrian, Paul Klee and Frank Lloyd Wright with the aesthetics of funk and the handmade, his geometry is surprisingly warm, inviting and sensual. His work appears initially comforting, yet on closer viewing subtle tensions emerge.

“I’ve been using this method of painting – slicing up cardboard moving boxes into rectangles and then painting and arranging them – as a way to imagine the notion of dramatic change and to channel it into something unexpected,” Vance explains. “`It became a way of using painting without making a picture of something, which is kind of funny considering the new series I’m doing.”

Over the past few years, as he became settled in the village of Kinvara, Vance began to look at his place in it. “So many things came to mind. The land and the things on it – livestock, boats, buildings in all states of ruin, walls, hedges – compelled me to paint a sort of ‘thank you’ note to it all.” he says.

Last year he came upon an idea for a different tool to paint with: rushes. “I’d learned to make Brigid’s crosses with them, and it got me thinking that they were an apt tool to use in painting about this place.” Vance would later find out they’re quite versatile, and depending on how many you use, the strokes can be broad as a broom or needle thin. He continues, “I use them to add paint and also add texture, making a subtle surface of marks and patterns that recall the ancient and the prehistoric.”

Combining those wild Irish weeds with the usual brushes and palette knives lets Vance continue the nervous energy of his geometric paintings. His new series depicts more familiar aspects of the world through the artist’s idiosyncratic vision. A cow stands in a boat, a Flake bar in its back. A sunken boat creates a small bowl of calm water. A herd of painted rocks. A broken necklace.

“The subjects all seem to have a peculiar narrative in common: that something has happened to them.”

Together with his painted cardboard sculptures – “house-shaped paintings” as Vance calls them – the exhibition’s trio of simultaneous series embodies the work of an endlessly inquisitive creativity.

Darryl Vance (American-Irish, b.1954) is a visual artist living in Kinvara, County Galway. His work is shown and collected internationally, most recently selected for Ballinglen Art Museum’s Biennial. Other juried shows include Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar (2023), Art Fair in Waterford (2021), The Courthouse in Ennistymon (2019), and The Westport Music + Arts Festival (2018 and 2019). Recent solo exhibitions include The Galway Fringe Festival (2020), A Space Gallery (2020) and KAVA (2017, 2019 and 2023). He was awarded a BFA from The Atlanta College of Art and has worked in photography, video, public media, performance, conceptual art and painting.

Cath Taylor is a multidisciplinary artist and musician.

Mick Brown is a Galway-based singer, songwriter, folk musician and community music facilitator.

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

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

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

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

Bio’s

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibition continues from 22nd of August to the 7th of September 2025

Manner-isms brings together two artists, A.S. Dutton and Francine Marquis, whose practices explore material, memory, and the passage of time.

Through stone, clay, plaster, fabric, and wood, the works in this exhibition examine how care, environment, and human touch shape—and are shaped by—the spaces and materials we live among.

In these pieces, the domestic and the elemental meet; personal narratives and geological timescales overlap. The result is a conversation between slow change and sudden shift, between the persistence of stone and the fragility of the body, between material and self.

You are invited to explore these minute characteristics ever-present in our surroundings and re-experience yourself among them.

Manner-isms will run from the 22nd of August to the 7th of September. Come and join us on Friday the 22nd of August at 6pm for the opening of this exhibition!

Open daily from 12pm-6pm at 126 Artist-Run Gallery, 15 St. Bridget’s Place, Galway. 126 thanks the Burren College of Arts, the Arts Council of Ireland and Galway City Council for their collaboration and support.

Curated by Eva O’Byrne.

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.

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.

Exhibition continues 1 June – 31 August 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bio’s

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opening Saturday 9 August 2025. 5-7 pm. Special musical performance by Rory Pierce

The Ballinglen Arts Foundation is proud to present Janet Pierce: Into the Light, a solo exhibition by the distinguished Scottish-born, Dublin-based artist Janet Pierce. Running from August 9 to

October 20, 2025, this exhibition brings together new and recent works that explore luminosity, inner vision, and spiritual resonance through richly layered abstraction.

Pierce’s work draws on a lifetime of immersion in the landscapes of Co Fermanagh and Co Monaghan. Her paintings—ethereal yet grounded—serve as meditative spaces that invite reflection and stillness. Known for her use of gold leaf, translucent washes, and sacred symbols, Pierce’s visual language bridges the material and the mystical, offering viewers a pathway “into the light.”

Over more than a decade, Pierce spent winters in India, exhibiting widely in New Delhi and producing a book with acclaimed poet Sudeep Sen. Two significant works from that period—a painting and a tapestry—are permanently installed in Mageough Chapel in Rathmines, Dublin. Now based in Rathmines after 15 years living in a house she built on the grounds of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Pierce continues to create work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant.

A member of Aosdána, she has exhibited extensively in Ireland, the UK, the United States, and India. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, and she has received international recognition, including awards from the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain and the Sanskriti Foundation in India.

This exhibition marks a significant return to the west of Ireland for an artist whose practice is rooted in silence, spirit, and landscape.

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).

Galway Arts Centre is pleased to announce ‘The Air We Share’, a major group exhibition of works developed through a year-long artist residency programme, exploring air quality, climate, and our shared environment through artistic collaboration and community engagement in Galway.

‘The Air We Share’ brings together the work of artists Christopher Steenson, Leon Butler and the artist collective a place of their own (Sam Vardy and Paula McCloskey) who, over the last nine months have worked with scientists, residents, and community groups to creatively respond to real-world air pollution research and lived experience in Westside, Galway aiming to deepen public understanding of air and its critical role in our shared environment.

The exhibition will be officially opened on Saturday 16 August 2025 at 2pm by Deputy Mayor of Galway City Alan Cheevers with guest speaker Annie Fletcher, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. All are welcome to attend.

‘The Air We Share’ brings together a consortium of local partners, which is led by Galway City Council and includes Galway Arts Centre, the University of Galway’s Centre for Creative Technologies, the Centre for Climate and Air Pollution Studies and the Insight SFI Centre for Data Analytics, Westside Resource Centre, and Galway Culture Company.

The resulting works featured in the exhibition include; Leon Butler’s ‘Phosphene’ a project that transforms real-time air quality data into sculptural and digital forms, inviting community members to co-design how environmental data is experienced and interpreted, Christopher Steenson’s ‘Where does the body end’ reflects on air pollution and breath through sound walks, writing, and workshops, linking live data with personal and collective experience and ‘a place of their own’ (Paula McCloskey & Sam Vardy) ‘The 9 Freedoms for the Air’ a speculative, collaborative artwork imagining future air rights, developed through participatory workshops with residents, scientists, and legal experts.

The exhibition will be on view from 16 August to 21 September 2025, with a programme of talks, guided tours, and public events taking place throughout its duration. Please see https://www.galwayartscentre.ie/whats-on/thursday-evenings-at-galway-arts-centre/ for more info.

A very special thanks to collaborators Karena Ryan, Alena Postnikova, Gary Stewart and to the participants The Red Bird Youth Collective & all the members of the Westside Community who brought their collaborative creativity to the projects.

‘The Air We Share’ is a recipient of the Creative Climate Action Fund, an initiative of the Creative Ireland Programme, funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media in collaboration with the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications.

For more information please visit www.theairweshare.ie

False Kingdoms a solo exhibition presented by Kaye Maahs will be shown in the upstairs gallery space. Maahs’ practice is devoted to the pursuit of painting. With the aid of photography, she documents moments, places and environments. Images are utilised as navigation props for assistance when she paints.
Maahs’ has held numerous solo exhibitions and has participated in multiple group shows nationally. Award. She has won many awards including the Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust Award and the Hunt Museums Curator’s Choice award.

Please join us on the evening of Thursday 21 August 2025, 6-8pm, opening remarks by Anne Hodge, National Gallery of Ireland and Katriona Gillespie, manager of the Custom House Studios + Gallery.
This exhibition is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Mayo County Council.

The Fresh to the Salt is a two-person exhibition by visual artists Angie Shanahan & Bridget Flannery (posthumously 1959 – 2024) which will be shown in the main gallery space. The exhibition consists of drawings and paintings responding to the artists’ engagement with coastal and riverine landscapes through drawing, sketch booking and mapping. History, placenames and local studies also feed into their preoccupation with the sense of place.

Angie Shanahan’s current practice involves landscape impacted by human presence usually set within a specific water defined place, the coast. She has had numerous solo exhibitions and has participated in numerous group shows nationwide.

During her lifetime, Bridget Flannery’s work was mainly focused on painting and drawing. She consistently exhibited in solo and group shows in Ireland and Europe. Her work is held in public and private collections nationally and internationally.

Please join us on the evening of Thursday 21 August 2025, 6-8pm, opening remarks by Anne Hodge, National Gallery of Ireland and Katriona Gillespie, manager of the Custom House Studios + Gallery.
This exhibition is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Mayo County Council.

Libraries of Rest by Ciara Barker.

Opening Reception: Saturday 23 August, 2-4pm.

Libraries of Rest by Ciara Barker is an immersive exhibition that invites visitors to imagine the future of restful spaces and practices. Libraries of Rest combines installation, gameplay, sound and light, inhabiting a space between visual art, immersive environment and critical theory, centered on collective well-being.

Barker’s investigation of rest as a method of resistance is informed by a number of critical works, including texts by Tricia Hersey, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, Sonya Renee Taylor and Dr. Devon Price. This scholarship is grounded in its examination of structural inequality and rest as a racial, disability rights and social justice issue that disproportionately affects marginalised communities.

This exhibition is curated by Aoife Donnellan with a soundscape by Mankyy. Image: Ciara Barker, Libraries of Rest at transmediale studio in Berlin. Image: Ciara Barker, Libraries of Rest at transmediale studio in Berlin. Photo by Katie O’Neill.

Diagonal Acts by Marie Farrington.

Opening Reception: Saturday 23 August, 2-4pm.

Diagonal Acts refers to how diagonal lines are seen as ways to connect, divide and move across various places or ideas. The exhibition explores themes of memory, place and connection — exploring gaps, fragments and edges within archaeology, geology, sculpture and staged performance.

The material outcomes in Diagonal Acts are supported by a range of collaborations, and connected by a public programme of generative elements devised to critically engage audiences in person and online, enhancing and expanding participation and access.

This exhibition is curated by Kate Strain with contributions by Liliane Puthod and Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. Image: Marie Farrington, Figures for Lifting, 2024, carved soapstone. Photo by Rein Kooyman.

Exhibition continues from 22nd of August to the 7th of September 2025

Manner-isms brings together two artists, A.S. Dutton and Francine Marquis, whose practices explore material, memory, and the passage of time.

Through stone, clay, plaster, fabric, and wood, the works in this exhibition examine how care, environment, and human touch shape—and are shaped by—the spaces and materials we live among.

In these pieces, the domestic and the elemental meet; personal narratives and geological timescales overlap. The result is a conversation between slow change and sudden shift, between the persistence of stone and the fragility of the body, between material and self.

You are invited to explore these minute characteristics ever-present in our surroundings and re-experience yourself among them.

Manner-isms will run from the 22nd of August to the 7th of September. Come and join us on Friday the 22nd of August at 6pm for the opening of this exhibition!

Open daily from 12pm-6pm at 126 Artist-Run Gallery, 15 St. Bridget’s Place, Galway. 126 thanks the Burren College of Arts, the Arts Council of Ireland and Galway City Council for their collaboration and support.

Curated by Eva O’Byrne.