What’s on in Connaught

Join artist Tinka Bechert in conversation with Patrick Murphy at The Model for a welcoming and insightful discussion of her solo exhibition. Admission is free, no booking required. Kindly supported by the Goethe-Institut Irland.

Get ready to cut, tear, glue, and celebrate! The Connacht Collage Collective is turning two, and we’re marking the occasion with a Big Paper Paste Party on World Collage Day. This extra special session is open to everyone — no matter your experience or skill level. Whether you’re a total beginner or a seasoned pro, we invite you to come along and enjoy the simple pleasure of making. For this birthday edition, DJ SIM Card will share some mood music while we create together.

This is an adult event (18+), and everyone is welcome.

Join artist Tinka Bechert in conversation with Patrick Murphy at The Model for a welcoming and insightful discussion of her solo exhibition. Admission is free, no booking required. Kindly supported by the Goethe-Institut Irland.

Get ready to cut, tear, glue, and celebrate! The Connacht Collage Collective is turning two, and we’re marking the occasion with a Big Paper Paste Party on World Collage Day. This extra special session is open to everyone — no matter your experience or skill level. Whether you’re a total beginner or a seasoned pro, we invite you to come along and enjoy the simple pleasure of making. For this birthday edition, DJ SIM Card will share some mood music while we create together.

This is an adult event (18+), and everyone is welcome.

‘Bándearg’ (Pink), an exhibition, featuring five female artists working in Ireland, officially opens in Books At One, Louisburgh, Co. Mayo, on Saturday, April 18th at 6:00 PM and will run through to May 13th 2026.
The exhibition brings together a diverse collective of artists, Olivia Jones, Tina Poole, Anna Marie Savage, Nickie Harrington, and Maria Mollohan, to explore the colour pink as both a physical material and a complex cultural symbol. Historically associated with innocence and softness, the colour is reclaimed within this exhibition as a site of strength, resistance, and emotional depth.

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.

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.

Daisy Chains || Data Trails expands on the recurrent theme in Ciara Tuite’s practice ”body memory’. In this exhibition she explores ‘old practices’ and ‘ancient rituals’ which are embedded in our DNA Modern technology can’t replace the act of mark-making, storytelling, dance etc. In our ever-evolving world, the artist uses painting, text and installation as a conduit to ask the question – how can ancient rituals and digital culture walk side by side to promote peace? What if stone skimming, and barefoot walking are a necessity rather than a novelty to thrive in todays world? What if for a moment we swapped the screen for the sky?

‘Even now there are still places where a thought might grow.‘ – Derek Mahon

I wrote the phrase ‘keep the burning world at bay’ in a notebook during a deep sense of uncertainty at the start of the global pandemic and partly as an answer to my young daughter’s worried question when her school closed – ‘Will it be like this forever?’ I didn’t know, bluffing I told her it would be back to ‘normal’ soon.

The Model is delighted to present Polyrhythms, a solo exhibition by German-Irish painter Tinka Bechert. Bringing together painting, sculpture and textile works made since 2018, the exhibition centres on a decisive shift in Bechert’s practice away from narrative imagery toward abstraction. Accompanying this development has been an increased attention to musical thinking, with rhythm, repetition and pacing guiding how the works unfold.

Vivian Hansbury is a mixed-media artist who integrates cast materials with organic elements. This exhibition features glass castings inspired by moss and bronze castings derived from willow reeds, reflecting her nuanced journey of growing up in the Irish Midlands and navigating the complexities of a biracial identity in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition includes both free-standing and wall-mounted sculptures in conjunction with drawings, immersing the viewer in the rich narrative of the boglands, which are deeply rooted in mythological and historical significance. Vivian’s work invites a critical examination of memory and the fluidity of recollection, guiding the audience through a liminal space that exists between past and future. Specifically designed for the Custom House Gallery.

Image: Tanawin, Willow Withies, Jesmonite & Turf Castings

A Group Exhibition by Artists: Colleen Fitzpatrick, Maria Laffey & Linda Proudfoot

“Nature does not hurry yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu
We are all rooted in Mother Nature but look to the sky where we dream of flying on the wild wind.
This exhibition is a celebration of the vastness, beauty and vulnerability of nature in these uncertain times.
If we slow down and tune into nature we learn so much. We live in an age of soundbites and instant gratification.
Art can point us to the world and help us to see things we don’t usually notice, such as the pace and beauty of the natural environment.

‘Bándearg’ (Pink), an exhibition, featuring five female artists working in Ireland, officially opens in Books At One, Louisburgh, Co. Mayo, on Saturday, April 18th at 6:00 PM and will run through to May 13th 2026.
The exhibition brings together a diverse collective of artists, Olivia Jones, Tina Poole, Anna Marie Savage, Nickie Harrington, and Maria Mollohan, to explore the colour pink as both a physical material and a complex cultural symbol. Historically associated with innocence and softness, the colour is reclaimed within this exhibition as a site of strength, resistance, and emotional depth.

‘The Long Pause – Ecology of Ruins I’

Lindsay LeBlanc – Exhibition Launch: Fri 24th April, 5-8pm at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim.

Lindsay LeBlanc works with glass as a way of understanding the places she moves through and lives alongside. Engaging with landscapes both visually and materially, LeBlanc works with the atmosphere they carry, the way growth gathers, what is discarded there, what survives there, and how time behaves there. Making becomes a way of paying close attention to those ecosystems and to her own evolving relationship with them.

“Intellectual / Emotional and Observed responses to nature and the environment”. Fine Art Print exhibition from one of Ireland’s finest painters.
‘Making Prints has always been part of my working method.
Each process informing, scrutinizing, and complementing the other’.