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

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

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

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

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

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

Opening Reception:
Thursday 28 August, 6–8pm

Kerlin Gallery is pleased to introduce Hazel O’Sullivan, with an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures titled ‘Circa Ré’.

Hazel O’Sullivan reimagines artefacts and art objects within an immersive retrofuturist narrative. Her work frequently interpret forts and mechanisms that open gateways to the mythological Otherworld as a way to connect with pre-colonisation. For Circa Ré, O’Sullivan’s sources include medieval and prehistoric objects, illuminated manuscripts, and sacred grounds. Soaking in this trove of archaeological and artistic references, O’Sullivan then manipulates colour, scale and perspective to create architectural compositions that tap into vernacular traditions and mythologies.

Hazel O’Sullivan
b. 1998, Co. Meath, Ireland. Lives and works in London.
Hazel O’Sullivan is a multi-disciplinary artist examining visual discourse from Irish culture. Her work imagines a combination of ancient and future narratives as artefacts, devices and mythological architecture through a retrofuturistic lens. Through drawing, painting, sculpture and curation, she explores symbolic materiality of Irish artefacts, reimagining them as both historical objects and speculative constructs. O’Sullivan has an MFA from Chelsea College of Arts, London (2023) and BFA from NCAD, Dublin (2021).

Recent exhibitions include New Contemporaries, ICA, London; Good Eye Projects, Saatchi Gallery, London and Irish Art Now, Irish Embassy, London (all 2025); RETROFUTURE, The LAB Gallery, Dublin (2024); Harvest Gold, Solstice Arts Centre, Co. Meath; Cladding, with Charys Wilson, Catalyst Arts, Belfast (both 2023).

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

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

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

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

Calling all creatives! Join us for our next networking event on August 28 to learn how to master balance between creative genius and business acumen from the experts.
Anyone who works in a creative field – from product innovation to atelier-based design – is familiar with how much time and focus are involved in creating and evolving their work, and yet there’s also the ‘real world’ deadlines, the business around launching collections or services, plus all the administration that requires time, energy and headspace. Still, the show must go on, and the ideas must keep coming.

At the IMAGE Business Club Live on Thursday, August 28, we will sit down with business founders from creative industries to learn how they juggle ‘left brain, right brain’ while simultaneously trying to build a business, generate revenues and grow a brand.

Join us for an animated panel discussion with John Redmond, artist and co-founder of Ecru Studios; Helen Steele, artist and fashion designer; Brian Woulfe, the Limerick-born, London-based founder of interior design business, Designed by Woulfe; and Sarah Plunkett, co-founder behind iconic fashion brand Queens of Archive. Moderated by IMAGE contributing editor Melanie Morris, this will be a conversation with some of Ireland’s most iconic tastemakers that will inspire anyone who dares to dream in a creative field.

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.

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

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

Exhibition continues 4 July – 30 August 2025.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Featuring artworks and contributions from:

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

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

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

Welcome to the artist job centre!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maeve McCarthy, Returning / Heritage

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibition continues 9th August – 6th September 2025

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

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

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 continues 16th May 2025 – 7th September 2025.

This exhibition centres upon a thirteenth-century manuscript copy of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s book from the Chester Beatty’s Arabic Collection and a commissioned response by contemporary artist Diaa Lagan.

Meticulously-labelled, al-Iṣṭakhrī’s full-page maps apply pre-modern techniques of exaggerated scale and schematic distortion to deliver both geographical data and an undeniably visual spectacle. These beautiful maps present a poignant visualisation of the world we know today.

Diaa Lagan is an artist based in Dublin. Typically layered in multiple viewpoints and references, Lagan’s powerful work deals with multiple perspectives on the conscious human sense of place, both local and global, and on our enduring relational connectivity to one another.

Lagan’s geo-spatial awareness is also central to al-Iṣṭakhrī’s book and its regional map survey. Glimpses of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s stark maps shimmer under the many layers of Lagan’s paintings, interwoven with modern themes and post-colonial perspectives.

For Lagan, these loaded landscapes offer interregional routeways, defined less by controlled frontiers than by the natural historic flow of human travel through a borderless world.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

We are delighted to present Primate by Irish artist Daphne Wright. This work is one of a series of sculptures by Wright which explores the relationship between humans, animals and medicine. The sculpture was cast from a mould from a recently dead rhesus monkey at the scientific institution, Wisconsin National Primate Research Centre.

The artist explains, “To approach the problem of what we humans do by involving animals in our human life-saving research, the central act of making the artwork was to access this stage of the animal’s life-death via its direct physical form. The primate is our kin and our stand in. Not only in medicine but also for the heart and the imagination. It is an image of the human. Everything about how it might be like us is filled with pathos: its body, its proximity, its delicate biology, its expression. The rhesus monkey is our ancestor, our antecedent past and passed away, an object of reverie, honour, compassion and mourning.”

This notable addition to the collection continues to strengthen the Gallery’s mission of acquiring works by Irish and international artists to reflect evolving art practices. The current display of Primate coincides with Wright’s solo exhibition Deep Rooted Things in The Ashmolean Museum. Oxford which was conceived in partnership with Hugh Lane Gallery. The exhibition catalogue is available in the HLG Bookshop.

In her new experimental moving image work The Glass Booth / An Both Gloine, artist Jenny Brady casts a cinematic gaze on the figure of the interpreter, exploring the interpreting profession and the contemporary landscape of interpretation. Through vignettes set in both extreme and familiar environments, the film portrays the processes of listening, speaking, and forgetting within acts of formal and informal interpretation. This film is a study of the complex, intersubjective nature of interpreters’ work, placing them at the centre, rather than intermediaries that blend into the background. Brady seeks to illuminate the interpretive act – an elaborate, sensory process of listening, decoding and responding.

The film emerges from research into the birth of the interpreting profession, which is less than a century old. Simultaneous interpretation technology, the language interpretation system that allows interpreters to hear and speak at the same time, was first employed prominently during the Nuremberg Trials that took place between 1945 and 1946, developing in direct relation to modern international diplomatic relations and the founding of the United Nations. This project builds on themes explored in Brady’s recent films, Music for Solo Performer (2022) and Receiver (2019) which looked at the complexities of technologically mediated communication.

The Glass Booth examines the art of interpretation as it extends to four different arenas; Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meeting at the Geneva Summit in 1985, an asylum seeker interview at the International Protection Office, a Young Interpreters programme in a Dublin primary school, and a European conference interpreter translating into target languages in real time. In each setting, though stakes are high, slips are inevitable. One interpreter speaks of his reliance on muscle memory to do the job, likening his work in simultaneous interpretation to his former career as a paramedic and interest in rally driving. Probing the negotiation between intention and expression, the artwork lays bare how interpretation is essential to humankind’s survival. The film will be screened in two, alternating versions: one with subtitles and the other with audiovisual descriptions for blind or low vision audiences. The Glass Booth has been generously funded through the Arts Council’s Film Project Award and premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh 2025.
Text by Aisling Clark.

Screening Times: 11:00am, 11:40am, 12:20pm, 1:00pm, 1:40pm, 2:20pm, 3:00pm, 3:40pm, 4:20pm, 5:00pm.
The film will be screened in two, alternating versions: one with subtitles and the other with audiovisual descriptions for Blind or low vision audiences.

Alan Butler
Mary FitzGerald
Damien Flood
Mark Joyce
Sorcha McNamara
Bridget Riley
Oisín Tozer

Exhibition dates : 1 August – 19 September 2025
Opening reception : Thursday 31 July 2025 5-8 pm

Earthly Delights is in the title of Hieronymous Bosch’s early 16th Century triptych The Garden of Eathly Delights. This painting charts the Creation, the Birth and Fall of man and woman. It was painted in The Netherlands in the 1490s or early 1500s. It is currently in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. It has captivated audiences and artists since that time, including some Irish artists and one or two in this show.

The Garden theme is also continued in Green On Red Gallery’s summer Earthly Delights exhibition looking at artists whose work looks at life and death and society, not to mention a world in crisis.

Opening reception:
Thursday 31 July, 6pm

‘Faigh Amach’ is an initiative by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S) in partnership with Culture Ireland and Southwark Park Galleries (SPG), London, to support an artist in presenting their first solo exhibition outside Ireland.

Roughly translating as ‘discover’, ‘Faigh Amach’ takes place as a group exhibition at TBG+S in Summer 2025, bringing together three artists selected through an open call process in 2024: Ella Bertilsson, Kathy Tynan, Emily Waszak. One of the three exhibiting artists will be invited to present their first international solo exhibition at SPG Lake Gallery in Spring 2026. During the planning and duration of ‘Faigh Amach’, SPG Director Judith Carlton and Deputy Director Charlotte Baker will conduct in-person and online studio visits with the three artists, as well as visiting the exhibition at TBG+S before making the selection for their programme.

Ella Bertilsson uses images and materials related to pop culture and the aesthetics of nostalgia to evoke a shared sense of memory and place. Her installations, which often incorporate film and performance, use the visual language of magical realism and absurdism to conjure darkly humorous and dreamlike sensory environments. The clash of bizarreness and naivety reflects the impact of anxiety and precarity in everyday life. Bertilsson’s installation for ‘Faigh Amach’ creates a new encounter with a recent film work, ‘A PEANUT WORM’S DREAM’, as viewers nestle into an immersive interior space behind a mountain scene of a photographic backdrop. Now emerging from the film itself, some of its characters – a fish, and a goat/deer – begin to populate their real-world surroundings outside of the confines of the film’s storage unit setting.

Kathy Tynan’s paintings of familiar cityscapes and domestic scenes illuminate moments of affection, intimacy and curiosity. Rather than focussing her gaze on monumental landmarks, Tynan instead attributes value to that which is otherwise overlooked. Her semi-autobiographical subjects include her own family and friends but speak more broadly to shared enthusiasms, experiences of care, community, and relationships. Tynan’s group of recent paintings in the exhibition collate a number of personal scenes from memory and family photographs. Patterned duvets and pyjamas conflate timelines between the artist’s own childhood and her experience as a mother with a young son. The sequence of paintings appear as a panorama of cinematic flashbacks.

Emily Waszak’s textile and assemblage works are informed by rituals of her Japanese cultural heritage, experiences of grief and the landscape of her home in Donegal. Using both ancient and contemporary weaving techniques, alongside the collection and display of found materials and other hand-made objects, Waszak combines processes that transcend time and place to find meaning in loss and understand how to access otherworldliness. Waszak has produced several large-scale woven works for the exhibition using a combination of discarded waste textiles gathered from industrial sites in Dublin, and fragments of fabric with deep personal significance. The textiles loom above a group of clay vessels holding ceremonial objects such as animal bones, which can be used as shakers in a form of incantation to connect with the spirit world.

Ella Bertilsson was born in Umeå, Sweden, and works in Dublin and Kilkenny. Her recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include The Horse, Dublin (2025); Ballina Art Centre (2024); The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon (2023); The Complex, Dublin (2022).

Kathy Tynan was born and works in Dublin. Her recent solo exhibitions include Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2024); Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise (2022); Highlanes Gallery (with Andrew Vickery), Drogheda (2020); The LAB, Dublin (2019).

Emily Waszak was born in North Carolina, United States, and works between Dublin and Donegal. Her recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny (2026); Pallas Projects, Dublin (2024); TU Dublin (2023).

Southwark Park Galleries is an interdisciplinary arts organisation in South East London. Through a locally relevant and internationally significant programme of exhibitions, performances and public engagement, their mission is to connect people using the intersection of art, nature and culture to facilitate meaning and wellbeing across communities. Established in 1984, they have a thriving reputation as a test site for experimental practice by commissioning artists at a critical stage to make their most ambitious work for exhibition.

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

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

ART EXHIBITION – TOM BYRNE
Title: “ I can buy myself flowers”.

5th August-30th September

Tom Byrne, born in Dublin in 1962, is an Irish artist known for his diverse range of work, including portraits, landscapes, and abstract pieces, often exploring themes of Irish history, culture, and spirituality. He studied at Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design and later in Berlin, drawing inspiration from the Bauhaus tradition, Irish writers like Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, and contemporary issues. Byrne is also recognized for his involvement in the punk movement, which influenced some of his early work, including album cover designs and street art. Tom was commissioned to do portraits by Hollywood filmmaker Elizabeth Banks, Matthew Rhys and Kerri Russell. In 2018, he was commissioned to create a piece for Pop Francis’s visit to Lithuania, which now hangs in the Vatican. . Tom Byrne’s style is very unique, he creates luxurious textures in nuanced, lush layers of paint and structured layers of colour, mediated by his own aesthetic experiences. Swirls of jewel-like colours transcend opaque, opulent washes of tone. Furthermore, he utilizes wax to create a luminous tangible surface which creates a multi-sensory experience, engaging the viewer not just on a visual level, but through a tactile experience as well.

– Opening Times: Thursday 7 August to Friday 19 September, 11.30am to 5.30pm
– Open daily for Kilkenny Arts Festival, then Thursday to Saturday weekly

‘beyond, beneath, Beside’ explores the site of the Tea Houses and their proximity to the River Nore and its nearby tributary the River Breaghagh. During her residency, artist Kate Fahey investigated the locale, including Talbot’s Inch model arts and crafts village, the former Greenvale Woollen Mills, and engaged with the rich subterranean, cultural and industrial history associated with the rivers, including the great flood in 1947.

Drawing on materials, forms and motifs relevant to the historical arts and crafts revival in Kilkenny, the installation positions the neighbouring River Breaghagh (translates as the deceitful river) as a swirling, twisting and uneasy presence, a trickster figure, liable to rise and surge unpredictably. Situating tactile encounters with the material world at the centre of this inquiry, the exhibition poetically echoes a sense of networked and interconnected resonances across time and space, situated beyond, beneath and beside the riverbank.

Curated by Rachel Botha.
Design by Emmet Brown.

Kate Fahey is an artist based between Kilkenny and London, working with sound, sculpture, moving image, print and installation. She has shown her work at spaces including the ICA London, VISUAL Carlow, the Bluecoat Liverpool, the CCArt Andratx, Arti et Amicitiae Amsterdam and Pallas Projects Dublin. She received an MA in Fine Art Print at the Royal College of Art, London and completed a practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London in 2020. She is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University.

The Tea Houses are situated by the River Nore in Kilkenny city centre and have been acquired by Kilkenny Arts Office to host an art programme that encourages a sense of community and active citizenship.

Kindly supported by Kilkenny Arts Office, Kilkenny County Council, ArtLinks and Arts Council, Ireland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 4 July – 30 August 2025.

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

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

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

Exhibition continues 9th August – 6th September 2025

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

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

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.
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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/.

Exhibition continues 12th August  – 30th September 2025.
Presented across both St Brigid’s Cathedral and the Round Tower, the exhibition honours the legacy of Brigid, celebrating her enduring presence as a figure of inspiration, compassion, and hope. The Cathedral showcases the original artworks within its sacred setting, while the Round Tower hosts an immersive display of illuminated replicas featuring imagery of Brigid. Installed across its nine windows and within the unique overhead space at the tower’s summit, the work allows natural light to filter through, creating a modest yet powerful tribute. This transforms the Round Tower into a radiant symbol of hope and offers a unique experience. Through the interplay of light, space, and imagery, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on Brigid’s role as a unifying symbol in Irish heritage, creating a dialogue between tradition and innovation and encouraging contemplation on the values she embodies and their continued relevance in the modern world.

Exhibition continues 16th May 2025 – 7th September 2025.

This exhibition centres upon a thirteenth-century manuscript copy of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s book from the Chester Beatty’s Arabic Collection and a commissioned response by contemporary artist Diaa Lagan.

Meticulously-labelled, al-Iṣṭakhrī’s full-page maps apply pre-modern techniques of exaggerated scale and schematic distortion to deliver both geographical data and an undeniably visual spectacle. These beautiful maps present a poignant visualisation of the world we know today.

Diaa Lagan is an artist based in Dublin. Typically layered in multiple viewpoints and references, Lagan’s powerful work deals with multiple perspectives on the conscious human sense of place, both local and global, and on our enduring relational connectivity to one another.

Lagan’s geo-spatial awareness is also central to al-Iṣṭakhrī’s book and its regional map survey. Glimpses of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s stark maps shimmer under the many layers of Lagan’s paintings, interwoven with modern themes and post-colonial perspectives.

For Lagan, these loaded landscapes offer interregional routeways, defined less by controlled frontiers than by the natural historic flow of human travel through a borderless world.

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

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

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

Exhibition continues 15th August – 20th September 2025. 
Mary Cullen-Kelly presents Carousel.
15th August – 20th September at Dunamaise Arts Centre.
Free to visit during opening hours, and 1 hour prior events (Tues to Sat, 1pm to 5pm).

Mary Cullen Kelly likes to time travel using paint, print and collage. Her colourful and detailed images can feel all at once familiar and strange. She creates moments and places that may or may not have existed. She is interested in and has studied the experience of Flow Theory in relation to art making.

Mary was awarded this solo exhibition as a prize from our Open Submission Show 2024 by Guest Selector Vera Klute, RHA.

About the Artist
Mary is an artist from Dublin who lives in Carlow. She has a degree in Fine Art Print from NCAD and an MSc in Disability Studies from UCD, which focussed on the experience of engagement in arts activities, for which she won the Eunice Kennedy Shriver medal. She has previously exhibited in VISUAL Carlow and extensively in group and open submission shows, including the RHA Annual. Mary has been involved in community arts in Dublin and Carlow. See more on www.marycullenkelly.com

The exhibition title references the TV series MadMen; there the ‘carousel’ is a Kodak slide projector that ‘moves the viewer forwards and backwards’ in time.
This series of paintings, prints and objects seek to describe a world that can feel familiar and strange all at the same time. Things are always changing. The artist draws on science fiction movies from the 50s and 60s. Colourful paintings of domestic and ‘small town’ settings draw us in with a whiff of nostalgia, a sense of the familiar which is subverted as things are not quite as expected. Photopolymer prints and made objects offer clues that the world we are in has been altered. Flora and other items have appeared nearby. Questions are posed but not answered. The world has changed and we are not quite sure where we are.

Thursday 21 August – Tuesday 30 September 2025

Curated by Margarita Cappock 

Nach Cuma? Who Cares? is an exhibition that explores the politics of care and responsibility with a focus on class and race within working class communities in Dublin. Developed out of a series of collaborative workshops with youth and adult groups in Rialto, Bluebell and Ballymun the project responds to an alarming rise in hate-driven rhetoric and division, particularly within working-class spaces. 

This exhibition follows on from Carey’s earlier work Stones, which focused on the relationship between individuals and place in Ballymun. Where Stones honed in on one community, Nach Cuma? expands to hold space across multiple sites, bringing people into slow, honest conversations about difficult truths and lived realities. Through a dialogical process and workshops within The LAB Gallery, the exhibition becomes a platform for intergenerational dialogue and reflection. Rejecting tokenism and reactionary politics, the work seeks instead to centre care and asks: who provides it, who receives it, and what happens when it is absent? Through visual, social, and dialogic forms, Nach Cuma? offers not conclusions but a methodology: one of listening, reflection, and accountability.

The exhibition will open on Thursday 21st August: 6pm – 8pm 

The exhibition will be opened by Willa White.

Aaron Sunderland Carey is a Dublin-based socially engaged artist and youth worker working across community spaces, youth clubs, and both informal and formal educational settings. His work investigates the intersections of land, class, masculinity, community, and systemic oppression. Central to his practice is the use of long-term collaboration, often with marginalised groups, to foster spaces for difficult, necessary conversations. At the core of this long-term practice is over three years of collaboration with Rialto Youth Project and a life spent in Ballymun making art and working with the community of Ballymun. Aaron’s work is grounded in ethics of care and accountability and is influenced by his hometown of Ballymun. He employs methods rooted in listening, reflection, and mutual learning—facilitating workshops that prioritise community voice and agency. He has worked extensively in areas such as Ballymun and Rialto, developing partnerships with youth projects, community organisations and local schools.

Aaron has participated in numerous socially engaged residencies and projects, including Common Grounds Studio 468, and has collaborated with groups including Rialto Youth Project, Poppintree youth project, The Axis Ballymun and The LAB Gallery. His practice sits between visual art, storytelling, and social action—always aiming to make space for storytelling and transformation.

Exhibition continues from 23rd August to 1st November 2025

A major solo exhibition by artist Maud Cotter maelstrom presents a group of works which seek to examine the complexity of the present, and engages with the complexity and form of change as process, with works that reference the dual directionality of time, and the relational nature of matter.

This exhibition of large scale works by this established Irish artist responds to the complexity and spatial range of the site of Highlanes Gallery across its two floors.

Integrated into the exhibition is a stream of engagement with the historic and contemporary work from the Drogheda Municipal Art Collection.

Within the exhibition of new and recent large-scale sculpture and installation is the eponymous work – maelstrom which Maud Cotter describes as ‘a spiral, a whirling stream.’

She adds ‘this phenomenon I see as an expression of the nature of change, a complex form which expands and ingests space; a dual directional dynamic, ingesting spent form and offering a different conceptual direction.’

Writer and critic Rebecca Geldard has written recently on Cotter’s practice:

‘In Marcel Marceau’s stage routine, there is a perfectly choreographed moment of suspension that goes unnoticed by the audience, Maud Cotter explains. It serves to amplify the physicality of his feat, the ability to hold sinew and bone in time and freeze imperceptibly. But this is only noticeable in the wings, from where she draws him. Beyond the stage, the interruption of energy, of flow, appears to change nothing but, in fact, changes everything about the energy field. With the muscular elegance of the gymnast or the pervasive creep of a musical score, the slight shift in mood silently alters the parameters of what’s performatively possible.’

‘Interconnectedness, at the molecular level, is the driver of Cotter’s sculptural enquiry; manifesting moments of “imperfect geometry” at the core of where things, beings, ideas and environments meet. Whether daring to ‘draw’ this massively in metal, manufacture it through the placement of pre-existing materials, or orchestrate the essential bits in between, any sense of artistic coercion is only ever, and oh so lightly, custodial, however hands-on the process. Each fixing, inscribed section, loop of archi-graphic script, is allowed to speak with its own energy as part of a quietly insistent ensemble cast, leading us beyond the need for meaning and on towards a collective sense of being in the thick of it – soaring, spiralling, feeling that all things seem to touch so they are.’

At the End of the Day: New Paintings

Some memories resonate over and over and become part of our identity. Often they are just below the surface, on the border of dream and real life. Carol Hodder’s new work continues to mine this in-between state that sometimes leads to change and transformation.

Hodder is haunted by water. Early memories of being in a small boat on the lake with her father anchor her exploration of water, shoreline and edges. Her paintings often contain a sense of ambiguous internal weather, where ideas and experiences brood behind the surface of human experience.

Athlone native Emer Gaffey presents “After the Peat” – A Reflection on the Changing Face of Ireland’s Bogs
Exhibition runs 28th August – 12th September at The Atrium, Athlone Civic Centre
Opening Reception: Thursday 28th August at 5.30pm to 7pm.

“Dermot Browne is an artist, curator, and mentor based in Cork, Ireland. With a practice rooted in visual culture, he brings over two decades of experience in curating, exhibiting, and mentoring artists across Ireland. Dermot is the founder of Crane Visual and One Space Culture CLG, initiatives focused on accessible, regenerative arts engagement.

Athlone-based artist Emer Gaffey returns with a powerful new exhibition entitled After the Peat, opening this August in the Atrium of Athlone Civic Centre. Rooted in the familiar yet transforming landscape of the midlands, the exhibition invites viewers to consider the evolving story of our local boglands—from once heavily worked extraction sites to fragile, biodiverse ecosystems in recovery.

Gaffey’s work, known for its meticulous detail and emotional resonance, captures the quiet transitions taking place in these rewilding environments. Through a series of vivid landscapes and observational studies. After the Peat documents the return of plant life and the subtle ecological shifts occurring as bogs are allowed to heal.

“Bogs are places of deep memory,” Gaffey says. “They carry our past, but now they also offer hope for the future—as carbon sinks, habitats, and sites of regeneration. This work explores that transformation.”

The exhibition opens with a public reception on Thursday 28th August at 5.30pm, where visitors can meet the artist and explore the works in person. Refreshments will be served.

After the Peat runs until Friday 12th September and is open to the public during Athlone Civic Centre opening hours. Admission is free.

Calling all creatives! Join us for our next networking event on August 28 to learn how to master balance between creative genius and business acumen from the experts.
Anyone who works in a creative field – from product innovation to atelier-based design – is familiar with how much time and focus are involved in creating and evolving their work, and yet there’s also the ‘real world’ deadlines, the business around launching collections or services, plus all the administration that requires time, energy and headspace. Still, the show must go on, and the ideas must keep coming.

At the IMAGE Business Club Live on Thursday, August 28, we will sit down with business founders from creative industries to learn how they juggle ‘left brain, right brain’ while simultaneously trying to build a business, generate revenues and grow a brand.

Join us for an animated panel discussion with John Redmond, artist and co-founder of Ecru Studios; Helen Steele, artist and fashion designer; Brian Woulfe, the Limerick-born, London-based founder of interior design business, Designed by Woulfe; and Sarah Plunkett, co-founder behind iconic fashion brand Queens of Archive. Moderated by IMAGE contributing editor Melanie Morris, this will be a conversation with some of Ireland’s most iconic tastemakers that will inspire anyone who dares to dream in a creative field.