What’s On around Ireland
Discover what’s on around Ireland for visual arts with our all-in-one events guide: from Dublin’s landmark gallery openings at the National Gallery and IMMA to Cork’s vibrant street-art festivals and Limerick’s immersive light-art installations along the River Shannon. Journey west to Galway’s artist-run studios and Mayo’s open-air sculpture trails, then northeast for Derry’s printmaking masterclasses and Belfast’s avant-garde pop-up exhibitions. Explore Kerry’s ceramic workshops in the Ring of Kerry, Waterford’s glass-blowing demos in the Crystal Quarter, and Kilkenny’s medieval castle gallery talks. Our Ireland-wide roundup brings you weekly updates on solo shows, collaborative installations, family-friendly art trails, and exclusive curator-led tours—complete with early-bird tickets to masterclasses and insider previews. Stay inspired and plan your next artistic adventure with the definitive “What’s On in Ireland” visual arts calendar.
Around Ireland
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100 Years of O’Connell Street | Deirdre Brennan at Mercato Coperto, Trieste (Italy)
Exhibition continues from the 24th of October to the 15th of November 2025
Deirdre Brennan’s series “100 Years of O’Connell Street” is on exhibition in Trieste as part of Trieste Photo Days Festival.
In honour of the 100th anniversary of the street’s name change from Sackville Street to O’Connell Street, Deirdre created a series of street portraits. Each person holds a gift for the street and gives their perspective on our main boulevard.
Irish in Resistance during World War II | Group Exhibition at Smashing Times Visual Art Gallery
30 Sandycove Road, Sandycove , Dublin, A39V9P1
Exhibition continues from the 10th of October to the 30th of November 2025
Irish in Resistance during World War II is a multidisciplinary exhibition featuring visual art, photography, film, poetry, and storytelling, reflecting on stories of Irish people in resistance during the Holocaust and World War II who stood up against fascism. The installation features original artworks by Hina Khan, visual artist; Amna Walayat, visual artist; Féilim James, writer and poet; and Mary Moynihan, writer, poet, creator of art and photograph, created in response to stories of people who stood up for the rights of others. Alongside these artworks we have original artworks by Noah Sex and Jessica Rodrigues on themes of equality.
Raw Chicken | Group Exhibition at The Arches Centre
The Arches Centre, 11-13 Bloomfield Avenue, Belfast, BT5 5AA
Exhibition continues from the 9th of October to the 13th of November 2025
Raw Chicken is a satirical take on the kitsch, blurring the lines between the familiar and the abject. The exhibition centres around the concept of an old curiosity shop as an environment for eclecticism and obsession. The work subverts the familiar, taking domestic materials and ideas and reinstating them in a nonsensical, Dadaist context.
Underpin | QSS Studios Group Exhibition at The Arches Centre
The Arches Centre, 11-13 Bloomfield Avenue, Belfast, BT5 5AA
Exhibition continues from the 9th of October to the 13th of November 2025
QSS is proud to present Underpin, a group exhibition showcasing the work of QSS artists who took part in our pilot internal mentoring programme, generously supported by Belfast City Council. Launched in February 2024, the programme paired emerging QSS studio members with more established peers, fostering an environment of mutual support, skill sharing, and creative development.
Talks | Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels - Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories with Clara Peeters at Triskel Arts Centre
In each Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories lecture, Artist and art teacher Áine Andrews will focus on a particular painting to recount its history.
Week 3: Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels, Clara Peeters, 1615.
This painting captures the different ages of the cheeses and reflections in glass and metal. A minute self-portrait of the painter is reflected in the lid of a jug behind the cheeses.
We know little about the life of Peeters, but there are some forty known paintings by this extraordinary skilled artist who had such great influence on the painters of the Northern Netherlands.
Mercurochromes | Michael O'Boyle at the Garden of Reflection Gallery
16 Bishop Street, Derry, BT486PW
Exhibition continues from the 4th of October to the 1st of November 2025
Welcome to the current art exhibition by Michael O’Boyle located at the Garden of Reflection Gallery – Derry.
Michael’s art exhibition will show until Saturday 1st November with a closing party and artists talk on Thursday 30th October.
Michael O’Boyle’s work coerces the visual language of popular science through a distilled painterly and colourist intervention that creates artificial forms that take their lead from the microscopic world.
He uses microscopy and Scientific illustrations as a primary source for his work with the aim to make the non visible that surrounds us visible, formalise it and animate it to create clean distilled art.
Yes, But Do You Care? | Marie Brett at GOMA Waterford
YES, BUT DO YOU CARE? A tour of audio-visual art work by acclaimed artist Marie Brett from IMMA’s national collection
Marie Brett is bringing her tour of Yes, But Do You Care? to GOMA Waterford on Monday 27th October. The exciting event will include a screening of Brett’s audio-visual art piece, a Q&A between the artist and IMMA curator Sundara O’Higgins, and a dance response by Kelly Keesing.
Time: 2pm
Date: 27 October 2025
Location: 6/7 Lombard Street, Waterford
Doors open 20 mins before the event. Entry is free and everyone is welcome!
Triangle | Mark Lawlor and Gábor Roskó at Townhall Arts Centre, Cavan
Townhall Street, Cavan, H12 WV82
Exhibition continues from the 4th of October to the 14th of November 2025
Drawings by Hungarian artist Gábor Roskó and Irish artist Mark Lawlor interpreted in words by Rebecca O’Connor.
Talks | Portrait of Hugh Lane - Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories with Áine Andrews at Triskel Arts Centre
Tobin Street, Off South Main Street, Cork, Cork, T12WYYO
In each Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories lecture, Artist and art teacher Áine Andrews will focus on a particular painting to recount its history.
Week 1: Portrait of Hugh Lane, John Singer Sargent, 1906
Hugh Lane was born in Cork in 1875, but he was never to spend time there again, until, with tragic irony, he died when the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U boat in 1915 within sight of the Cork coastline.
Lane is perhaps best known as Lady Gregory’s nephew and particularly for an unsigned codicil to his will which led to the controversy regarding Ireland’s right to the important Impressionist paintings previously owned by him. Little however is generally known of the collector’s life in London and his extraordinary successful career as a dealer of old master paintings as well as modern works of art.
MIRA | Group Exhibition at GalleryX
The word mirror traces its roots from the Latin mirari, to admire. In Spanish, mira means “look.” But what happens if a mirror shows nothing? In gothic lore, the vampire is denied reflection, cursed with blindness to itself. MIRA is an exhibition of young Irish artists working across film, painting, drawing, and stitched media. Together they explore gothic horror’s legacy, with Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a touchstone. Step into a world where self-image, darkness, and the uncanny collide.
Opening Night: 28 Oct, 5:30–9 PM
Exhibition Hours: 29 Oct–1 Nov, 1–6 PM.
Come look closer, if you dare.
The Canticle of the Creatures | Deirdre Brennan at Palazzo Gopcevich, Trieste (Italy)
Via Gioacchino Rossini, 4, , Trieste , Italy , 34121
Exhibition continues from the 24th of October to the 23rd of November 2025
Deirdre Brennan’s image of Sinead O’Connor’s funeral courage was selected for “The Canticle of the Creatures”
Trieste Photo Days Canticle of the Creatures” refers to an international photography project and exhibition inspired by St. Francis of Assisi’s hymn, with a photographic book published and exhibited at both the Palazzo Frumentario in Assisi and during the main Trieste Photo Days festival. The project was an open call for photographers to visually interpret the themes of the Canticle and culminated in a main exhibition in Trieste in late October 2025, following an earlier one in Assisi that ran from September 1–21, 2025.
Evolving Access | Mini-Symposium & Artist Tour at Westport Town Hall Theatre
The Octagon, Westport , Co. Mayo , F28 R240, Connaught
A mini-symposium which will focus on how access solutions have developed over the last 25 years and their potential future direction from the perspective of artists with disabilities, venues, festival organisers and arts organisations.
Presentations by Alan James Burns, disabled artist and festival organiser, Orla Moloney, (Project Arts Centre) and Padraig Naughton (Arts and Disability Ireland). The morning session will conclude with a Q&A Session.
Lunch provided followed a tour of ‘The Space Between Real and Shadow’, an exhibition by Breda Burns, at the Custom House Studios & Gallery.
From the Forest to the Ocean | Mary Moynihan and Hina Khan at Rathfarnham Castle
Rathfarnham, Dublin D14K3T6 , Rathfarnham, CO.DUBLIN, D14K3T6
Exhibition continues from the 16th of September to the 2nd of November 2025
From The Forest to The Ocean is a powerful multidisciplinary exhibition at Rathfarnham Castle, Dublin, with artists Mary Moynihan and Hina Khan. The exhibition is a stunning collection of visual art, photography, poetry and film, inspired by reflections on nature and journeys of interconnectedness. The exhibition links physical landscapes of nature, from the forests to the ocean, to landscapes of the soul. Join us as we reflect on ways to re-wild the landscape and re-wild the human soul, exploring the flow of life and the art of letting go. The exhibition runs until Sunday 2 November, Wed-Sunday, 10.30am-5pm. Last admission 4.45pm.
Talks | Climate and Art: Programming & Advocacy Talk at Pallas Projects/Studio
Climate and Art: Programming & Advocacy brings together three artists and three curators to explore how contemporary art responds to this challenge, offering an unusual mirroring perspective that highlights synergies and divergences. It’s a reflection on the role of the arts in shaping public discourse around the climate crisis, its complexity and its aim towards regenerative outcomes.
Viviana Checchia (Curator at Void Art Centre)
Vanya Lambrecht Ward (Artist)
Siobhan Mooney (Independent curator)
Katherine Sankey (Artist)
Niamh Schmidtke (Artist)
Kate Strain (Curator at Kunstverein Aughrim)
Connection | Veronica Buchanan at Strule Arts Centre
Townhall Square, Omagh, Tyrone, BT78 1BL
Strule Arts Centre is delighted to announce the opening of Connection, a solo exhibition by Buncrana-based artist Veronica Buchanan, launching at 7pm on Thursday 30 October in the Gallery at Strule Arts Centre, Omagh.
In Connection, Veronica explores themes of personal experience, relationships, memory, and reflection—concepts that evoke emotional responses and invite viewers to engage on a deeply human level. The exhibition presents a compelling collection of both earlier and recent works, showcasing a variety of media including drawing, painting, ceramics, and textiles.
Elemental | Clive Bright at the Hamilton Gallery
4 Castle Street, Sligo, Sligo, F91P863, Connacht
In ‘Elemental’ Clive Bright explores the language of paint using a geometric backdrop as a recurring motif.
Bright’s paintings have a universal narrative. Through absence, and the use of inanimate objects, Bright creates a sense of human presence, which in turn personifies the objects. His deep understanding and appreciation of his subject evokes powerful sentiments communicating more than just a visually pleasing experience.
Bright works principally with oil paint but drawing & line play a constant and major role in his work. He avoids slipping into a process or procedure of creating a drawing or painting: “I constantly try to change
Before Tomorrow: Underground Images | Burke and Rachel Roberts at Garter Lane Arts Centre
Garter Lane Arts Centre is pleased to present a screening of a short scene from the latest film project by multidisciplinary artists Burke and Rachel Roberts.
Based in Waterford, the duo have collaborated since their time in college. This new work continues the artistic dialogue begun with their debut film, The Ground, furthering their exploration of image and surface.
Join us in the atmospheric surroundings of the Garter Lane Studios basement on the eve of Halloween for an evening of film and conversation!
Tickets: €5 (includes complimentary beer & pizza)
Online Talks | Holm Sound - Episode 9: SURVEY
A reckoning of time and a reckoning of place, broadcast live from Papay, Orkney with surveyor/contributors from near at hand and far-off lands. Holm Sound returns for a special one-off episode to survey the surveyors.
Amy Liptrot, writer seaweed collector and mum; Roxane Palmer artist, Autumn Richardson, poet editor and publisher; Amanda Thomson, artist; Gayle Brogan, sonic alchemist; Frances Scott, artist and SurvØY artists Jonathan Ford and Saoirse Higgins.
A Q+A with the audience will follow.
Ashes to Embers | Thomas Hendy and Ger Hughes at Reds Gallery Dublin
21 Dawson Street , Dublin , Dublin , D02 TK33, Dublin
Artists Thomas Hendy and Ger Hughes come together for a two person exhibition at Reds Gallery Dublin in October.
These works arise from darkness, reaching toward light. Ger paints as if gathering fragments of dawn, transforming past fear into radiance. Thomas draws like rebuilding from ash, turning loss into form and discipline into freedom. Together their practices transform despair into presence, fracture into wholeness, and silence into resilience and renewal.
Curated by Tony Strickland.
Fri 31st Oct – Weds 5th November. 12 – 5:30PM
Closed Sunday/Monday
Vague Symptom Clinic | Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh at Project Arts Centre
39 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, Dublin
Vague Symptom Clinic considers Ireland’s legacies of colonialism, partition, and state violence, and their relationship to intergenerational trauma and inherited chronic illness. The title is taken from the real-life NHS clinic that attempts to identify origins or causes of a range of indicators of disease, including weight loss, fatigue, brain fog and night sweats. Ó Dochartaigh makes sculptural installations with materials including blown glass, silicone, ice, lard, metal, diagrammatic images, sound recordings, electronic components and medical tools made of ceramic, marble, and granite.
Systems | Interrupted Collective Group Exhibition at Axis Arts Centre
Axis, Main Street, Ballymun Dublin 9, D09 Y9W0, Dublin
Interrupted Collective presents ‘Systems’ . An exhibition of new works by Annemarie Kilshaw, Roger O Neill, Sorcha Nineill, Paul Hickey and Steven Doody.
The work explores the relationships we have with various systems we encounter on a daily basis. Through painting, drawing, installation and video we explore the complexities and how we navigate our way around them.
Running from 30th October to 30th January.
Liam Roe, A life's work | A Retrospective of an Irish Wood Sculptor at Pearse Museum
St. Enda's Park, Grange Road, Rathfarnham, Dublin 16, D16 Y7Y5
The Office of Public Works (OPW) and Pearse Museum are proud to present a major retrospective of the work of Irish wood sculptor Liam Roe (1935–2010), running from 1 November 2025 to 1 February 2026.
Roe spent his life cultivating the craft of wood sculpture, developing his practice over several decades. He worked primarily with oak, walnut, Spanish chestnut, elm, yew and lime, creating human and animal forms that reflected both Irish cultural memory and everyday experience. His work explored themes of history, mythology, music, faith, the natural world, and the bond between mother and child.
Born in Marino, North Dublin, Roe began carving in his twenties. In 1962, he travelled to Oberammergau, Germany, to study traditional woodcarving, and later attended night classes at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD). He held his first solo exhibition in 1963 at Brown Thomas, Dublin.
Roe played a significant role in preserving traditional woodcarving in Ireland. He contributed to teaching at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), where his deep knowledge and practical skill were respected by students and colleagues alike.
This exhibition, organised in partnership with the OPW, brings together a wide selection of Roe’s sculptures, many of which have never before been shown publicly.
Image: “Cut-out lady” in sycamore (1972)”
Symposium | Art Futures: Navigating Career Pathways in the Fine Art Sector at TU Dublin
East Quad, Grangegorman Lower D07 XFF2 Dublin 7, Dublin, Dublin, D07 XFF2, Dublin
Art Futures is a half-day symposium designed for emerging artists, recent graduates, and creative professionals beginning their journey in the art world. Through live interviews and candid conversations with leading figures from across the visual arts sector, attendees gain insight into real career paths, pivotal decisions, and the challenges that shaped them. Led by a prominent cultural facilitator, the event offers practical guidance, honest reflection, and fresh perspectives—demystifying the industry and opening doors to its many opportunities.
The Touchstones - James Winnett | Official Launch and Artist Tour at National Museum of Ireland, Turlough Park
Turlough Park , Turlough, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, F23 HY31, Mayo
Saturday, 1st November 2025 at 11am at National Museum of Ireland, Turlough, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, F23 HY31.
All welcome. Refreshments provided. RSVP to mayoarts@mayococo.ie /094 9064376.
The Touchstones artist tour: 11.30am -3.45pm.
Following the launch the artist will lead a tour of the ten stone sculptures in Turlough, Breaffy, Islandeady and Raheens Woods.
Bus and lunch will be provided.
Places limited for tour. Booking required: Contact Aoife O’Toole: mayoarts@mayococo.ie / 0949064376.
Closing
Kunstkammer | Group Exhibition at Lismore Castle Arts
In 2025 Lismore Castle Arts will celebrate 20 years by presenting an exhibition dedicated to the theme of Kunstkammer, curated by art historian & writer, Robert O’Byrne.
Kunstkammer is a form of museum in which strange or rare objects are exhibited together, also known as a Cabinet of Curiosities. Once widespread throughout Europe, these private museums were renowned for featuring a broad range of objects, including Arteficialia (products of man) and Naturalia (products of nature) together with scientific instruments, clocks and automaton.
Priceless works of art were shown alongside strange curiosities, antiquities next to the latest inventions. They were united in their diversity, and their beauty. Kunstkammer at Lismore Castle is both a re-creation and a reinvention of the genre. Through a series of rooms, each one different in size and form, historical objects from private and public collections will share space with works by leading Irish and international contemporary artists.
The exhibition creates new encounters with the familiar and uncanny, inviting timely conversations about display, collections, and contemporary practice as the artefact of the future. Drawing on themes of display the work invites audiences to engage with contemporary art in an accessible way, referring to one of the original ambitions of the Cabinet of Curiosity to foster learning through encounter.
Robert O’Byrne is one of Ireland’s best known writers and lecturers specializing in the fine and decorative arts. A former Vice-President of the Irish Georgian Society, he is the author of more than a dozen books, a former columnist for Apollo magazine, and a contributor to both The Burlington Magazine and the Irish Arts Review. Robert has curated many exhibitions, including Ireland’s Fashion Radicals for The Little Museum in Dublin, and In Harmony with Nature: The Irish Country House Garden for the Irish Georgian Society, both of which drew record attendances. For the past twelve years, he has written an award-winning blog The Irish Aesthete.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive programme of events, talks, screenings, and a far-reaching learning programme. A catalogue will be published in Summer 2025 to accompany the exhibition.
Cities of the World | Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach at the Butler Gallery
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)
To the Edge of Your World | Anita Groener at Academy Art Museum, Maryland, USA
106 South Street Easton, Maryland , MD 21601
In To the Edge of Your World, Dutch-born, Ireland-based artist Anita Groener uses humble materials—twigs, cardboard, cut paper—to explore themes of loss, displacement, and resilience. Her intricately constructed sculptures and drawings reflect on the shared human impact of migration, conflict, and remembrance, shaped in part by her travels through the American South and global regions affected by upheaval. The exhibition also features the premiere of Shelter, a new animated video created in collaboration with filmmaker Matt Kresling and the Talbot Interfaith Shelter. Drawing from personal narratives, Shelter highlights stories of perseverance and community, echoing the exhibition’s meditation on belonging, memory, and the human capacity to endure.
This Exhibition is supported by Culture Ireland.
Bíodh Orm Anocht | Group Exhibition at Ormston House
9-10 Patrick Street, Limerick, Limerick, V94 V089
Ormston House in collaboration with EVA International presents Bíodh Orm Anocht. The exhibition will run from 29 August to 26 October.
Bíodh Orm Anocht, roughly translating to ‘be with me tonight’, is a group exhibition featuring new and existing artworks by four artists – Seán Hannan, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, and Kiera O’Toole – presented at Ormston House and off-site locations. While the contributors work across media and processes, they are unified by a preoccupation with customs and practices that can broadly be described as folk knowledge. These methods and intuitive systems challenge technorational systems of thought.
These four artists convey knowledge that transcends language and which is all the more potent because it remains unwritten and unspoken. Each artist is concerned with the metaphorical qualities of materials. They draw from disciplines outside the visual arts (including mythology, zoology, and cartography), infusing them with personal meaning. Inherent in these works is the possibility that atavistic wisdom may be sourced from the natural world.
Seán Hannan‘s work explores how forgotten voices and rituals can echo into the future, both through unstable technologies and systems of collaboration. Using archival fragments from autobiographical memories referring to Irish traditions, Hannan’s artworks reflect obsolescence and poetic instability. Received at the Graveyard is a sonic installation revolving around an evolving voice AI (artificial intelligence). At its core lies a handful of field recordings made in Ireland in the 1950s that captured the final traces of a near-extinct tradition, keening (caoineadh). Another work featured in this exhibition is LUCK (2022), a sculpture in the form of a piseóg (pish-ohg): folk witchcraft. Mainly a phenomenon of rural Ireland, piseógs were cast as an act of malice, often using a chicken egg onto which a curse had been placed.
In contrast, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín employs materials which have traditionally been connected with healing and nourishment. Sifting stories and traces associated with site, memory, and the casting of spells, Ní Fhlaibhín creates complex but delicate sculptural scenarios. She frequently introduces living beings into white cube environments that are typically purposed for the display of inanimate objects. While previous artworks have involved earthworms, leopard slugs, and willow trees, the family of sculptural assemblages presented here are made from chunks of mineral salt and ash wood. The creation of these sculptures has involved the co-authorship of horses, who have licked the salt crystals into biomorphic forms. The ash tree is sacred in Irish mythology and is seen as possessing talismanic power.
The equine kingdom is also referred to in the cosmological work of Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh. His Speculative massage tools for a family of Donkeys (2022) incorporates massage tools for these domesticated creatures. Other works by Ó Dochartaigh presented at Ormston House include a rendering in glazed ceramics of the artist’s late father’s stomach. A stacked edition of printed drawings link the ecological decline of fish species with medical modifications of the human body, Irish history, and the legacies of British colonialism.
Preparation for this project has entailed site visits and open-ended fieldwork across graveyards, the River Shannon, fish shops, and city streets. This is best exemplified in the work of Kiera O’Toole, whose practice involves derivés of everyday public spaces, in this case Limerick city centre. Through drawing in-situ, O’Toole records the subtle energies of these locations (which she describes as spatialised emotions) and translates her pre-reflective, sensory encounters into topographical maps and charts that she describes as ‘affective cartographies’.
The exhibition takes its name from a traditional Irish song first transcribed by the Irish Folklore Commission in 1936. The song is essentially a piece of mouth music or lilting in which melody and rhythm take precedence over lyrical content. Before being preserved via the written word, ‘Bíodh Orm Anocht’ was conveyed orally down through generations and was therefore altered over time. In the few recordings that are available (such as Mick Hanly and Micheál O Domhnaill’s 1974 album Celtic Folkweave), the singer’s words hover between possibilities of lyrical meaning, pitch, and rhythm. In this way, the song is a vehicle for forms of expression that transcend time and language and which are an outcome of communal rather than individual authorship.
This exhibition is accompanied by a programme of events:
-On Saturday, 30 August from 12–1pm, Seán Hannan will join us for an artist talk and a wireless broadcast of Received at the Graveyeard. Meet at Ormston House, followed by a five-minute walk to St. Michael’s Graveyard. This event will have limited accessibility due to steps and uneven ground.
-On Friday, 19 September, we will be joined from 5–6pm by Historian-in-Residence Sharon Slater for a talk and walk about the history of St. Michael’s Graveyard. This talk will have limited accessibility due to steps and uneven ground. The exhibition will also remain open until 9pm as part of Culture Night 2025.
-On Friday, 26 September, 6–8pm, we will be joined for an artist talk with Laura NíFhlaibhín and tactile workshop with equine therapist Muriel Foxton. Free tickets can be booked here.
-On Saturday, 27 September from 2–4pm, artist Kiera O’Toole will lead a participatory drawing workshop. Through gestural drawing exercises, participants will map the energies and atmospheres of Limerick city. Meet at Ormston House, followed by a walk to city centre sites. Materials will be provided. Capacity is limited, so book here to avoid disappointment.
Artist biographies:
Seán Hannan lives and works in Amsterdam and graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam in 2009. His work has been shown in numerous art venues such as the RU exhibition space, New York; Upstream gallery, Amsterdam; and Hotel Maria Kapel in Hoorn. Hannan participated in Unfair16. He has also received numerous project grants from the Amsterdam fund for the arts (AFK).
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín is an artist from Wexford. She completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019 with Distinction and her BA at National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2013. She is the recipient of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin Staff Prize Bursary; the Goldsmiths Graduate Almacantar Bursary 2019; the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award 2020; the Arts Council England Developing Creative Practice Award 2021; and Arts Council of Ireland Bursaries.
Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh is an artist, researcher, and Gaeilgeoir from Derry, living and working with chronic illness. His mixed-media practice explores complexities inherent within the embodiment of personal loss with the legacy of political violence and lived experience. He is interested in combining industrial manufacturing processes with the materialities of artisanal craft objects to create a specific language of sculptural works.
Kiera O’Toole is a research-based visual artist and lecturer at ATU Sligo. Her practice explores drawing as a method of registering the spatialised emotions of place, blending phenomenology and atmospheric theory. O’Toole exhibits internationally and publishes widely on contemporary drawing. She is a professional member of Visual Artists Ireland and the Drawing Research Network (UK), and she is a co-founder of Drawing deCentered. She currently lives and works in Sligo, Ireland.
The exhibition is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Limerick Arts Office. The events programme is funded by Creative Ireland and Limerick City and County Council through Limerick Creative Communities Small Grants Scheme 2025. Seán Hannan’s participation in this exhibition is partly made possible by the Mondriaan Fund, the public fund for visual art and cultural heritage in the Netherlands.
The Gardener Digs | Laura McMorrow at the RHA Gallery
Laura McMorrow’s paintings draw on found imagery of figures working in the garden, altered landscapes (topiary and hedging), plants, and people enjoying gardens and green spaces.
McMorrow learned everything she knows about gardening from her mother Gillian. An avid gardener and obsessive weeder, Gillian tended to her garden in North Leitrim by making decisions about which plants belong and deserve to self-seed and which become a nuisance. Her approach to gardening was naturalistic and looked effortless, but she was extremely dedicated to her craft.
Out in the garden, in all weather until dusk, it became a form of therapy for her as she suffered with a chronic and fatal illness. The garden became a sanctuary for Gillian and a source of inspiration for Laura who began researching and making work about gardens in her studio practice. Poet and gardener Ross Gay describes time spent gardening as “an exercise in supreme attentiveness”, a trait it shares with painting.
A stop motion animation created using a paint on glass technique is exhibited alongside the paintings. Each frame is hand painted, giving it a painterly and expressive aesthetic. The animation illustrates a quote by the filmmaker Derek Jarman in the book Modern Nature, a journal of his time spent gardening in Dungeness shortly after he discovered he was HIV positive.
The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time — the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer. Derek Jarman.
McMorrow is interested in a personal exploration of the garden as a sanctuary and a space of refuge. However, she is also questioning the complexity of gardening in a time of climate emergency and the futile act of attempting to control and tame nature. The transition to a more ecologically friendly approach to gardening, for example, growing a wildflower meadow instead of a lawn. McMorrow embraces this duality of gardening as a form of therapy and its disposition in the greater context of our time.
Laura McMorrow is a visual artist from Leitrim. She holds a Masters in Fine art from the University of Ulster in Belfast (2012) and she graduated with a degree in painting from Limerick School of Art and Design (2008). Her practice incorporates video installation, animation, sculpture, collage, and painting.
Recent solo exhibitions include The Gardener Digs at The Dock and The Lost Acre at Leitrim Sculpture Centre. Recent community art projects include a collaborative animation project with teenagers funded by Creative Ireland and a sensory mapping project with Leitrim Cycling Festival.
McMorrow is part of the collective, who run an artist-led studio and experimental space in Manorhamilton, Leitrim. Her studio is currently based in the collective space. In 2023, the collective worked together on a collaborative project called Waking the Land that considered environmental grief, supported by the Irish Hospice Foundation.
ARCHIPELAGO | Group Exhibition at the RHA Gallery
The form of photographic practice has expanded in recent times and the RHA invited artists to respond to the spatial magnitude of the largest gallery in Ireland, with many responding to the open spaces with in-the-round works to create something beyond the typical photo show. Pictured here is: the prosaic everyday made poetic; reflections on both psychic and human-altered landscapes; art documentary; constructed abstractions; observations on borders, invisible and hidden; meditations on sexuality and objectification; the interconnectedness of nature and reflections on Ireland losing its welcoming spirit. Throughout it all, a collage of Irish cultural identity—and our contemporary photographers’ place within it—is revealed.
This exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the RHA’s exhibition department and the artist-led group Island Photographers, who foster engagement with and understanding of photography in Ireland, both in the fine art realm and the broader lens-based culture industry through talks, events and workshops. All eight members are participating in the show.
To What Do We Align | Marianne Keating at the RHA Gallery
Marianne Keating’s upcoming exhibition brings together two new films that interrogate Ireland’s shifting place within histories of nationalism, migration, and global power. Cad Leis a Bhfuilimíd Ailínithe / To What Do We Align (2025) is a multi-channel film that reflects on Éamon de Valera’s idealised vision of Ireland, its economic stagnation and mass emigration, and the country’s subsequent reorientation under Seán Lemass, as Ireland chose to align itself with Western hegemony rather than the newly formed Non-Aligned Movement.
No Irish Need Apply (2025) examines the experience of the Irish in Britain during the 1970s and 80s, a period when political violence in Northern Ireland fuelled systemic discrimination, surveillance, and social prejudice against Irish communities. Together, these works explore how Ireland has been both the subject of, and complicit in, wider histories of colonialism, migration, and exclusion, revealing the contradictions at the heart of national identity
Marianne Keating is an Irish artist and researcher based in London. She holds a practice-based PhD in Visual & Material Culture and Contemporary Art Practice entitled, ‘They don’t do much in the cane-hole way’, Hidden Histories of the Irish Diaspora in Jamaica, funded by KSA at Kingston University, London and a TECHNE Associate. She has an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London and a BA in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland. She is currently an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London (2020- Present).
Keating was shortlisted to represent Ireland in the 2022 Venice Biennial and has exhibited extensively throughout Ireland and internationally. Upcoming and recent exhibitions include (2025)The Irish Pavilion, World Expo, Japan; The Model, Sligo; Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick; Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford, Ireland. Collections include The Office of Public Works, Ireland; Royal College of Art, London; Norlinda and José Lima Collection, Portugal; Zuckerman Museum of Art, Georgia, USA; Palazzo Fogazzaro, Vicenza, Italy.
The Known and Unknown World | KCAT Studio Group Exhibition at the RHA Gallery
All works in the exhibition, The Known and Unknown World, have taken a drawing of a five-legged cat by George McCutcheon as their initial point of reference. This work, made in 1996 remains the logo of KCAT to this day. This unusual creature exists at the centre of a sprawling exhibition that mirrors the multi-layered design of a Wunderkammer.
From the 16th century onwards these cabinets of curiosities mixed items from the arts, the natural world, and the sciences to present idiosyncratic views of existence. Juxtaposing local landmarks with fantastical landscapes, common songbirds with speculatively designed creatures, human portraits with extra-planetary beings, The Known and Unknown World invites the viewer to discover and celebrate the multiplicity of ways in which the world can be experienced, understood, and recorded.
Artists featured in this exhibition include: Andrew Pike, Brianna Hurley, Declan Byrne, Diana Chambers, Erin Hacking, Eileen Mulrooney, Fergus Fitzgerald, Fintin Kelly, Jason Turner, Karl Fitzgerald, Lorna Corrigan, Margaret Walker, Shay Croke, Sinead Fahey, Thomas Barron, Mary Cody, Francis Casey, Jack Foskin and George McCutcheon.
Curated by Benjamin Stafford in cooperation with KCAT Studio. This exhibition was first shown at KCAT Art Centre, Callan, Co. Kilkenny as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, 2025.
Groundwork | Forensic Architecture at 126 Artist-Run Gallery & Studios
15 St Bridget’s Place, Hidden Valley, Woodquay, Galway City
Exhibition continues 26 September – 26 October 2025.
126 Artist-Run Gallery & Studios presents Groundwork, an exhibition of work by Forensic Architecture which traces the ongoing Nakba (catastrophe) in Palestine.
Forensic Architecture is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, dedicated to developing and employing cutting-edge techniques for investigating state violence and human rights violations.
Launching 26th Sept at 6pm. Open Wed-Sun 12pm-6pm until 26th Oct 2025.
Please see our Instagram and Website for associated Events.
Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Galway City Council Arts Office.
Nature Studies in the Nick of Time | Martin Finnin at The People's Museum of Limerick
2 Pery Square, Prior's-Land, Limerick , Limerick, V94 HF53
Nature Studies in the Nick of Time, an exhibition by Martin Finnin, opens at 6pm on 16 October at The People’s Museum of Limerick, launched by artist John Shinnors.
Returning to Ireland for the first time in nearly twenty years, Finnin presents oil paintings, works on paper, and sculpture that merge abstraction, satire, and nature—exploring the fragility and power of the natural world with his signature vibrant, intuitive style.
Creative Transparency | Waiting Space (Chris Falconer) at Waterford Medieval Museum
Waterford Medieval Museum, Cathedral Square, The Viking Triangle, X91 K10E, Waterford, X91RR76
Installed in 13th-century Choristers Hall, this interactive installation by Waiting Space (Chris Falconer) resembles familiar architectures of confession/recording/voting booths – threshold spaces we enter to undertake acts of vulnerability & privacy – but here constructed in transparent materials. A specialised microphone captures internal sounds of touch to the structure itself, amplifying even subtle gesture, which trigger audio-reactive lighting. Exploring self-awareness, exposure, and creation, it invites visitors to tap, brush, & listen – becoming both observer & instrument of the piece.
Exhibition | Aleana Egan at Place Des Vosges, Paris
Kerlin Gallery is pleased to bring a solo presentation by Aleana Egan to the second edition of Place des Vosges. Aleana Egan will present a group of new paintings and bronze sculptures. In Egan’s work, traces of psychological states and experience are harvested and expressed through material objects, colour, and form, blending fragmented interior visions with observations from the world at large.
Place des Vosges is a gallery-led joint exhibition, taking place in the heart of the Marais district during Paris Art Week.
OFFSCREEN Paris | Dorothy Cross at La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, Paris
47, Bd de l’Hôpital, , Paris, 75013
Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present Dorothy Cross at the 4th edition of OFFSCREEN. Cross will present three signature works in La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, a 17th-century chapel and former asylum in Paris’s 13th arrondissement.
OFFSCREEN Paris is focused on image-based art, including installations, still and moving images, and experimental practices. OFFSCREEN aims to create an immersive experience, through selective curation and fostering a dialogue between various artistic media and practices.
Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee's Bend | Group Exhibition at IMMA
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
Talks | Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels - Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories with Clara Peeters at Triskel Arts Centre
In each Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories lecture, Artist and art teacher Áine Andrews will focus on a particular painting to recount its history.
Week 3: Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels, Clara Peeters, 1615.
This painting captures the different ages of the cheeses and reflections in glass and metal. A minute self-portrait of the painter is reflected in the lid of a jug behind the cheeses.
We know little about the life of Peeters, but there are some forty known paintings by this extraordinary skilled artist who had such great influence on the painters of the Northern Netherlands.
Yes, But Do You Care? | Marie Brett at GOMA Waterford
YES, BUT DO YOU CARE? A tour of audio-visual art work by acclaimed artist Marie Brett from IMMA’s national collection
Marie Brett is bringing her tour of Yes, But Do You Care? to GOMA Waterford on Monday 27th October. The exciting event will include a screening of Brett’s audio-visual art piece, a Q&A between the artist and IMMA curator Sundara O’Higgins, and a dance response by Kelly Keesing.
Time: 2pm
Date: 27 October 2025
Location: 6/7 Lombard Street, Waterford
Doors open 20 mins before the event. Entry is free and everyone is welcome!
Events | Westival's 50th Anniversary in Westport
Westport’s much-loved arts festival, Westival, returns next week for six days of music, film, theatre, and visual art, filling the town with creativity and conversation from Wednesday 22 to Monday 27 October.
Across six days, audiences can explore a rich programme of music, film, visual art, spoken word, theatre, and family-friendly workshops, with events taking place in venues and pop-up spaces throughout the town. From the traditional to the experimental, Westival remains a space where art and community meet, and where creativity continues to thrive.
Talks | Portrait of Hugh Lane - Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories with Áine Andrews at Triskel Arts Centre
Tobin Street, Off South Main Street, Cork, Cork, T12WYYO
In each Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories lecture, Artist and art teacher Áine Andrews will focus on a particular painting to recount its history.
Week 1: Portrait of Hugh Lane, John Singer Sargent, 1906
Hugh Lane was born in Cork in 1875, but he was never to spend time there again, until, with tragic irony, he died when the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U boat in 1915 within sight of the Cork coastline.
Lane is perhaps best known as Lady Gregory’s nephew and particularly for an unsigned codicil to his will which led to the controversy regarding Ireland’s right to the important Impressionist paintings previously owned by him. Little however is generally known of the collector’s life in London and his extraordinary successful career as a dealer of old master paintings as well as modern works of art.
Out Of Light | Group Exhibition at the City Assembly House
58 South William Street, Dublin 2, Co. Dublin, D02T883
High Tide Contemporary presents, Out of Light, an exhibition of work by six artists – Karen Ebbs, Myra Jago, Diane Magee, Aisling McEntee Walsh, Sorca O’Farrell, and Paula O’Riordan.
This exhibition will be opened by Mr. James Hanley, RHA on Thursday the 23rd of October, 6-8pm and runs until the 29th of October 2025.
This work examines the phenomenon of light, focusing on how it is perceived and experienced through the distinct creative lenses of six individuals.
Kindly sponsored by Oar House & Brass Monkey Restaurants.
Evolving Access | Mini-Symposium & Artist Tour at Westport Town Hall Theatre
The Octagon, Westport , Co. Mayo , F28 R240, Connaught
A mini-symposium which will focus on how access solutions have developed over the last 25 years and their potential future direction from the perspective of artists with disabilities, venues, festival organisers and arts organisations.
Presentations by Alan James Burns, disabled artist and festival organiser, Orla Moloney, (Project Arts Centre) and Padraig Naughton (Arts and Disability Ireland). The morning session will conclude with a Q&A Session.
Lunch provided followed a tour of ‘The Space Between Real and Shadow’, an exhibition by Breda Burns, at the Custom House Studios & Gallery.
Talks | Climate and Art: Programming & Advocacy Talk at Pallas Projects/Studio
Climate and Art: Programming & Advocacy brings together three artists and three curators to explore how contemporary art responds to this challenge, offering an unusual mirroring perspective that highlights synergies and divergences. It’s a reflection on the role of the arts in shaping public discourse around the climate crisis, its complexity and its aim towards regenerative outcomes.
Viviana Checchia (Curator at Void Art Centre)
Vanya Lambrecht Ward (Artist)
Siobhan Mooney (Independent curator)
Katherine Sankey (Artist)
Niamh Schmidtke (Artist)
Kate Strain (Curator at Kunstverein Aughrim)
Before Tomorrow: Underground Images | Burke and Rachel Roberts at Garter Lane Arts Centre
Garter Lane Arts Centre is pleased to present a screening of a short scene from the latest film project by multidisciplinary artists Burke and Rachel Roberts.
Based in Waterford, the duo have collaborated since their time in college. This new work continues the artistic dialogue begun with their debut film, The Ground, furthering their exploration of image and surface.
Join us in the atmospheric surroundings of the Garter Lane Studios basement on the eve of Halloween for an evening of film and conversation!
Tickets: €5 (includes complimentary beer & pizza)
Headland | Sean Molloy at the Molesworth Gallery
16 Molesworth Street, Dublin 2, Dublin, Dublin
Over the past 15 years, Sean Molloy has investigated and deconstructed the baroque painting canon. Initially, this took the form of portraiture, primarily via the unsettling representation of Philip IV by Velazquez, later leading to exploration of the baroque landscape canon, in particular the works of Berchem, Ruisdael, Cuyp and Wouwerman. From 2014, he focussed on creating capricci, imagined landscapes composited from references in the baroque canon, occasionally including staffage and overlain with disruptive, superimposed and highly-saturated ‘glitch’ elements.
Drift | Margot Galvin at Ranelagh Arts Centre
‘Drift ‘ explores the vibrant environment along the River Dodder through expanded printmaking processes. Developed through regular walks along the riverbanks, the work responds to natural rhythms, human impact, and the tension between urban infrastructure and ecological systems.The project draws on conversations with local environmental and citizen groups, whose work in conservation, clean-ups, and advocacy informs the visual and conceptual layers of the exhibition. Drift invites reflection on our relationship with place, presence, and environmental change.
Phenomenal Irish Women | Ishmael Claxton at The United Arts Club
3 Upper Fitzwilliam St, Dublin 2, Dublin, D02 RR50, Dublin 2
Inspired by a poem by Maya Angelou.
In his latest body of work, Claxton turns to Irish history and contemporary life, taking inspiration from Maya Angelou’s poetry and from the courage of Irish women who have reshaped cultural and political landscapes. Figures such as Constance Markievicz, Sinead O’Connor, Mary Robinson, Catherine Corless, Bernadette Devlin, and Rhasidat Adeleke are presented alongside lesser-known activists, writers, and truth-tellers whose contributions are equally transformative.
Online Talks | Holm Sound - Episode 9: SURVEY
A reckoning of time and a reckoning of place, broadcast live from Papay, Orkney with surveyor/contributors from near at hand and far-off lands. Holm Sound returns for a special one-off episode to survey the surveyors.
Amy Liptrot, writer seaweed collector and mum; Roxane Palmer artist, Autumn Richardson, poet editor and publisher; Amanda Thomson, artist; Gayle Brogan, sonic alchemist; Frances Scott, artist and SurvØY artists Jonathan Ford and Saoirse Higgins.
A Q+A with the audience will follow.
Resonance | Laura Butler and Audrey Kyle at Larne Museum & Arts Centre
2 Victoria Road, Larne, Antrim, BT40 1RN
Sometimes a painting evokes a feeling or a memory that the viewer cannot always bring to mind.
While Laura Butler and Audrey Kyle have very different artistic styles and use different mediums, they share a vision in the sense of being preoccupied with a world beyond the present moment. Often, they are drawn to depicting scenes in the same places but produce their own unique interpretations. Audrey explores through a deep connection with the natural world, a strong sense of the mythical, mystical and folklore. Laura’s pursuit in her landscape paintings is to honour the spirit of the lives of people, and the traces their presence leaves on the landscape.
The exhibition will be on display from Friday 3rd until Friday 31st October 2025, and includes Saturday opening on 11th October. Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 10.00am – 4.00pm.
TEND/ER | Lorna Watkins at Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre
24 Main Street, Limavady, Londonderry, BT49 0FJ
Exhibition Launch: Saturday 13th September at 12 noon
Based in Sligo, Lorna Watkins is a multi-disciplinary visual artist. She studied Printed Textile Design in NCAD and is a recipient of a Ballinglen Fellowship. Her exhibition Tend/er features painting, printmaking and sculpture exploring ideas around the home, overlooked everyday objects, motherhood and ageing. She often references the body, as life drawing has been a constant in her practice over the past decade.
In 2024 Watkins was selected for the John Richardson French Residency Award and in 2020, JOYA AiR, Spain. She is a recipient of the Arts Council Agility Award; ADI Training Award and Thomas Damann Travel Bursary and her works are part of several public and private collections including the Ulster Hospital and Ballinglen Arts Foundation.
Page Turners | Group Exhibition of Artists' Books at St Fin Barre's Cathedral
Bishop Street, Cork, T12 K710, Munster
Page Turners is an exhibition of artists’ books which launches in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral at 5:30pm on Thursday, September 4th.
This autumn exhibition in the cathedral ambulatory invites visitors to linger and spend time exploring selected artists’ books from across Ireland, the UK and France.
Selected national and international book artists include Ambeck Design, Coracle Press, Helen Douglas, Paul Gaffney, Helena Grimes, ottoGraphic Books, Road Books, and Tom Sowden. Editions will be for sale through the cathedral shop.
Page-turners is co-curated with MTU Crawford College of Art & Design and is an important moment at the cathedral as we pioneer a rolling arts programme.
There will also be a panel discussion at the cathedral at 12:30pm on Thursday, September 18th.
The exhibition runs until October 31st, 2025
There no charge to see this exhibition: email arts@stfinbarres.ie to receive your ticket.
Eist: The Listening Frame | The Nenagh Street Collective at Nenagh Arts Centre
Town Hall, Banba Square, Nenagh, IE, Tipperary, E45 NX26
Launch: Wednesday October 1st, 6:30pm
This exhibition explores the connection between voice, self and community. Through the medium of photography, the collective demonstrates the importance that creativity has in conveying current cultural values, legacy for future generations, identity and wellbeing, and the importance of holding space. This exhibition is a participatory experience, and we invite all attendees to bring smartphones and headphones to unlock audio reflections and soundscapes that accompany the photographs.
Glimpses | Jennifer Alexander at Threshold Gallery Belfast
Exhibition continues from the 4th of September to the 31st of October 2025
In her exhibition, open for Late Night Art Belfast this Thursday 4 September, Alexander interprets Aristotle’s imagining the cosmos as 56 celestial spheres by creating a series of acrylic sketches on linen. Each fragment invites a shift in perspective, exploring in-between spaces, identity beyond the body, and our place in the universe – a constellation of moments that ask who we are, and how we find meaning.
Jennifer Alexander is a visual artist and curator from Scotland, currently based in Northern Ireland. Her practice investigates the interplay between perception and stratification.
Wild things | ORINOTAWASHI at Tøn
Norio Ishiwata and Chifumi Ishiwata formed the art unit Orinotawashi after their marriage. Based in Tokyo, they began by creating collage works, working together to complete each single piece. In 2013, they dedicated themselves to art, participating in artist-in-residence programs in five countries: Spain, Italy, Zambia, Egypt, and Morocco. Their travels abroad inspired them to focus on the theme of “art for living.” In Spain, they met Irish artist Mark Redden, whose traditional Irish boat, the Currach, and his artistic style influenced them.
RURAL LIFE 1.0 | Group Exhibition at Brown Mountain Diamond
Revanagh, Coolcullen, Kilkenny, R93 E089
Opening Sunday 12th October.
Guided tours at 2:30pm 4:00pm and 5:30pm.
Artworks are outdoors – dress accordingly.
Music: DJs throughout the day, live jazz at 4:00pm and Robbie Kitt playing at 7:00pm.
Brown Mountain Diamond, an artist-run space in the hills of North Kilkenny, presents RURAL LIFE 1.0, an exhibition of new work. Since May artists immersed themselves in rural life and collaborated with community groups. Participating artists include Sharon Phelan (May), John Byrne (June), Maria McKinney (July), Paddy Bloomer (August), and Bog Cottage (September).
here and there | Ben Malcolmson at PS²
11 Rosemary Street, Belfast BT1 1QA, Belfast, Antrim, BT1 1QA
Ben Malcolmson’s debut artist book, self-published ‘here and there’, presents a five-year photographic look (2019-2024) into the topography of Ireland and Western Europe.
Drawing from an archive of five years of smartphone photos, the images are playfully assembled to weave thematic connections of place, personal ephemera and photographic making. Through a non-chronological sequence of works, Malcolmson explores the space between—the feeling of being neither fully here nor there.
This publication will be launched as part of a significant photographic culmination held as a solo installation.
Systems | Interrupted Collective Group Exhibition at Axis Arts Centre
Axis, Main Street, Ballymun Dublin 9, D09 Y9W0, Dublin
Interrupted Collective presents ‘Systems’ . An exhibition of new works by Annemarie Kilshaw, Roger O Neill, Sorcha Nineill, Paul Hickey and Steven Doody.
The work explores the relationships we have with various systems we encounter on a daily basis. Through painting, drawing, installation and video we explore the complexities and how we navigate our way around them.
Running from 30th October to 30th January.
The Dreaming Road | Jack Butler Yeats at The Model
Exhibition continues 25th March – 1st November 2025.
Jack Butler Yeats; The Dreaming Road
Tue. 25 Mar. – Sat. 1 Nov. 2025
The Dreaming Road presents audiences with the opportunity to trace Jack Butler Yeats’ extraordinary journey as an artist through four important, interconnected stages of his life and work. The show touches on the legacy of his unique artistic family, as well as the indelible influence of his early life in Sligo on his entire career. A selection of his politically charged paintings of the 1920s are on view alongside a number of the great masterpieces of his later years, which are noted for their wildly romantic and expressionistic style. While Jack was notably reluctant to discuss his creative practice, the exhibition is augmented with a number of statements by the artist himself that shed light on aspects of his attitudes and approaches to painting.
The Yeats Family was one of the most creative and accomplished in the literary and cultural world of early twentieth century Ireland. Patriarch, John Butler Yeats was distinguished as an artist, and particularly noted for his work in portraiture. Jack’s three siblings William, Susan, Elizabeth made significant contributions to literature, publishing and education throughout their lifetimes. Their mother, Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a wealthy Sligo merchant family, and imbued in her children a deep love for the people, landscape, and mythology of the county.
Jack Butler Yeats remains one of Ireland’s best loved and most accomplished artists. Unlike his siblings, Jack was sent to his maternal grandparents in Sligo, where he lived between the ages of eight and 16 years. He cut his creative teeth on the deep experience of Irish life he encountered in the town, and its western characters and dramatic landscape populated his works until the end of his life. While his subject matter remained the same throughout his long career, his style of painting, and the meaning he gave his works changed over time. His initial depictions of western life was marked by a strong sentimentality, which he expressed in watercolours during the period 1898–1910. This gave way, in his early oil period (1910–1925), to the pronounced realism that he developed to make political and social commentary.
Jack had been on a visit back to Sligo in 1898, when he witnessed some of the centenary re-enactments of the 1798 Rebellion. The spectacle of the event appealed to Jack’s love of the drama of everyday life, and he was inspired to create one of his first political scenes, Robert Emmet – Procession at Carricknagat, Co. Sligo, 1898. The more serious concern of Ireland’s nationhood that the centenary celebrations brought to the fore, also impacted the young artist. From 1898 onwards he became more convinced of the right to Irish self-determination. He went on to paint several, more overtly political works, some of which are also on view in this exhibition, culminating in the masterworks The Funeral of Harry Boland, 1922, and Communicating with Prisoners, c. 1924.
From the 1920s and into the later part of his career, another more marked development took hold. Jack’s subject matter became imbued with a deeper mysticism and symbolism. His handling of paint became much freer, he abandoned his palette and brush, and worked directly onto the canvas using only the primary colours. Throughout the 1940s, his paintings increasingly present us with apocalyptic visions. He developed a highly personal technique, which placed less emphasis on composition. He focused more on creating work in a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ style and termed the paintings he made in this way as ‘happenings’.
The exhibition continues until 1st November. In depth Curator’s Tours will run on each Saturday at 11am throughout June, July and August, and can be booked at the front desk or at www.themodel.ie.
We keep all of our exhibitions free of charge and open to everyone. We kindly ask that those who can afford to, make a donation of €5 for this exhibition. This can be done by contactless payment at the station in this gallery.
Glór | Ciúnas | Group Exhibition at An Táin Arts Centre
Crowe St, Townparks, Dundalk, Co. Louth, Dundalk, Louth
Opening Launch on Thursday 2nd October 7pm
Creative Spark is proud to present Glór | Ciúnas, a group exhibition showcasing new work by artists from the 2024/25 Artist-in-Residence Programme. Featuring a vibrant mix of painting, print, installation, sculpture, and mixed media, the exhibition brings together work by Aoife Cawley, Klowi, Claire McAteer, Colleen Eilís Murphy, Nicola Moran, Áine Dunne, Maria Atanacković, and Eimear Murphy. The title Glór | Ciúnas translating as Loud | Silence reflects the work created by this year’s artists. Some using bright, bold colours to express energy and stories while others create subtle, quiet works that invite you to reflect. Glór | Ciúnas marks the eleventh year of the artists-in-Residence exhibition hosted in an Táin Arts Centre.
The Creative Spark Residency Programme, supported by The Arts Service of Louth County Council and the Arts Council of Ireland, is dedicated to providing essential support to artists.
Libraries of Rest | Ciara Barker at The Dock
Libraries of Rest by Ciara Barker.
Opening Reception: Saturday 23 August, 2-4pm.
Libraries of Rest by Ciara Barker is an immersive exhibition that invites visitors to imagine the future of restful spaces and practices. Libraries of Rest combines installation, gameplay, sound and light, inhabiting a space between visual art, immersive environment and critical theory, centered on collective well-being.
Barker’s investigation of rest as a method of resistance is informed by a number of critical works, including texts by Tricia Hersey, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, Sonya Renee Taylor and Dr. Devon Price. This scholarship is grounded in its examination of structural inequality and rest as a racial, disability rights and social justice issue that disproportionately affects marginalised communities.
This exhibition is curated by Aoife Donnellan with a soundscape by Mankyy. Image: Ciara Barker, Libraries of Rest at transmediale studio in Berlin. Image: Ciara Barker, Libraries of Rest at transmediale studio in Berlin. Photo by Katie O’Neill.
Diagonal Acts | Marie Farrington at The Dock
St. George's Terrace, Carrick-on-Shannon, Leitrim, N41T2X2
Diagonal Acts by Marie Farrington.
Opening Reception: Saturday 23 August, 2-4pm.
Diagonal Acts refers to how diagonal lines are seen as ways to connect, divide and move across various places or ideas. The exhibition explores themes of memory, place and connection — exploring gaps, fragments and edges within archaeology, geology, sculpture and staged performance.
The material outcomes in Diagonal Acts are supported by a range of collaborations, and connected by a public programme of generative elements devised to critically engage audiences in person and online, enhancing and expanding participation and access.
This exhibition is curated by Kate Strain with contributions by Liliane Puthod and Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. Image: Marie Farrington, Figures for Lifting, 2024, carved soapstone. Photo by Rein Kooyman.
Maelstrom | Maud Cotter at Highlanes Gallery
St Laurence St, Drogheda, Drogheda, Co. Louth
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.’
Formwork | Mandy O'Neill at Ballina Arts Centre
Barrett Street, Ballina, Mayo, F26NW83, Connaughht
Exhibition continues from the 6th of September to the 1st of November 2025
The point of departure for this exhibition was Mandy O’Neill’s recent practice-based PhD, where she examined the social and material implications of housing development and dereliction in the Dublin inner suburb of Cabra. Her research questioned the ideological shifts in housing policy since the mid 20th century in Ireland which have resulted in a move from housing as public good to housing as commodity, with emphasis on the impact of planning. In a broader context O’Neill’s practice is concerned with the politics of space and place, and the power relations which shape our built environment
The Push and Pull | Katie Moore at Ballina Arts Centre
Barrett Street, Ballina, Mayo, F26NW83, Connaughht
Exhibition continues from the 6th of September to the 1st of November 2025
Rooted in the beauty of the west of Ireland, The Push and Pull explores the dualities of motherhood – the tenderness and tension, the giving and the grieving, the fierce love and quiet loss of self. Through a series of intimate, textured works, the artist captures the emotional rhythms of raising children: moments of connection stretched thin by the demands of care, identity, and time. This body of work invites viewers into the ebb and flow of maternal experience, where nature, body, and memory collide.
Dusk Alchemy | Carol Graham at ArtisAnn Gallery
70 Bloomfield Avenue, Belfast, County Antrim, BT5 5AE
Carol describes this exhibition as
“This collection birthed as an exhilarating rush of visual stories. Begun around the mid-winter Solstice they took ragged forms in intense blues, purples, crimsons, with rich bronze and gold. They explore something of the dark and dusks of winter when the dog becomes the wolf”.
Her work is held in private collections, public institutions, businesses and galleries across the UK, Ireland, USA, South Africa and Australia.
Light Falls: Ode to Baggotonia | Gerard Byrne at Gerard Byrne Studio
15 Chelmsford Road, Ranelagh , Dublin, Dublin, D06 DE68
Exhibition continues 20 September – 1 November 2025.
Gerard Byrne, Artist of the Baggotonia Festival 2025 presents ‘Light Falls: Ode to Baggotonia’, set in his intimate Ranelagh studio + gallery. Byrne captures Dublin’s unique light—the glow between buildings, canal shimmers, shadows folding into foliage. The show features contemplative still lifes, dreamy urbanscapes, and bold figuratives. Reflecting on Georgian streets and the city’s Bohemian soul where Beckett, Behan, and Bacon once walked, Byrne transforms everyday sights into lyrical meditations on light, memory, and place—continuing Ireland’s Impressionist legacy with contemporary insight.
Rooted Utopias: our Future at Play | Group Exhibition at Westgate Heritage Centre
Westgate Heritage Centre, Westgate, Wexford Town
In this exhibition guest curator Karla Sánchez invited the eight selected artists to voice their thoughts about the need of current world to re-tell stories that incorporate other beings, human and more-than-human, as well as re-imagine structures and modes of living and doing. New and better futures grounded in nature have to be dreamed of and worked on without delay.
Several common threads emerged; from an interest, deep curiosity and almost obsession with place -natural environments in particular- to personal and social connections and re-connections, experimentation and play.
Symposium | Art Futures: Navigating Career Pathways in the Fine Art Sector at TU Dublin
East Quad, Grangegorman Lower D07 XFF2 Dublin 7, Dublin, Dublin, D07 XFF2, Dublin
Art Futures is a half-day symposium designed for emerging artists, recent graduates, and creative professionals beginning their journey in the art world. Through live interviews and candid conversations with leading figures from across the visual arts sector, attendees gain insight into real career paths, pivotal decisions, and the challenges that shaped them. Led by a prominent cultural facilitator, the event offers practical guidance, honest reflection, and fresh perspectives—demystifying the industry and opening doors to its many opportunities.
MIRA | Group Exhibition at GalleryX
The word mirror traces its roots from the Latin mirari, to admire. In Spanish, mira means “look.” But what happens if a mirror shows nothing? In gothic lore, the vampire is denied reflection, cursed with blindness to itself. MIRA is an exhibition of young Irish artists working across film, painting, drawing, and stitched media. Together they explore gothic horror’s legacy, with Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a touchstone. Step into a world where self-image, darkness, and the uncanny collide.
Opening Night: 28 Oct, 5:30–9 PM
Exhibition Hours: 29 Oct–1 Nov, 1–6 PM.
Come look closer, if you dare.
New Wave | Group Exhibition at SO Fine Art Editions
2nd Floor Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, 59 South William Street, Dublin 2, D02 DC83
Exhibition continues from the 11th of October to the 1st of November 2025
SO Fine Art Editions is excited to present ‘New Wave’, a group exhibition featuring the work of five leading contemporary Irish artists: Peter Bradley, Niall Cullen, Karl Hagan, James Kirwan and John O’Flynn. Their practices, span painting, mixed media, digital collage and sculpture, a push beyond traditional methods. Together, they offer new perspectives on the fleeting and complex nature of contemporary life, demonstrating how art can connect the personal and universal, questioning how we see ourselves, each other and the world around us.
The Touchstones - James Winnett | Official Launch and Artist Tour at National Museum of Ireland, Turlough Park
Turlough Park , Turlough, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, F23 HY31, Mayo
Saturday, 1st November 2025 at 11am at National Museum of Ireland, Turlough, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, F23 HY31.
All welcome. Refreshments provided. RSVP to mayoarts@mayococo.ie /094 9064376.
The Touchstones artist tour: 11.30am -3.45pm.
Following the launch the artist will lead a tour of the ten stone sculptures in Turlough, Breaffy, Islandeady and Raheens Woods.
Bus and lunch will be provided.
Places limited for tour. Booking required: Contact Aoife O’Toole: mayoarts@mayococo.ie / 0949064376.
STONE STEEL BRONZE GOLD | Group Exhibition at Whites of Wexford
Abbey Street, Wexford, Wexford, Y35C5PF, Leinster
Exhibition continues from the 18th of October to the 1st of November 2025
One artist, three sculptors exhibit together.
STONE Jason Morris carves stone inspired by a passion for Irish heritage, archaeology and mythology which he skillfully ‘weaves’ into work.
STEEL Guy Urbin forges ‘the gentle Japanese curves smooth to the eyes’ and movement of flames, flowing water, wind.
BRONZE Gilly Thomas sculpts the simplicity of the creature keeping the essence with clean lines and intuitive shape.
GOLD Mary Wallace vibrant use of colour paired with the opulence of pure gold is breathtaking. Gazing into translucent depths her art transports you to a place of imagination.
On-going
Online Exhibition | Noel Molloy in Waste to Create 4 at Eco Aware Art Gallery
Three of my sculptures selected for Eco Aware Art Gallery ® Art Gallery
Our Vision Is To Reduce Waste In world through Art. We promote Artwork Made by Waste ,Recycle , And Found Material.
Textile Memories | Varvara Keidan Shavrova at Documentation Centre, Berlin
Stresemannstraße 90, Berlin, 10963
This gallery exhibition centers on the textile installation by artist Varvara Keidan Shavrova, born in Soviet Russia and now living in England and Ireland. The installation features eight screen-printed felt blankets, each depicting images from her family photo album. This social and performative artwork invites interaction: visitors are encouraged to touch the blankets or drape them over their shoulders.
Juxtaposed with the artwork are historical objects from the Documentation Centre’s collection, including a tablecloth from East Prussia, a bedspread from Bohemia, and a small table cover from Brandenburg.
Textiles such as blankets, tablecloths, handkerchiefs, traditional costumes, coats, cloaks, scarves, and throws are poignant witnesses to hardship and suffering. They serve as relics of loss and deprivation, embodying the deeply human desire to connect with warmth, familiarity, and family. These objects offer a sense of solace against the painful experiences of displacement, loneliness, and uprootedness.
Varvara Keidan Shavrova’s work speaks to these shared experiences of millions of refugees, displaced persons, and emigrants, resonating with their enduring stories.
Exhibition Dates: February 2- November 16, 2025
IMMA Collection: Art as Agency | Group Exhibition at IMMA
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 | Group Exhibition at IMMA
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
Kunstkammer | Group Exhibition at Lismore Castle Arts
In 2025 Lismore Castle Arts will celebrate 20 years by presenting an exhibition dedicated to the theme of Kunstkammer, curated by art historian & writer, Robert O’Byrne.
Kunstkammer is a form of museum in which strange or rare objects are exhibited together, also known as a Cabinet of Curiosities. Once widespread throughout Europe, these private museums were renowned for featuring a broad range of objects, including Arteficialia (products of man) and Naturalia (products of nature) together with scientific instruments, clocks and automaton.
Priceless works of art were shown alongside strange curiosities, antiquities next to the latest inventions. They were united in their diversity, and their beauty. Kunstkammer at Lismore Castle is both a re-creation and a reinvention of the genre. Through a series of rooms, each one different in size and form, historical objects from private and public collections will share space with works by leading Irish and international contemporary artists.
The exhibition creates new encounters with the familiar and uncanny, inviting timely conversations about display, collections, and contemporary practice as the artefact of the future. Drawing on themes of display the work invites audiences to engage with contemporary art in an accessible way, referring to one of the original ambitions of the Cabinet of Curiosity to foster learning through encounter.
Robert O’Byrne is one of Ireland’s best known writers and lecturers specializing in the fine and decorative arts. A former Vice-President of the Irish Georgian Society, he is the author of more than a dozen books, a former columnist for Apollo magazine, and a contributor to both The Burlington Magazine and the Irish Arts Review. Robert has curated many exhibitions, including Ireland’s Fashion Radicals for The Little Museum in Dublin, and In Harmony with Nature: The Irish Country House Garden for the Irish Georgian Society, both of which drew record attendances. For the past twelve years, he has written an award-winning blog The Irish Aesthete.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive programme of events, talks, screenings, and a far-reaching learning programme. A catalogue will be published in Summer 2025 to accompany the exhibition.
Artist-Initiated Projects 2025 at Pallas Projects/Studios
115–117 The Coombe, Dublin 8, Dublin
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.
The Dreaming Road | Jack Butler Yeats at The Model
Exhibition continues 25th March – 1st November 2025.
Jack Butler Yeats; The Dreaming Road
Tue. 25 Mar. – Sat. 1 Nov. 2025
The Dreaming Road presents audiences with the opportunity to trace Jack Butler Yeats’ extraordinary journey as an artist through four important, interconnected stages of his life and work. The show touches on the legacy of his unique artistic family, as well as the indelible influence of his early life in Sligo on his entire career. A selection of his politically charged paintings of the 1920s are on view alongside a number of the great masterpieces of his later years, which are noted for their wildly romantic and expressionistic style. While Jack was notably reluctant to discuss his creative practice, the exhibition is augmented with a number of statements by the artist himself that shed light on aspects of his attitudes and approaches to painting.
The Yeats Family was one of the most creative and accomplished in the literary and cultural world of early twentieth century Ireland. Patriarch, John Butler Yeats was distinguished as an artist, and particularly noted for his work in portraiture. Jack’s three siblings William, Susan, Elizabeth made significant contributions to literature, publishing and education throughout their lifetimes. Their mother, Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a wealthy Sligo merchant family, and imbued in her children a deep love for the people, landscape, and mythology of the county.
Jack Butler Yeats remains one of Ireland’s best loved and most accomplished artists. Unlike his siblings, Jack was sent to his maternal grandparents in Sligo, where he lived between the ages of eight and 16 years. He cut his creative teeth on the deep experience of Irish life he encountered in the town, and its western characters and dramatic landscape populated his works until the end of his life. While his subject matter remained the same throughout his long career, his style of painting, and the meaning he gave his works changed over time. His initial depictions of western life was marked by a strong sentimentality, which he expressed in watercolours during the period 1898–1910. This gave way, in his early oil period (1910–1925), to the pronounced realism that he developed to make political and social commentary.
Jack had been on a visit back to Sligo in 1898, when he witnessed some of the centenary re-enactments of the 1798 Rebellion. The spectacle of the event appealed to Jack’s love of the drama of everyday life, and he was inspired to create one of his first political scenes, Robert Emmet – Procession at Carricknagat, Co. Sligo, 1898. The more serious concern of Ireland’s nationhood that the centenary celebrations brought to the fore, also impacted the young artist. From 1898 onwards he became more convinced of the right to Irish self-determination. He went on to paint several, more overtly political works, some of which are also on view in this exhibition, culminating in the masterworks The Funeral of Harry Boland, 1922, and Communicating with Prisoners, c. 1924.
From the 1920s and into the later part of his career, another more marked development took hold. Jack’s subject matter became imbued with a deeper mysticism and symbolism. His handling of paint became much freer, he abandoned his palette and brush, and worked directly onto the canvas using only the primary colours. Throughout the 1940s, his paintings increasingly present us with apocalyptic visions. He developed a highly personal technique, which placed less emphasis on composition. He focused more on creating work in a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ style and termed the paintings he made in this way as ‘happenings’.
The exhibition continues until 1st November. In depth Curator’s Tours will run on each Saturday at 11am throughout June, July and August, and can be booked at the front desk or at www.themodel.ie.
We keep all of our exhibitions free of charge and open to everyone. We kindly ask that those who can afford to, make a donation of €5 for this exhibition. This can be done by contactless payment at the station in this gallery.
Events | Entangled Life at Pallas Projects / Studios
115–117 The Coombe, Dublin 8, Dublin
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
Sewing Fields | Sam Gilliam at IMMA
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).
Art in Motion | Tralee Art Group Exhibition at Baile Mhuire Day Centre
Balloonagh, Caherslee,, Tralee,, Co. Kerry., V92 DA03
‘Art in Motion’ Exhibition to Open at Baile Mhuire Day Centre.
Tralee Art Group is delighted to announce their latest collaborative exhibition, ‘Art in Motion’, which will be officially opened on Tuesday, June 17th at 2.30pm at Baile Mhuire Day Centre, Balloonagh, Tralee. The opening will be led by special guest Paddy Garvey, Chairperson of Baile Mhuire, and all are welcome to attend. Guests can enjoy an afternoon of art, music and refreshments in a warm and inclusive setting.
This special exhibition is the result of a unique collaboration between members of Tralee Art Group and the clients of Baile Mhuire Day Centre, showcasing the creative energy and expression of both groups. Featuring a variety of works in different media, styles and subjects, Art in Motion celebrates movement, creativity, and community spirit.
TAG is committed to enriching the cultural life of Tralee and surrounding areas. The group regularly holds exhibitions, workshops, and community projects, and has built strong relationships with local organisations—including an ongoing volunteering partnership with Baile Mhuire.
This exhibition reflects that partnership, with art created not only by TAG members but also by clients of the Day Centre who engage weekly in creative workshops facilitated by the group volunteers from Tralee Art Group. The result is a joyful and inspiring collection of artworks, each piece telling its own story of imagination, connection, and collaboration.
All are welcome to attend the opening and celebrate this uplifting display of artistic expression in our community. The exhibition will run for a year and be available to the public weekdays between 4pm and 5pm.
Exhibition | The Great Book of Ireland at The Glucksman
The Great Book of Ireland is an extraordinary vellum manuscript which contains the original work of 120 artists, 140 poets and nine composers.
All of the contributors were asked one thing – please convey your hopes, joys, fears, loves in being an Irish person at the turn of the second millennium. Described by former president, Mary Robinson, as “the Book of Kells of the second millennium”, artists and writers who contributed include Samuel Beckett, Eavan Boland, Cecily Brennan, Louis le Brocquy, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Barrie Cooke, Dorothy Cross, Daniel Day-Lewis, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Seamus Heaney, Eithne Jordan, Michael Longley, John Montague, Tony O’Malley, Kathy Prendergast, and Patrick Scott.
Visitors will have the opportunity to view the original manuscript as well as to use a digital touchscreen to turn the pages and explore the exceptional range of artistic practices brought together in this unique cultural artefact.
Visitors will have the opportunity to view the original manuscript as well as to use a digital touchscreen to turn the pages and explore the exceptional range of artistic practices brought together in this unique cultural artefact.
The Great Book of Ireland is supported by The Arts Council Ireland, University College Cork, and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.
RINN: An Ireland and Japan dialogue on making, place and time | Group Exhibition at The Glucksman
Sara Flynn, Sueharu Fukami, Shihoko Fukumoto, Joe Hogan, Eiko Kishi, Frances Lambe, Deirdre McLoughlin, O’Donnell + Tuomey, Satoru Ozaki, Sean Scully, Joseph Walsh, Kan Yasuda, Osamu Yokoyama.
Curated by Wahei Aoyama and Joseph Walsh.
RINN explores the culture of making and its relationship to place and time through the work of Irish and Japanese artists and architects. While each piece is a personal expression of form, their works are united by an immersion in the culture of making. Whether drawing on craft heritage – the materials and skills associated with place – or challenging new techniques and pursing new materials, they all share an intimate relationship with the handmade.
Rinn in Gaelic means place or a point – and in Japanese, the same word means circle, ring or circularity. Joseph Walsh has observed that the meaning in both languages strongly represents ideas inherent in his practice, of place and this moment in time, within a continuous cycle of time.
Presented by Making In by Joseph Walsh Studio as part of the Ireland Japan 2025 programme in partnership with the Government of Ireland, the exhibition premiered in April at both Ireland House and A Lighthouse called Kanata, Tokyo.
The Glucksman is proud to host the show on its return to Ireland.
RINN is supported by The Arts Council Ireland, University College Cork, Government of Ireland, Ireland Japan 2025, A Lighthouse Called Kanata, and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.
Cities of the World | Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach at the Butler Gallery
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)
To the Edge of Your World | Anita Groener at Academy Art Museum, Maryland, USA
106 South Street Easton, Maryland , MD 21601
In To the Edge of Your World, Dutch-born, Ireland-based artist Anita Groener uses humble materials—twigs, cardboard, cut paper—to explore themes of loss, displacement, and resilience. Her intricately constructed sculptures and drawings reflect on the shared human impact of migration, conflict, and remembrance, shaped in part by her travels through the American South and global regions affected by upheaval. The exhibition also features the premiere of Shelter, a new animated video created in collaboration with filmmaker Matt Kresling and the Talbot Interfaith Shelter. Drawing from personal narratives, Shelter highlights stories of perseverance and community, echoing the exhibition’s meditation on belonging, memory, and the human capacity to endure.
This Exhibition is supported by Culture Ireland.
Libraries of Rest | Ciara Barker at The Dock
Libraries of Rest by Ciara Barker.
Opening Reception: Saturday 23 August, 2-4pm.
Libraries of Rest by Ciara Barker is an immersive exhibition that invites visitors to imagine the future of restful spaces and practices. Libraries of Rest combines installation, gameplay, sound and light, inhabiting a space between visual art, immersive environment and critical theory, centered on collective well-being.
Barker’s investigation of rest as a method of resistance is informed by a number of critical works, including texts by Tricia Hersey, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, Sonya Renee Taylor and Dr. Devon Price. This scholarship is grounded in its examination of structural inequality and rest as a racial, disability rights and social justice issue that disproportionately affects marginalised communities.
This exhibition is curated by Aoife Donnellan with a soundscape by Mankyy. Image: Ciara Barker, Libraries of Rest at transmediale studio in Berlin. Image: Ciara Barker, Libraries of Rest at transmediale studio in Berlin. Photo by Katie O’Neill.
Diagonal Acts | Marie Farrington at The Dock
St. George's Terrace, Carrick-on-Shannon, Leitrim, N41T2X2
Diagonal Acts by Marie Farrington.
Opening Reception: Saturday 23 August, 2-4pm.
Diagonal Acts refers to how diagonal lines are seen as ways to connect, divide and move across various places or ideas. The exhibition explores themes of memory, place and connection — exploring gaps, fragments and edges within archaeology, geology, sculpture and staged performance.
The material outcomes in Diagonal Acts are supported by a range of collaborations, and connected by a public programme of generative elements devised to critically engage audiences in person and online, enhancing and expanding participation and access.
This exhibition is curated by Kate Strain with contributions by Liliane Puthod and Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. Image: Marie Farrington, Figures for Lifting, 2024, carved soapstone. Photo by Rein Kooyman.
The Memories of Others | Akihiko Okamura at the Ulster Museum
Stranmillis Road, Botanic Gardens, Belfast, BT9 5AB
Exhibition continues from the 13th of June to the 4th of January 2026
An exhibition of rarely seen artworks by internationally important Japanese war photographer Akihiko Okamura, documenting his relationship with Ireland during the Troubles.
From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Japanese war photographer Akihiko Okamura (1929-1985) created a powerful and largely unseen collection of photographs in Ireland, both north and south.
After covering the Vietnam War, Akihiko Okamura visited Ireland in 1968 drawn by the connection to John F. Kennedy’s family roots. A year later, he moved to Ireland with his own family and stayed until his sudden passing in 1985. During that time, he captured everyday life with his family and the conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles.
Okamura’s photographs have rarely been seen before, and show a unique artistic view of Ireland at this time. What makes his work stand out is that he chose to make Ireland his home. Among all the international photographers working at that time, Okamura stood out for his commitment to the history of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Since he became so closely connected to what he was photographing, Okamura created innovative images in both his own style and how the Troubles were shown through photography. His profound, personal relationship with Ireland allowed him to develop a new method of documenting conflict: poetic and ethereal moments of peace in a time of war.
Akihiko Okamura: The Memories of Others is now open in Art Gallery 4, Ulster Museum. No booking needed.
The Memories of Others is a Photo Museum Ireland touring exhibition. Curated by Pauline Vermare, Seán O’Hagan, Masako Toda, Brendan Maher and Trish Lambe, with the support of the Estate of Akihiko Okamura, it premiered at Photo Museum Ireland in 2024. It opened in Belfast during Belfast Photo Festival.
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Maelstrom | Maud Cotter at Highlanes Gallery
St Laurence St, Drogheda, Drogheda, Co. Louth
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.’
Bíodh Orm Anocht | Group Exhibition at Ormston House
9-10 Patrick Street, Limerick, Limerick, V94 V089
Ormston House in collaboration with EVA International presents Bíodh Orm Anocht. The exhibition will run from 29 August to 26 October.
Bíodh Orm Anocht, roughly translating to ‘be with me tonight’, is a group exhibition featuring new and existing artworks by four artists – Seán Hannan, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, and Kiera O’Toole – presented at Ormston House and off-site locations. While the contributors work across media and processes, they are unified by a preoccupation with customs and practices that can broadly be described as folk knowledge. These methods and intuitive systems challenge technorational systems of thought.
These four artists convey knowledge that transcends language and which is all the more potent because it remains unwritten and unspoken. Each artist is concerned with the metaphorical qualities of materials. They draw from disciplines outside the visual arts (including mythology, zoology, and cartography), infusing them with personal meaning. Inherent in these works is the possibility that atavistic wisdom may be sourced from the natural world.
Seán Hannan‘s work explores how forgotten voices and rituals can echo into the future, both through unstable technologies and systems of collaboration. Using archival fragments from autobiographical memories referring to Irish traditions, Hannan’s artworks reflect obsolescence and poetic instability. Received at the Graveyard is a sonic installation revolving around an evolving voice AI (artificial intelligence). At its core lies a handful of field recordings made in Ireland in the 1950s that captured the final traces of a near-extinct tradition, keening (caoineadh). Another work featured in this exhibition is LUCK (2022), a sculpture in the form of a piseóg (pish-ohg): folk witchcraft. Mainly a phenomenon of rural Ireland, piseógs were cast as an act of malice, often using a chicken egg onto which a curse had been placed.
In contrast, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín employs materials which have traditionally been connected with healing and nourishment. Sifting stories and traces associated with site, memory, and the casting of spells, Ní Fhlaibhín creates complex but delicate sculptural scenarios. She frequently introduces living beings into white cube environments that are typically purposed for the display of inanimate objects. While previous artworks have involved earthworms, leopard slugs, and willow trees, the family of sculptural assemblages presented here are made from chunks of mineral salt and ash wood. The creation of these sculptures has involved the co-authorship of horses, who have licked the salt crystals into biomorphic forms. The ash tree is sacred in Irish mythology and is seen as possessing talismanic power.
The equine kingdom is also referred to in the cosmological work of Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh. His Speculative massage tools for a family of Donkeys (2022) incorporates massage tools for these domesticated creatures. Other works by Ó Dochartaigh presented at Ormston House include a rendering in glazed ceramics of the artist’s late father’s stomach. A stacked edition of printed drawings link the ecological decline of fish species with medical modifications of the human body, Irish history, and the legacies of British colonialism.
Preparation for this project has entailed site visits and open-ended fieldwork across graveyards, the River Shannon, fish shops, and city streets. This is best exemplified in the work of Kiera O’Toole, whose practice involves derivés of everyday public spaces, in this case Limerick city centre. Through drawing in-situ, O’Toole records the subtle energies of these locations (which she describes as spatialised emotions) and translates her pre-reflective, sensory encounters into topographical maps and charts that she describes as ‘affective cartographies’.
The exhibition takes its name from a traditional Irish song first transcribed by the Irish Folklore Commission in 1936. The song is essentially a piece of mouth music or lilting in which melody and rhythm take precedence over lyrical content. Before being preserved via the written word, ‘Bíodh Orm Anocht’ was conveyed orally down through generations and was therefore altered over time. In the few recordings that are available (such as Mick Hanly and Micheál O Domhnaill’s 1974 album Celtic Folkweave), the singer’s words hover between possibilities of lyrical meaning, pitch, and rhythm. In this way, the song is a vehicle for forms of expression that transcend time and language and which are an outcome of communal rather than individual authorship.
This exhibition is accompanied by a programme of events:
-On Saturday, 30 August from 12–1pm, Seán Hannan will join us for an artist talk and a wireless broadcast of Received at the Graveyeard. Meet at Ormston House, followed by a five-minute walk to St. Michael’s Graveyard. This event will have limited accessibility due to steps and uneven ground.
-On Friday, 19 September, we will be joined from 5–6pm by Historian-in-Residence Sharon Slater for a talk and walk about the history of St. Michael’s Graveyard. This talk will have limited accessibility due to steps and uneven ground. The exhibition will also remain open until 9pm as part of Culture Night 2025.
-On Friday, 26 September, 6–8pm, we will be joined for an artist talk with Laura NíFhlaibhín and tactile workshop with equine therapist Muriel Foxton. Free tickets can be booked here.
-On Saturday, 27 September from 2–4pm, artist Kiera O’Toole will lead a participatory drawing workshop. Through gestural drawing exercises, participants will map the energies and atmospheres of Limerick city. Meet at Ormston House, followed by a walk to city centre sites. Materials will be provided. Capacity is limited, so book here to avoid disappointment.
Artist biographies:
Seán Hannan lives and works in Amsterdam and graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam in 2009. His work has been shown in numerous art venues such as the RU exhibition space, New York; Upstream gallery, Amsterdam; and Hotel Maria Kapel in Hoorn. Hannan participated in Unfair16. He has also received numerous project grants from the Amsterdam fund for the arts (AFK).
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín is an artist from Wexford. She completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019 with Distinction and her BA at National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2013. She is the recipient of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin Staff Prize Bursary; the Goldsmiths Graduate Almacantar Bursary 2019; the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award 2020; the Arts Council England Developing Creative Practice Award 2021; and Arts Council of Ireland Bursaries.
Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh is an artist, researcher, and Gaeilgeoir from Derry, living and working with chronic illness. His mixed-media practice explores complexities inherent within the embodiment of personal loss with the legacy of political violence and lived experience. He is interested in combining industrial manufacturing processes with the materialities of artisanal craft objects to create a specific language of sculptural works.
Kiera O’Toole is a research-based visual artist and lecturer at ATU Sligo. Her practice explores drawing as a method of registering the spatialised emotions of place, blending phenomenology and atmospheric theory. O’Toole exhibits internationally and publishes widely on contemporary drawing. She is a professional member of Visual Artists Ireland and the Drawing Research Network (UK), and she is a co-founder of Drawing deCentered. She currently lives and works in Sligo, Ireland.
The exhibition is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Limerick Arts Office. The events programme is funded by Creative Ireland and Limerick City and County Council through Limerick Creative Communities Small Grants Scheme 2025. Seán Hannan’s participation in this exhibition is partly made possible by the Mondriaan Fund, the public fund for visual art and cultural heritage in the Netherlands.
Page Turners | Group Exhibition of Artists' Books at St Fin Barre's Cathedral
Bishop Street, Cork, T12 K710, Munster
Page Turners is an exhibition of artists’ books which launches in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral at 5:30pm on Thursday, September 4th.
This autumn exhibition in the cathedral ambulatory invites visitors to linger and spend time exploring selected artists’ books from across Ireland, the UK and France.
Selected national and international book artists include Ambeck Design, Coracle Press, Helen Douglas, Paul Gaffney, Helena Grimes, ottoGraphic Books, Road Books, and Tom Sowden. Editions will be for sale through the cathedral shop.
Page-turners is co-curated with MTU Crawford College of Art & Design and is an important moment at the cathedral as we pioneer a rolling arts programme.
There will also be a panel discussion at the cathedral at 12:30pm on Thursday, September 18th.
The exhibition runs until October 31st, 2025
There no charge to see this exhibition: email arts@stfinbarres.ie to receive your ticket.
Echo | Eithne Jordan at the Casino Marino
The Office of Public Works and Dublin City Arts Office are pleased to present a new exhibition of work by Eithne Jordan RHA curated by Margarita Cappock. It takes place at the Casino Marino, Cherrymount Crescent, Marino, Dublin 3, D03 HH70.
The exhibition is open everyday from 10.00am to 5.00pm and admission to the exhibition is free.
About the Artist
Eithne Jordan is one of Ireland’s pre-eminent painters. In this exhibition, Jordan has turned her artistic gaze to the interiors of public and private spaces, such as museums and institutional buildings, which she has visited on her travels in Ireland, France, Italy, Switzerland and the United States. Jordan explores the way paintings, sculptures and artefacts are displayed in these spaces. She creates paintings that are, in her words, ‘emotional landscapes’. Jordan is drawn to exhibiting in unusual spaces where her work can interact with their surroundings as in this exhibition at the Casino Marino. Her paintings reflect her enduring interest in architecture and the interplay that can happen between her paintings and their environment, whether a modernist space or a historic building.
The resonance of this new body of work – most from the last five years – displayed in the rooms of the Casino creates the ‘echo’ of an ongoing conversation with the eighteenth century, which is why the artist chose this as the exhibition title. Eithne Jordan grew up in Clontarf, not far from the Casino. She states, ‘The Casino has an air of grandeur but it also has that sense of intimacy in the beauty of its proportions. It is one of the things that I love about it.’
Funded by the OPW and Dublin City Arts Office with the support of the Arts Council.
Irish Gothic | Patricia Hurl at the Irish Arts Center, New York
OPENING RECEPTION WITH THE ARTIST, CURATOR MEET-AND-GREET, FILM SCREENINGS, AND MORE
“It’s terrible to think [about] where I get my inspiration, but all these things are fodder to me as an artist. I love trees. I love mountains. But I don’t want to go out and paint them. I don’t paint to make money. I paint what I want, and I’ve always been political.”
— Patricia Hurl
For the past 40+ years, the painter Patricia Hurl has portrayed the lives of Irish women and their experiences as housewives, child-bearers, caretakers, providers and warriors navigating a male-dominated world, evoking the broad spectrum of emotions felt by her subjects through expressionistic, layered brushstrokes and blending the figurative and abstract.
As part of Irish Gothic, a retrospective of Hurl’s extraordinary career presented by IAC in partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), we will be offering special opportunities this September for audiences to engage with the artist and her work, including an opening night reception; a talk with curator Johanne Mullan of IMMA; a members-only private tour of the exhibition; screenings of the documentary Dawn to Dusk, which follows the artist collective Na Cailleacha, of which Hurl is a founding member; and gallery hours for an Irish Gothic theatre installation. Admission is free.
Grief's Current Shape | Ciara O’Connor at the Garter Lane Arts Centre
Garter Lane Arts Centre, 22a O’Connell Street, Waterford, X91 DX57
Grief’s Current Shape – a new thread based exhibition by Ciara O’Connor
“If I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it’s inescapable.”
-Edna O’Brien
Grief has seeped into my bones and I suspect it will never leave. But it is so much more than sorrow and despair. It is an ever changing expression of love. We loved them and they loved us. For me, sometimes that love is a rush of warmth when I look down at my hands and see hers.
Sometimes it’s a stab of regret for the hurtful thing I said to him. Sometimes it’s a crumble to the floor when I am overcome by the loss and cruelty of it all. But sometimes now, as the waves of sadness move further and further apart, it is bountiful gratitude for everything it has taught me.
Grief’s Current Shape is an exploration of the various stages of grief, and a personal attempt to lean into it all.
About Ciara
Ciara O’Connor is a Kerry based visual artist who works primarily with textiles and free motion embroidery. Her work is figurative and deals with themes of identity, feminism, trauma and recovery. She is interested in pushing the boundaries of traditional techniques to tell contemporary stories.
Since returning to her practice in 2019 she has been selected for 15 group shows, including Following Threads in Crawford Art Gallery, and RUA and RSA Annuals. She had her first solo show in Garter Lane Arts Centre, 2022, and has featured in FAIRE, Image Magazine, The Irish Examiner, The Kerryman, and VAN Jan/Feb 2024. Her second solo show opens from Sept 6 in Garter Lane Arts Centre.
Glimpses | Jennifer Alexander at Threshold Gallery Belfast
Exhibition continues from the 4th of September to the 31st of October 2025
In her exhibition, open for Late Night Art Belfast this Thursday 4 September, Alexander interprets Aristotle’s imagining the cosmos as 56 celestial spheres by creating a series of acrylic sketches on linen. Each fragment invites a shift in perspective, exploring in-between spaces, identity beyond the body, and our place in the universe – a constellation of moments that ask who we are, and how we find meaning.
Jennifer Alexander is a visual artist and curator from Scotland, currently based in Northern Ireland. Her practice investigates the interplay between perception and stratification.
Formwork | Mandy O'Neill at Ballina Arts Centre
Barrett Street, Ballina, Mayo, F26NW83, Connaughht
Exhibition continues from the 6th of September to the 1st of November 2025
The point of departure for this exhibition was Mandy O’Neill’s recent practice-based PhD, where she examined the social and material implications of housing development and dereliction in the Dublin inner suburb of Cabra. Her research questioned the ideological shifts in housing policy since the mid 20th century in Ireland which have resulted in a move from housing as public good to housing as commodity, with emphasis on the impact of planning. In a broader context O’Neill’s practice is concerned with the politics of space and place, and the power relations which shape our built environment
The Push and Pull | Katie Moore at Ballina Arts Centre
Barrett Street, Ballina, Mayo, F26NW83, Connaughht
Exhibition continues from the 6th of September to the 1st of November 2025
Rooted in the beauty of the west of Ireland, The Push and Pull explores the dualities of motherhood – the tenderness and tension, the giving and the grieving, the fierce love and quiet loss of self. Through a series of intimate, textured works, the artist captures the emotional rhythms of raising children: moments of connection stretched thin by the demands of care, identity, and time. This body of work invites viewers into the ebb and flow of maternal experience, where nature, body, and memory collide.
An Outer Reflection of an Inner Reality | Karen Ebbs at Municipal Gallery, dlr LexIcon
Haigh Terrace, Moran Park, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, A96 H283
In this installation of large-scale colourful oil paintings, sculptures and plexiglass mirrors Karen Ebbs explores ideas relating to reflection, perception and reality. At the heart of the work is colour, life-affirming and transformative. In a time of ecological and social challenge, Ebbs uses colour as a quiet rebellion against grey apathy to offer hope. Using mirrors, the boundaries between the artworks and the individual collapse. Viewers are confronted with their own reflections as they become interwoven with the artworks. Through this interaction visitors become part of an ever-changing installation which is continuously altered by their presence. This idea challenges the notion of separation and how we perceive ourselves, offering viewers an opportunity to pause.
Karen Ebbs is a Dublin-based artist and a member of Pallas Projects and Studios. She received a Masters in Fine Art, in painting from NCAD in 2023 and was subsequently shortlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards. She also studied at the Royal Hibernian Academy School, Dublin. Recent solo exhibitions include Rathfarnham Castle, 2024, Farmleigh Estate, 2022 and the LAB Gallery, Dublin, 2022. In 2022, Karen received an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and a Professional Development Award from dlr Arts Office.
Our Gallery Learning Programme has lots of workshops, tours for all ages and opportunities to learn more and try different artmaking techniques. See our website for information: www.dlrcoco.ie/arts.
ARCHIPELAGO | Group Exhibition at the RHA Gallery
The form of photographic practice has expanded in recent times and the RHA invited artists to respond to the spatial magnitude of the largest gallery in Ireland, with many responding to the open spaces with in-the-round works to create something beyond the typical photo show. Pictured here is: the prosaic everyday made poetic; reflections on both psychic and human-altered landscapes; art documentary; constructed abstractions; observations on borders, invisible and hidden; meditations on sexuality and objectification; the interconnectedness of nature and reflections on Ireland losing its welcoming spirit. Throughout it all, a collage of Irish cultural identity—and our contemporary photographers’ place within it—is revealed.
This exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the RHA’s exhibition department and the artist-led group Island Photographers, who foster engagement with and understanding of photography in Ireland, both in the fine art realm and the broader lens-based culture industry through talks, events and workshops. All eight members are participating in the show.
The Gardener Digs | Laura McMorrow at the RHA Gallery
Laura McMorrow’s paintings draw on found imagery of figures working in the garden, altered landscapes (topiary and hedging), plants, and people enjoying gardens and green spaces.
McMorrow learned everything she knows about gardening from her mother Gillian. An avid gardener and obsessive weeder, Gillian tended to her garden in North Leitrim by making decisions about which plants belong and deserve to self-seed and which become a nuisance. Her approach to gardening was naturalistic and looked effortless, but she was extremely dedicated to her craft.
Out in the garden, in all weather until dusk, it became a form of therapy for her as she suffered with a chronic and fatal illness. The garden became a sanctuary for Gillian and a source of inspiration for Laura who began researching and making work about gardens in her studio practice. Poet and gardener Ross Gay describes time spent gardening as “an exercise in supreme attentiveness”, a trait it shares with painting.
A stop motion animation created using a paint on glass technique is exhibited alongside the paintings. Each frame is hand painted, giving it a painterly and expressive aesthetic. The animation illustrates a quote by the filmmaker Derek Jarman in the book Modern Nature, a journal of his time spent gardening in Dungeness shortly after he discovered he was HIV positive.
The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time — the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer. Derek Jarman.
McMorrow is interested in a personal exploration of the garden as a sanctuary and a space of refuge. However, she is also questioning the complexity of gardening in a time of climate emergency and the futile act of attempting to control and tame nature. The transition to a more ecologically friendly approach to gardening, for example, growing a wildflower meadow instead of a lawn. McMorrow embraces this duality of gardening as a form of therapy and its disposition in the greater context of our time.
Laura McMorrow is a visual artist from Leitrim. She holds a Masters in Fine art from the University of Ulster in Belfast (2012) and she graduated with a degree in painting from Limerick School of Art and Design (2008). Her practice incorporates video installation, animation, sculpture, collage, and painting.
Recent solo exhibitions include The Gardener Digs at The Dock and The Lost Acre at Leitrim Sculpture Centre. Recent community art projects include a collaborative animation project with teenagers funded by Creative Ireland and a sensory mapping project with Leitrim Cycling Festival.
McMorrow is part of the collective, who run an artist-led studio and experimental space in Manorhamilton, Leitrim. Her studio is currently based in the collective space. In 2023, the collective worked together on a collaborative project called Waking the Land that considered environmental grief, supported by the Irish Hospice Foundation.
The Known and Unknown World | KCAT Studio Group Exhibition at the RHA Gallery
All works in the exhibition, The Known and Unknown World, have taken a drawing of a five-legged cat by George McCutcheon as their initial point of reference. This work, made in 1996 remains the logo of KCAT to this day. This unusual creature exists at the centre of a sprawling exhibition that mirrors the multi-layered design of a Wunderkammer.
From the 16th century onwards these cabinets of curiosities mixed items from the arts, the natural world, and the sciences to present idiosyncratic views of existence. Juxtaposing local landmarks with fantastical landscapes, common songbirds with speculatively designed creatures, human portraits with extra-planetary beings, The Known and Unknown World invites the viewer to discover and celebrate the multiplicity of ways in which the world can be experienced, understood, and recorded.
Artists featured in this exhibition include: Andrew Pike, Brianna Hurley, Declan Byrne, Diana Chambers, Erin Hacking, Eileen Mulrooney, Fergus Fitzgerald, Fintin Kelly, Jason Turner, Karl Fitzgerald, Lorna Corrigan, Margaret Walker, Shay Croke, Sinead Fahey, Thomas Barron, Mary Cody, Francis Casey, Jack Foskin and George McCutcheon.
Curated by Benjamin Stafford in cooperation with KCAT Studio. This exhibition was first shown at KCAT Art Centre, Callan, Co. Kilkenny as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, 2025.
To What Do We Align | Marianne Keating at the RHA Gallery
Marianne Keating’s upcoming exhibition brings together two new films that interrogate Ireland’s shifting place within histories of nationalism, migration, and global power. Cad Leis a Bhfuilimíd Ailínithe / To What Do We Align (2025) is a multi-channel film that reflects on Éamon de Valera’s idealised vision of Ireland, its economic stagnation and mass emigration, and the country’s subsequent reorientation under Seán Lemass, as Ireland chose to align itself with Western hegemony rather than the newly formed Non-Aligned Movement.
No Irish Need Apply (2025) examines the experience of the Irish in Britain during the 1970s and 80s, a period when political violence in Northern Ireland fuelled systemic discrimination, surveillance, and social prejudice against Irish communities. Together, these works explore how Ireland has been both the subject of, and complicit in, wider histories of colonialism, migration, and exclusion, revealing the contradictions at the heart of national identity
Marianne Keating is an Irish artist and researcher based in London. She holds a practice-based PhD in Visual & Material Culture and Contemporary Art Practice entitled, ‘They don’t do much in the cane-hole way’, Hidden Histories of the Irish Diaspora in Jamaica, funded by KSA at Kingston University, London and a TECHNE Associate. She has an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London and a BA in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland. She is currently an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London (2020- Present).
Keating was shortlisted to represent Ireland in the 2022 Venice Biennial and has exhibited extensively throughout Ireland and internationally. Upcoming and recent exhibitions include (2025)The Irish Pavilion, World Expo, Japan; The Model, Sligo; Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick; Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford, Ireland. Collections include The Office of Public Works, Ireland; Royal College of Art, London; Norlinda and José Lima Collection, Portugal; Zuckerman Museum of Art, Georgia, USA; Palazzo Fogazzaro, Vicenza, Italy.
Radical Hope | Group Exhibition at the Golden Thread Gallery
Golden Thread Gallery is proud to present Radical Hope, a new exhibition developed in collaboration with Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, Poland. Curated from Collection II, one of Poland’s most significant collections of contemporary art, the exhibition offers a timely reflection on uncertainty, resilience, and the transformative potential of art.
Collection II, held by the Arsenal Gallery and shaped under the direction of Monika Szewczyk, traces the evolving landscape of contemporary art in Poland and Eastern Europe over the past three decades. Developed as an ‘open corpus,’ the collection is a living archive: dynamic, growing, and responsive to the shifting narratives of our time.
This exhibition is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, British Council and Polish Cultural Institute in London, and supported by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland.
Radical Hope | Group Exhibition at the Golden Thread Gallery
23-29 Queen Street, Belfast, BT1 6EA
Exhibition continues from the 13th of September to the 8th of November 2025
Golden Thread Gallery is proud to present Radical Hope, a new exhibition developed in collaboration with Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, Poland. Curated from Collection II, one of Poland’s most significant collections of contemporary art, the exhibition offers a timely reflection on uncertainty, resilience, and the transformative potential of art.
TEND/ER | Lorna Watkins at Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre
24 Main Street, Limavady, Londonderry, BT49 0FJ
Exhibition Launch: Saturday 13th September at 12 noon
Based in Sligo, Lorna Watkins is a multi-disciplinary visual artist. She studied Printed Textile Design in NCAD and is a recipient of a Ballinglen Fellowship. Her exhibition Tend/er features painting, printmaking and sculpture exploring ideas around the home, overlooked everyday objects, motherhood and ageing. She often references the body, as life drawing has been a constant in her practice over the past decade.
In 2024 Watkins was selected for the John Richardson French Residency Award and in 2020, JOYA AiR, Spain. She is a recipient of the Arts Council Agility Award; ADI Training Award and Thomas Damann Travel Bursary and her works are part of several public and private collections including the Ulster Hospital and Ballinglen Arts Foundation.
Liminal Landscapes | Gabhann Dunne and Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe at The Courthouse Gallery
Liminal Landscapes is a two-person exhibition featuring painter Gabhann Dunne and sculptor/writer Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe. Exploring transitions from ecological change to the boundaries of sculpture and writing, Dunne’s paintings respond to the Burren’s ecological narratives and the resilience of the Burren Pines. Hynan-Ratcliffe’s sculptural and written works engage with materiality, feminist perspectives, and cycles of grief and renewal. Together, their practices create a dialogue across nature, identity, and time, inviting reflection on our impact and connection to the earth
Let’s Not Talk About This Now | Peter Nash at Cork Printmakers Studio Gallery
Wandesford Quay Clarke’s Bridge, Cork, Cork
Let’s Not Talk About This Now is a solo exhibition of drawings, sculptures, and prints by Peter Nash at Cork Printmakers Studio Gallery which opens on Culture Night.
Taking the form of an exploded encyclopedia, or chaotic museum exhibit, his visual explorations are open-ended and inherently human; a continuous search for understanding in a rapidly evolving digital age.
Whilst the exhibition aesthetic is influenced by museums and reference books, there are no claims to authority being made. There are deliberately more questions posed than answers presented.
Artist Talk 8 October 1pm
The Swallow | Film by Tadhg O’Sullivan starring Brenda Fricker
THE SWALLOW, Tadhg O’Sullivan’s new feature, starring Academy Award winner Brenda Fricker, will open in select Irish cinemas from 19 September.
The film presents a meditation on art, memory and solitude in later life, through an artist exploring memories and fragments of the past while trying to make sense of her own unwillingness to let go.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/marmaladefilms/theswallowofficialtrailer
Tickets available via https://linktr.ee/marmaladefilms
The Swallow was funded by The Arts Council/An Comhairle Ealaíon, under the Authored Works scheme.
Pollanroe Burn | Emily McFarland at Void Art Centre
Pollanroe Burn or An Pollán Rua – the little red pool – unfolds through a series of new films and archival fragments, forming part of artist Emily McFarland’s ongoing long-term research into the shifting ecology of the Sperrin Mountains of West Tyrone, in the North of Ireland, in the shadow of proposed major industrial-scale gold extraction. The project asks: How can we cultivate modes of thinking that allow intellect and empathy to apprehend the long-standing and delicate connections between humans and their environments?
Launching: Saturday 27 September 2025 at Void Art Centre, 6-8pm
Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood | Group Exhibition at
VISUAL is pleased to present Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood. This landmark touring exhibition has been conceived by Hettie Judah in collaboration with Hayward Gallery Touring. Following a successful tour of the UK, Acts of Creation comes to VISUAL augmented by the inclusion of works from Irish artists and collections.
Spanning all of VISUAL’s galleries, Acts of Creation presents work in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography and sound that speaks to the experience of motherhood in all its complexity. At VISUAL, an accompanying in-depth learning programme will respond to the exhibition’s themes and works. A reading area, a reflection space and specialist workshops and tours will further provide visitors with ways to engage with the ideas and experiences reflected in this powerful exhibition.
Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood plunges into the joys and heartaches, mess, myths and mishaps of motherhood through over 100 artworks, from the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 70s to the present day.
While the Madonna and Child is one of the great subjects of European art, we rarely see art about real motherhood, in all its complexity. Acts of Creation addresses this blind spot in art history, asserting the artist mother as an important cultural figure.
How does the image of motherhood change when the artist is drawing on lived experience? What is made visible? What challenges are levelled at motherhood as an institution through which the mother is idealised as self-sacrificing, wholesome, tireless and uncomplaining?
Diverse experiences are explored across four thematic displays. Creation looks at conception, pregnancy, birth and nursing. It imagines motherhood as a creative act, albeit one in which joy might be tempered with anxiety, pain and exhaustion.
Maintenance is dedicated to the ongoing work of motherhood and caregiving in the day-to-day. Here we find artists engaged in domestic chores, keeping children safe, and navigating a balance between art and parenting.
In Loss artists reflect on experiences of miscarriage, adoption and involuntary childlessness. Works in this section also protest the loss of women’s reproductive rights.
The Temple is a series of self-portraits in which artists explore their own identity in relation to motherhood. For decades women were told they could not be both an artist and a mother. These portraits stand in defiance of that idea.
This exhibition features artworks that include nudity and explore childbirth, (in)fertility, miscarriage, abortion, loss and domestic abuse.
So Nice Day | Carrowbeg Artist Collective at The Courthouse Gallery
Exhibition continues 27 September – 22 November 2025.
“So Nice Day” by the Carrowbeg Artist Collective invites viewers into an immersive dialogue between art, ecology, and lived experience. Created by seven artists with intellectual disabilities, the exhibition weaves natural materials with personal narratives, exploring sensory awareness, sustainability, and our bond with nature. By amplifying diverse voices, CHG&S highlights the transformative power of art, fostering inclusion and deepening cultural conversations around ecology and accessibility.
Light Falls: Ode to Baggotonia | Gerard Byrne at Gerard Byrne Studio
15 Chelmsford Road, Ranelagh , Dublin, Dublin, D06 DE68
Exhibition continues 20 September – 1 November 2025.
Gerard Byrne, Artist of the Baggotonia Festival 2025 presents ‘Light Falls: Ode to Baggotonia’, set in his intimate Ranelagh studio + gallery. Byrne captures Dublin’s unique light—the glow between buildings, canal shimmers, shadows folding into foliage. The show features contemplative still lifes, dreamy urbanscapes, and bold figuratives. Reflecting on Georgian streets and the city’s Bohemian soul where Beckett, Behan, and Bacon once walked, Byrne transforms everyday sights into lyrical meditations on light, memory, and place—continuing Ireland’s Impressionist legacy with contemporary insight.
Eist: The Listening Frame | The Nenagh Street Collective at Nenagh Arts Centre
Town Hall, Banba Square, Nenagh, IE, Tipperary, E45 NX26
Launch: Wednesday October 1st, 6:30pm
This exhibition explores the connection between voice, self and community. Through the medium of photography, the collective demonstrates the importance that creativity has in conveying current cultural values, legacy for future generations, identity and wellbeing, and the importance of holding space. This exhibition is a participatory experience, and we invite all attendees to bring smartphones and headphones to unlock audio reflections and soundscapes that accompany the photographs.
Dusk Alchemy | Carol Graham at ArtisAnn Gallery
70 Bloomfield Avenue, Belfast, County Antrim, BT5 5AE
Carol describes this exhibition as
“This collection birthed as an exhilarating rush of visual stories. Begun around the mid-winter Solstice they took ragged forms in intense blues, purples, crimsons, with rich bronze and gold. They explore something of the dark and dusks of winter when the dog becomes the wolf”.
Her work is held in private collections, public institutions, businesses and galleries across the UK, Ireland, USA, South Africa and Australia.
Groundwork | Forensic Architecture at 126 Artist-Run Gallery & Studios
15 St Bridget’s Place, Hidden Valley, Woodquay, Galway City
Exhibition continues 26 September – 26 October 2025.
126 Artist-Run Gallery & Studios presents Groundwork, an exhibition of work by Forensic Architecture which traces the ongoing Nakba (catastrophe) in Palestine.
Forensic Architecture is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, dedicated to developing and employing cutting-edge techniques for investigating state violence and human rights violations.
Launching 26th Sept at 6pm. Open Wed-Sun 12pm-6pm until 26th Oct 2025.
Please see our Instagram and Website for associated Events.
Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Galway City Council Arts Office.
non–stick frying pan | Alex Keatinge & Niamh Hannaford at Catalyst Arts
On display from Thursday 2 October to Thursday 6 November.
Read more: https://www.catalystarts.org.uk/nonstick-frying-pan
Wild things | ORINOTAWASHI at Tøn
Norio Ishiwata and Chifumi Ishiwata formed the art unit Orinotawashi after their marriage. Based in Tokyo, they began by creating collage works, working together to complete each single piece. In 2013, they dedicated themselves to art, participating in artist-in-residence programs in five countries: Spain, Italy, Zambia, Egypt, and Morocco. Their travels abroad inspired them to focus on the theme of “art for living.” In Spain, they met Irish artist Mark Redden, whose traditional Irish boat, the Currach, and his artistic style influenced them.
Glór | Ciúnas | Group Exhibition at An Táin Arts Centre
Crowe St, Townparks, Dundalk, Co. Louth, Dundalk, Louth
Opening Launch on Thursday 2nd October 7pm
Creative Spark is proud to present Glór | Ciúnas, a group exhibition showcasing new work by artists from the 2024/25 Artist-in-Residence Programme. Featuring a vibrant mix of painting, print, installation, sculpture, and mixed media, the exhibition brings together work by Aoife Cawley, Klowi, Claire McAteer, Colleen Eilís Murphy, Nicola Moran, Áine Dunne, Maria Atanacković, and Eimear Murphy. The title Glór | Ciúnas translating as Loud | Silence reflects the work created by this year’s artists. Some using bright, bold colours to express energy and stories while others create subtle, quiet works that invite you to reflect. Glór | Ciúnas marks the eleventh year of the artists-in-Residence exhibition hosted in an Táin Arts Centre.
The Creative Spark Residency Programme, supported by The Arts Service of Louth County Council and the Arts Council of Ireland, is dedicated to providing essential support to artists.
Resonance | Laura Butler and Audrey Kyle at Larne Museum & Arts Centre
2 Victoria Road, Larne, Antrim, BT40 1RN
Sometimes a painting evokes a feeling or a memory that the viewer cannot always bring to mind.
While Laura Butler and Audrey Kyle have very different artistic styles and use different mediums, they share a vision in the sense of being preoccupied with a world beyond the present moment. Often, they are drawn to depicting scenes in the same places but produce their own unique interpretations. Audrey explores through a deep connection with the natural world, a strong sense of the mythical, mystical and folklore. Laura’s pursuit in her landscape paintings is to honour the spirit of the lives of people, and the traces their presence leaves on the landscape.
The exhibition will be on display from Friday 3rd until Friday 31st October 2025, and includes Saturday opening on 11th October. Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 10.00am – 4.00pm.
'Go Ye Afar' | Frank Sweeney at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios
5 – 9 Temple Bar, Dublin 2, Dublin, Dublin
Opening reception: Thursday 02 October 2025, 6–8pm
Frank Sweeney’s new film, ‘Go Ye Afar’, follows the journey of an Irish-Nigerian taxi driver on a miraculous voyage through the streets of Dublin and Calabar. Using a range of techniques and sources, from reenacted interviews and archival footage to rear-projection and Nollywood-inspired special effects, a series of characters are transported through interconnected sites in Ireland and Nigeria.
Panthalassa | Bernadette Tuite at Working Artist Studios
Exploring West Cork’s hidden coves by kayak, Bernadette gathers clays and sea-altered debris, which she later transforms through ceramic processes into vessels she calls a claytography of the coastline—tactile notations of time, place, and transformation.
Alongside kiln-cast glass pieces that embody her emotional and physical responses to ocean waters, the ceramics hold the energy, texture, and temporality of the sites they emerge from. Each work speaks to geological time, the impermanence of coastlines, and the fragile balance between humanity and environment.
