What’s on in Connaught

Heidi describes her new work as an exploration of human folly using paintings and sculptures with references to the Greek mythological character of Icarus and the Soviet space programme of the 1950’s.
Steve Wickham describes his new paintings as ‘a series of prompts to Organic Intelligence (OI)’.

Exhibition continues from 01/03/2026.

Luke YD Davis of Castlebar, Co. Mayo presents a meditative art exhibition exploring colour, movement and sound. A singer-songwriter and multidisciplinary artist, Davis creates intuitive works guided by music, allowing energy and form to shape each piece. The exhibition features vibrant, layered compositions across mixed media, inviting viewers into a calm and reflective visual experience.

Songs to the Siren.
The Model, Sligo | 24 January – 12 April 2026.
Curated by Hallahan & Welch.

Exhibition Opening: Sat. 24 January, 1 – 3pm.
1pm – Curators’ Tour.
2pm – Reception.

Songs to the Siren brings together works that dwell in ambiguity and emotion. Inspired by Brian O’Nolan’s veiled identity and Tim Buckley’s haunting song, the exhibition features artists including Joyce Pensato, William McKeown, Mark Leckey, Banksy, and Zanele Muholi. It invites visitors to linger with uncertainty, where feeling replaces resolution.

‘usual and generous ways’ presents works from artists working across a range of media, from Ireland and elsewhere, in which stone is not just a material to be shaped by the artist’s hand, but a subject-matter, object of inquiry, and an agent to be thought-with and thought-through.

Featuring: Richard Long, Barrie Cooke, Damien Hirst, Dorothy Cross, Seiha Kurosawa, David Beattie, Patrick Ireland/Brian O’Doherty, Patrick Hall, Anne Madden, Hilary Heron, Hamish Fulton.

Presented by Galway Arts Centre in partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, curated by writer & poet Padraig Regan.

Map: GSNI

Exhibition continues from 01/03/2026.

Luke YD Davis of Castlebar, Co. Mayo presents a meditative art exhibition exploring colour, movement and sound. A singer-songwriter and multidisciplinary artist, Davis creates intuitive works guided by music, allowing energy and form to shape each piece. The exhibition features vibrant, layered compositions across mixed media, inviting viewers into a calm and reflective visual experience.

A Tenuous Line is a multimedia exhibition presented by Niamh McGuinne, a Dublin-based visual artist whose practice combines print, sculpture, film and installation. Her work investigates the formulations of middens, accumulations of discarded material, and historical rubbish heaps. There are 77 midden sites situated in Mayo, 18 of which are sheltered in Clew Bay, typically containing shells, bones and other such remnants of survival. These middens are read as sites of temporary occupation. In A Tenuous Line, the “line” invoked is neither cartographic nor fixed; rather, it is a line drawn around resources, around bodies, around access.

Pilgrim is a solo exhibition by Susan Mannion, an Irish artist and curator whose practice centres on enamelled metalwork and printmaking. In this body of work, Mannion interrogates the enduring human impulse to gravitate toward liminal waterscapes and sacred sites—spaces where narrative, ritual, and topography coalesce. Informed by her training as an archaeologist, Pilgrim traverses the material and metaphysical strata of the Irish waterscape, from the primordial bog pools and holy wells of Roscommon, along fluvial passages, to the Atlantic threshold at Westport in Clew Bay.
(Image: Water Energies, Enamel on steel wall panel 1m x 1m)

Heidi describes her new work as an exploration of human folly using paintings and sculptures with references to the Greek mythological character of Icarus and the Soviet space programme of the 1950’s.
Steve Wickham describes his new paintings as ‘a series of prompts to Organic Intelligence (OI)’.

Exhibition continues from 06/03/2026.

The Living Ginger brings together a range of Jack Butler Yeats’s watercolours from 1895 to 1910, a formative period when his vivid sense of character and everyday life was emerging through dynamic, spirited compositions. The title comes from a phrase Yeats once used to describe the vitality he believed that all great painting should possess. That lively undercurrent gives these early works their enduring charge.

Exhibition continues from 07/03/2026.

Flight by Sacha Hutchinson opens at Daróg Wine Bar on 02 March, bringing a study of Atlantic seabirds to focus at a time when our coastal birdlife faces increasing pressure.
Based in Barna, Co. Galway, Sacha Hutchinson is a practising artist with a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Design (2010). Working primarily in gouache and oil, her practice explores nature’s vulnerability, with a particular focus on Ireland’s Atlantic seabirds. Alongside her visual work, she writes environmental poetry and has been published in several poetry journals and art anthologies. She is also a member of the Hare’s Corner Collective.

The Dock presents Soft Spot, an exhibition by Irish artist Helen O’Leary that foregrounds reuse, repair, and ecological thinking as generative artistic strategies.
Raised in rural Ireland in the 1960s and 70s, O’Leary’s formative ethos — “if you can’t make it, you can’t have it” — continues to inform her materially rigorous practice. Over decades, she has developed a distinctive formal language built from modest materials and unglamorous gestures. Her works occupy a dynamic space between painting and sculpture, blurring categorical boundaries while insisting on the physicality of their making.

Solas Art Gallery, located within The Island Theatre in Ballinamore, is delighted to announce that its 19th Annual Spring Group Exhibition will open at 7:30pm on Friday, the 20th of March. The exhibition features a diverse collection of work by both emerging and established artists, highlighting a wide range of styles and creative approaches. All are welcome and visitors can enjoy a curated selection of paintings in oils, acrylics, watercolours, embroidery, photography, poetry and mixed media spanning realism to abstraction.