Mark your calendars for August 27–28, when we are bringing you Sin Objeto / Intet Objekt, a two-day live art event at Metronomen, right in the heart of Frederiksberg.
We’ve invited 16 amazing performance artists from around the world to join us for an exploration of performance and non-objectual art. Just raw, experiences you won’t forget.

From collective actions and solo performances to video screenings, workshops, and parties, the program is packed with surprises, intensity, and creative freedom. It’s open, it’s playful, it’s experimental — and you’re invited. Involved with my video performance SMOKING and looking forward to the many great performers August 27–28, Sin Objeto / Intet Objekt, a two-day live art event at Metronomen, right in the heart of Frederiksberg. Denmark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curated by Eva O’Byrne.

At the End of the Day: New Paintings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opening Reception:
Thursday 28 August, 6–8pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cath Taylor is a multidisciplinary artist and musician.

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

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 main program of the 27th International Festival of Multimedia Arts – IMAF 2025 is the presentation of artistic actions , live performances and video documentation , which will be held on August 30th to September 12th, 2025. The festival has traditionally been held for many years now in the SULUV gallery in Novi Sad. New performance to video RING A RING .. performed and documented at my studio July 2025

Opening – Saturday 30 August 2025
With a music performance by the artist at 2.45pm

Open – Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm

‘Singing Threads: Songs and Stories of Ulster’s Mill Life’ features textile artist and musician Eimear Magee. It presents a new iteration of her graduate collection, an innovative body of work that combines contemporary textile art, traditional music and storytelling to honour the resilience of mill workers, transforming their lived experiences into rich, emotive art. Through this work, the artist creates a “living archive” that not only revisits and revives tradition, but invites reflection on community strength and cultural continuity.

About the artist
Eimear Magee is an emerging textile artist and traditional musician whose practice is a fusion of tradition and innovation, drawing inspiration from the rich tapestry of Irish traditional music, storytelling, and community engagement. A recent graduate of Ulster University’s Textile Art, Design, and Fashion programme, her work draws on the stories, songs, and rhythms of Ulster’s linen industry.

Exhibition supported by
‘Singing Threads’ is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (principal funder). The exhibition is part of the Linen Biennale, a festival celebrating linen, past, present and future, with initiatives across Northern Ireland by R-Space and other partner organisations. The Esmé Mitchell Trust supported R-Space’s work for this festival. https://www.linenbiennalenorthernireland.com

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

Blue Skies, Black Earth: A solo exhibition by Deirdre Frost at GOMA Gallery of Modern Art Waterford | Running from 30 August – 27 September 2025

Official launch: Saturday 30 August 4–6pm at GOMA Waterford. All are welcome!

The Earth, locus of growth and renewal, is the inspiration behind this new body of oil paintings on canvas and on wood by Deirdre Frost.

The works consider rootedness and displacement, alongside the innate instinct in all living things to grow, to thrive, to flourish, to reach upward. The paintings attempt to capture the experience of living in this world – a fragmented, complicated place of growth and collapse, influenced by a multitude of opaque and complex human agendas. Buildings, split open under construction or under dereliction, reverberate of our time of great need for safe homes globally. A space to thrive; a world where the plants and soil itself is under pressure due to excess human activity.

Vignettes depict scenes of captured beauty and simplicity, much like an endeavour to simplify and structure our lives and desires, while the box like structures that contain these snapshots split and crack. Oil painting on canvas rooted on the floor draws the viewer in to its dark vortex as prickly plants reach from the depths, a visceral reminder of what is beneath our feet. Sea thrift drifting through a triptych give a sense a floating free, uprooted, adrift and floating like seeds through the air while soft bog cotton blows above collapsed slabs on a shore.

In line with works such as Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital, which presents our blue world spinning serenely through black space as we live out our small and larger dramas, this body of work flips our perspective. Created from the ground, and drawing on local imagery of the natural and built environments, these paintings unfold against the constant bombardment and diversion of news and social media. Within them are traces of global fracturing and collapse, through which plants continue to reach toward the air.

Deirdre Frost is a Cork-based visual artist, working from Backwater Artist Studios, and is represented by Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin.

Her solo exhibitions include Tumbling Earth (2025) at Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin; Big Crush (2023) at Kilkenny Arts Festival; In Habitat, In Transition (2021) at Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group, and St Luke’s Crypt, Sample Studios; Claochló (2021) at Joan Clancy Gallery, Waterford; and Biophilia (2021), part of the Lavit Gallery Student of the Year Exhibition, Cork.

Unfolding

MFA/MA in Fine Art Exhibition at the Large Sculpture Studio GF20, Limerick School of Art and Design

Limerick, Ireland – [21st of July 2025] – Unfolding is an exhibition featuring seven artists from the MFA/MA in Fine Art programme at Limerick School of Art and Design—TUS. It will take place at the Large Sculpture Studio, Clare St. Campus, from September 2nd to September 10th, 2025. The artists’ reception event will be held on September 9th at 5:30 PM.

In Unfolding, the act of slowly revealing is a sustained movement; an ongoing unfolding of form, thought, and relation that favours becoming over closure.

Through diverse media, the artists engage with themes that are intimate, political, embodied, and affective. Across the exhibition, material becomes a means of thinking: with memory, space, the body, and with the systems both visible and invisible, that shape lived experience. Unfolding becomes an epistemological gesture; an opening into ways of knowing that remain fluid, provisional, and situated.

Artists:

Marta Baptista – Sorcha Hassett – Marta Jagusiak – Brendan Roddy – Brian Twomey – Oliwia Alicja Woszczynska – Barry Wrafter

We are delighted to bring an exhibition by Sophie Calle, one of the most celebrated and influential conceptual artists in the world, to audiences in Northern Ireland for the first time. Beyond the Gaze – Shared Perspectives presents video works (Voir la Mer, 2011) and photographic pieces (L’Hôtel, 1981-1983).

For Voir la mer, Sophie Calle invited inhabitants of Istanbul, who often originated from central Turkey, to see the sea for the first time. “I took 15 people of all ages, from kids to one man in his 80s … once we were safely by the sea, I instructed them to take away their hands and look at it. Then, when they were ready-for some it was five minutes and for others 15-they had to turn to me and let me look at those eyes that had just seen the sea.”

One of her most famous works, Calle took the photographs of strangers’ bedrooms that make up L’Hôtel over two years.

“On Monday, February 16, 1981, I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. On Friday, March 6, the job came to an end.”*

The work presented in the exhibition has been generously loaned from the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and supported by Galerie Perrotin.

University of Atypical’s CEO and Artistic Director Edel Murphy is pleased to welcome you to the Connection Artists Collective Group Exhibition. University of Atypical is delighted to partner with Dublin-based Connections Arts Centre to bring their Group Exhibition to Northern Ireland.
Connections Arts Centre (CAC) is a not-for-profit social enterprise that supports neurodivergent adults, including adults with learning disabilities, in Ireland. CAC exists to enhance inclusivity and empowerment by tackling inequalities faced by disabled people, by providing accessible and innovative training, arts, and community education programmes. These specialised programmes cater to and support diverse learning requirements, ensuring that barriers to inclusion and participation for the disability community are overcome.

Connecting Artists Programme & Collective: This national annual initiative pairs artists who are neurodivergent or have an intellectual disability with mentors and nurtures their creative development and visibility. The programme leads to an exhibition at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Once participants complete the programme, they can join the Connecting Artists Collective, a platform for continued support and artistic growth.
The collective facilitates artistic expression, skill-sharing, and collaboration. It has held notable exhibitions including at the prestigious Royal Hibernian Academy.

Exhibiting artists: Evan McLoughlin, Rachel Connell, Pamela Kavanagh, Martin Carolan, Marta Soltysek, John Heavey, Claudia Williams, Bearnard Durnin, Ava Lawlor, Amy Begley, Alan Tarpey, Thomas Higgins, Brian Kennedy, David Singleton, Michael Hade, Matthew Sexton, Jennifer Humphreys, Peter Kehoe, Sarah McNulty, Rachel Coen, Jenny Stafford, Kristin Reynado Suniega and Tomás Malone.

Cover image: Bouquet from Beyond, Claudia Williams

https://www.connectionsartscentre.ie/

SO Fine Art Editions Presents: Summer Show 2025
02 August 2025 – 27 August 2025

The summer sun is out, and with it comes the return of SO Fine Art Editions’ highly anticipated annual Summer Show. Celebrating the lightness of the season and the joy of discovery, this group show brings together a vibrant array of contemporary artworks, featuring fine art prints, paintings, ceramics and photography.

This year, we’re delighted to welcome several new and exciting artists into the fold, joining a diverse line-up of established names and emerging talent. The exhibition presents a unique opportunity to acquire work from artists you’ve long admired, or to fall in love with someone new.

Exhibiting Artists Include
Yoko Akino, Jean Bardon, Ailbhe Barrett, Peter Bradley, Ria Czerniak-LeBov, Sorca O’Farrell, Mary A. Fitzgerald, Niamh Flanagan, Taffina Flood, Debbie Godsell, Alastair Keady, James Kearney, Richard Lawlor, Stephen Lawlor, Kate MacDonagh, Bernadette Madden, Emmanuel Matt, David McGinn, Mary O’Connor, John O’Flynn, Emma O’Hara, Sophia O’Sullivan, Padraig Parle, and Pascal Ungerer.

New Artists to the Gallery
We are delighted to introduce three artists making their debut with SO Fine Art Editions:

– Pascal Ungerer explores the tension between the built and natural world, drawing attention to liminal spaces, structures and the thresholds between rural and urban edges. He reimagines real landscapes to reflect on ecological degradation, peripherality and speculative futures in the age of the Anthropocene.

– Peter Bradley creates large, mixed media figurative works that examine gender, identity, sex and sexuality beyond binary norms. Using layered transparency, light and reflectivity in his work has allowed Bradley to analyse the reciprocal relationship between the viewer, the work and the environment – highlighting how perception and interaction shape understanding.

– John O’Flynn is a Galway born artist based in Dublin whose work merges graffiti, street art and industrial design. Using spray paint, acrylic and watercolour, he reflects on urban and natural landscapes, light and introspection. His expressive compositions explore everyday monotony and perception, aiming to forge connection through shared reflection.

A Unifying Thread
What ties these works together is a sense of reflection on landscape, on identity and on our evolving cultural moment. Each piece encourages the viewer to pause, consider and connect with the shifting worlds — both outer and inner — that these artists illuminate.

All artworks are available for purchase online and in the gallery.

Gallery opening hours are 10am to 5.30pm Monday to Friday, 11am to 5pm on Saturday. We are closed Sunday and bank holidays.

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

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

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

Mark your calendars for August 27–28, when we are bringing you Sin Objeto / Intet Objekt, a two-day live art event at Metronomen, right in the heart of Frederiksberg.
We’ve invited 16 amazing performance artists from around the world to join us for an exploration of performance and non-objectual art. Just raw, experiences you won’t forget.

From collective actions and solo performances to video screenings, workshops, and parties, the program is packed with surprises, intensity, and creative freedom. It’s open, it’s playful, it’s experimental — and you’re invited. Involved with my video performance SMOKING and looking forward to the many great performers August 27–28, Sin Objeto / Intet Objekt, a two-day live art event at Metronomen, right in the heart of Frederiksberg. Denmark

“Rapport” is an exhibition of work by three artists, Jo Going, Fiona Woods and Amanda Montgomery.

The three artists met at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, in 2002.

Fiona and Amanda had been awarded three month residencies with the Leighton Studios by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland respectively. Jo, an artist from Alaska, had a residency there at the same time.

The artists struck up a rapport that continued over 20 years. This is their second exhibition together. Their first exhibition, taking place in KAVA, Kinvara, in October 2023.

Sadly, Jo passed in January 2024.

This exhibition brings the three artists together again.

The works are diverse in media and approach. What connects them is a shared interest in looking beyond the surface of things, hinting at sacred spaces and complex narratives, invoking the emotions, sensations and longings that arise from the condition of being human.

The exhibition will be on display from Friday 1st until Friday 29th August 2025, and will include Saturday opening on 16th August.

For more information, please contact Larne Museum & Arts Centre on 028 28 262443 or e-mail marian.kelso@midandeastantrim.gov.uk.

Image: Artwork by Jo Going

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

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

Opening reception Friday 18 July, 5.30-7.30pm

Exhibition tour with Gallery Director, Brian Mac Domhnaill Saturday 09 August, 12pm

Running over six weeks, the Summer Exhibition at Lavit Gallery is an annual group show featuring painting, print, photography, sculpture and craft at a variety of price points. This year exhibiting artists and makers include Wendy Dison, Michael Duhan, Patricia Doherty, Grainne Dowling, Ana Duncan, James English, Angela Fewer, Felicia Garrivan, Etain Hickey, Antonio Julio Lopez Castro, Andrew Ludick, Damaris Lysaght, David Magee, Michaela McCann, Isobel McCarthy, Kate Mac Donagh, Peter McTigue, Paul Murphy, Claire O’Reilly, John O’Reilly, Jenny Richardson, Katherina Tremil, Zoe Velthuysen, Sarah Walker, Catherine Weld.

Cork Arts Society (est 1963), trading as Lavit Gallery, is a not-for-profit arts organisation, registered charity (CHY 13297) and CLG dedicated to promoting an appreciation of art in Cork City through the provision of a gallery space in which artists can exhibit their artwork for public patronage. Lavit Gallery also serves the art community and the public through its non-commercial activities such as artist talks, exhibition tours, continued professional development and the provision of two graduate awards given annually to students at MTU Crawford College of Art & Design.

Representing Nature – An Exhibition by Colin Watson RUA

ArtisAnn Gallery, 70 Bloomfield Avenue, Belfast, BT5 5AE

Wed 2nd July to Sat 30th August

Late Night Opening: WED 2nd July from 6 to 8pm

Wed – Sat: 11am to 5.30pm

( Gallery closed Fri July 11th and Sat July 12th)

www.artisann.org

The paintings in the show all have great personal significance to Colin. These smaller paintings are more spontaneous that his larger works, but there remains a desire to infuse each picture with a certain degree of mystery.

Although the choices of subject are personal, the paintings, hopefully, are also universal and have meaning beyond the painter’s initial inspiration.

Alongside studies towards fully realised paintings this exhibition also presents stand alone, spontaneous, intuitive works that directly respond to observed natural phenomena. This selection of works represents a cross section of his working methods beyond the finished paintings.

Colin Watson lives and works in Belfast. He has held seven solo exhibitions in London, as well as in Dublin, Northern Ireland and Morocco. In October 2008, Colin was invited by HRH The Prince of Wales to accompany him on the Royal Tour of Japan, Brunei and Indonesia, as his official Tour Artist.

Colin Watson has exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, the Royal Ulster Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy, winning awards at the latter two including two gold medals at the Royal Ulster Academy, one awarded by the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Christopher Le Brun. He was also awarded the Ireland Fund of Great Britain Annual Arts Award in 1999. His work has been included in the BP Portrait Prize Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, The Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibitions and at the Discerning Eye at the Mall Galleries in London.

Colin Watson’s work is held in collections worldwide, including the Royal Collection of His Majesty King Charles III and in the collection of the King of Morocco. He is also represented in a number of public collections, including the Ulster Museum, Moroccan Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Arts Council for Northern Ireland, the National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland, Limerick and the Royal Geographical Society, London with a portrait of Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the British explorer and travel writer.

At noon Sat 26th July, as part of EastSide Arts Festival, there will be a special British Sign Language event with BSL interpretation of a gallery tour by gallery owner Dr Ann McVeigh. This is free, with no booking required.

All artworks are available to buy.

You can also buy art from this exhibition through the Own Art scheme which gives you an interest-free loan over 10 months (and you still get to take the art home immediately the exhibition ends).

ArtisAnn Gallery, 70 Bloomfield Avenue, Belfast, BT5 5AE
Wed – Sat: 11am to 5.30pm

INTERRUPTED (JOURNEYS)
Brain Injury Matters NI
8 July– 30 August
Explore Interrupted (Journeys), a large-scale collaborative installation inspired by aural histories from Limavady. It tells the story of the lost Ross Sea Party, part of Shackleton’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition, highlighting courage, survival, and hope through an intricate origami display reflecting their perilous journey and determination.

EXHIBITION LAUNCH: Tuesday 8th July 2pm | Free Admission | All welcome
Brain Injury Matters (NI) was established in 2013 as an independent regional third sector organisation supporting, promoting and empowering those individuals and families affected by acquired brain injury.

For more information, please email ciara@braininjurymatters.org.uk or telephone 02890705125 or 07516629856

Opening Thursday 7 August at 7.00pm

This body of work explores the hand movements made during speech as a form of subconscious drawing. The series seeks to reconcile production in an abstract expressionist aesthetic with the desire to make work which contains and contributes to constructive narratives regarding cultural diversity and society. The work connects the artist’s definition of drawing as ‘to describe a path’ into the verbal field.

The work is initiated from hand movements taken from primary school Principal Mary Harbinson, describing ‘Different Journeys to the Same Place’, as an educational objective in the multi-cultural school. For other works the artist recorded his own hand movements as he described his consideration of the need to simultaneously respect and protect cultural diversity.

Michael Doherty paints in oils, in an expressive abstract aesthetic grounded in his drawing practice. His works are rooted in narratives around cultural diversity, society and the environment. While practicing as an architect he qualified from the Ulster University in 2023 with a First Class Honours degree in Fine Art. The boundaries of perceived surfaces, and places where line and surface meet, are critical in his approach to the resolution of his drawings and paintings.

Exhibition continues 5 July – 30 August 2025.

Naomi Draper’s work references a diverse range of research sources that are centred around botany and botanical activity throughout history. It investigates processes of collecting, preserving, and archiving natural particles, fragments and found objects harvested from our landscape.

Naomi is interested in the role process’ of production and making can play in the negotiation of relationships between humans and other matter. Her work looks for moments when materials become active participants in our learning and development.

This exhibition will present a large collection of objects and materials that the artist accumulated and kept over the past five years. Many of the works explore the internal cavity of plants, seedpods, shells and other things, investigating unseen hidden spaces and giving form to invisible entities.

Through various and repeated casting process’ there is an intention to forge a relationship with an object that can never be fully understood, accessed or grasped, acknowledging an attachment and melancholy for particular objects and plant species.

Exhibition continues 5 July – 30 August 2025.

David Fox has become renowned for his compelling connection with the contemporary Irish landscape, where in recent work he juxtaposes the vibrant essence of street art and graffiti within the bustling cities, with the often quiet and overlooked built structures and walls that are seen scattered across rural Ireland. Working primarily with oil paints, Fox brings these walls, alleys and derelict structures to life on canvas, transforming the often-overlooked art of graffiti into evocative pieces that resonate with a modern audience. His paintings are not merely visual explorations but rather profound dialogues with the culture, identity and rebellion found within the modern landscape.

Through meticulous attention to detail and a nuanced understanding of colour and form, Fox’s works serve as a testament to the hidden beauty and enduring spirit of street art and graffiti , weaving a tangible connection between the every day and the extraordinary. His collection is a love letter to the streets, a celebration of the unspoken, and a compelling journey through contemporary Ireland’s visual voice.

Throughout August, Ards Arts Centre will play host to the principle Creative Peninsula exhibition, featuring exclusive works by the finest Artists and Makers from the Ards and North Down Borough

This exhibition will feature unique pieces of art and craftwork in a variety of mediums, specially selected for display in Ards Arts Centre and created in our Borough. This exhibition is a celebration of the exclusivity and quality of the artwork produced by local artists and makers and a fantastic opportunity to purchase a beautiful piece of art.

The theme of this year’s exhibition is ‘Reflection’ with each work taking inspiration from this concept.

Artworks are for sale, and many artists accept commission work too.

Be sure to pick up a Creative Peninsula programme for more information on other events and activities taking place during the festival.

Exhibition Preview: Thurs 31 July, 7 – 9pm

Join us for this open reception and enjoy a glass of wine or soft drink as you view the artworks on display. Meet the artists and makers, and chat about their work.

This exhibition is part of the programme of events for Creative Peninsula 2025.

An Exhibition of Immersive Audio-Visual Work by David Ian Bickley

Romancing the Soil explores the deep connections between landscape, memory, and technology. This immersive audio-visual exhibition draws on mythological and spiritual traditions while using advanced digital tools to examine our relationship with the natural world.

David Ian Bickley’s work is rooted in a belief that landscape is not merely a backdrop to human activity—it is a living archive of movement, memory, and transformation. As a canvas for time, these places embody a continuous dialogue between presence and absence, between the physical trace and the invisible resonance of experience. The terrain holds not just history, but the imprint of intention and the rhythm of existence itself. Influenced by folklore and folk memory, prehistoric monuments, and the elemental power of place, his practice blends field recordings, ambient composition, symbolic imagery, and experimental film techniques to evoke “the spirit of place.”

At the same time, the work is grounded in contemporary processes. Bickley uses modular synthesisers, micrographic textures, and custom-built projection systems to create environments that are both ancient and futuristic. His concept of a “particle accelerator for the mind” reflects this duality—where myth and machine meet to uncover hidden layers of perception.

This exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the evolving relationship between humans, land, and technology. It is a journey through time and terrain, where the soil becomes a medium for both memory and transformation.

Exhibition continues 19th July – 30th August 2025

An exhibition by artists Miriam de Búrca, Pascal Ungerer, Sally O’Dowd, Rita Duffy, and Maria Anastassiou.
Open 10am to 4pm Tuesday to Friday
11am to 4pm Saturday or by appointment
@borderbiennale2025

Exhibition continues 4 July – 30 August 2025.

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

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

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

Exhibiting a sculpture relief titled, Gospel of Abhainn / Naomh Abhainn/ carpet page -exhibition in the historical Hamilton Vault Studios between 21st August and 28th August 2025 for a group exhibition. Medieval marginalia- illustrations or notations in the margins of manuscripts. We will be exploring the fascinating and insightful world of the drawings and writings created in the margins of old manuscripts by monks, nuns and scholars. These varied from the highly decorative to the humorous; think animals playing musical instruments.

Exhibition continues 2nd August – 30th August 2025.

This exhibition features a collection of book illustrations, artwork and new etchings by artist Shona Shirley Macdonald. An award-winning illustrator and author living in Co. Waterford, she specialises in children’s books and large-scale murals. Her debut picture book, ‘The Pooka Party’ was selected for the 2020 IBBY Honour List and received multiple award nominations. Her recent collaboration, ‘Girls Who Slay Monsters’, won the Children’s An Post Book of the Year Award 2022 and was nominated for the 2024 Yoto Carnegie Medal for illustration.
Exhibition runs untils 30th August.

We are delighted to invite you to the opening of Tadgh McSweeney’s exhibition, Saoirse, on 2 August at 12 noon.
The exhibition will be introduced by Tadgh’s friend and film-maker, Vivienne Dick.

McSweeney was an exceptionally individual artist who found extraordinary beauty in the absolutely ordinary, in the landscapes, animals and everyday objects of his home surroundings.

The poet Brian Lynch wrote, ‘the simplicity, the stubbornness, the freshness, and the joy he finds in nature are facets of an ongoing self-portrait, expressions of the soul of an original artistic personality. He is in the tradition of Irish genius, but there is no genius like him. Tadgh McSweeney is unique’.

McSweeney studied in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, between 1959 and 1960, and later studied printmaking techniques, such as etching and silkscreen printing, in London. He exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy, the Oireachtas, Group 65 and the Independent Artists annual exhibitions, and had fourteen solo shows in Cork, Dublin, San Francisco, Hamburg, Killarney and London. He passed away on 29 August 2018, aged 82.

The exhibition runs until 31 August, open Wed—Sun, 12—5pm or by appointment.

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

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

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

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

Featuring artworks and contributions from:

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

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

Welcome to the artist job centre!

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

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

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

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

Exhibition continues 5 June – 31 August 2025.

‘All in Colour’, an exhibition of new paintings by Louise French at Shankill Road Library. It is the eleventh of Flax Art Studios’ annual exhibitions in partnership with the library – an opportunity for an artist to present their work in a community setting.

‘All in Colour’ is a new series of paintings made on surfaces with pre-existing imagery. Through experimentation with materials and processes, the paintings explore colour and form. Referring to still life and domestic representations of nature, the exhibition reflects on the act of painting itself.

Opening: Thursday 5 June 2025, 6.00pm–7.45pm
Exhibition dates: 5 June–31 August 2025

Opening hours:
Monday and Tuesday: 9.30am–5.30pm
Wednesday: 1pm–5.30pm
Thursday: 12–6pm
Friday: 9.30am–5.30pm
Saturday: 9.30am–1pm

Louise French completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School, Australia, 2022. In March 2023 she joined Flax Art Studios (Belfast) Emerging Artist Programme. She has had solo exhibitions at Threshold Gallery, Belfast, and Ards Art Centre, Newtownards and group shows in Northern Ireland and London. In 2025 she was granted ACNI SIAP funding.

Jane Arden (1927-1982) was a leading figure in experimental British theatre and cinema, and an important radical feminist voice of the 1960s and ‘70s. Born in Wales, this director, actor, musician, and poet initially trained as a professional actress, a future derailed by marriage and children. Arden turned to writing, and had some success with stage and television projects. With her work increasingly informed by her politics, the beginning of a personal and professional relationship with director Jack Bond facilitated the move to film, and the small body of work for which she is here celebrated. Following her death, Bond withdrew these often strongly autobiographical films from circulation, only relenting decades later. Arden’s work is raw, perceptive, disturbing, vital, and often beautiful. We are pleased to present the work of an overlooked filmmaker wholly deserving of greater acclaim.

Films:
Separation – Screening Saturday 9th (in-cinema and on IFI@Home)
The Other Side of the Underneath – Screening Sunday 10th, Streaming from Saturday 9th on IFI@Home
Anti-Clock – Screening Wednesday 13th (+ short film Vibration), Streaming from Saturday 9th on IFI@Home

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

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

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

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

“Chomh bán le bainne /Chomh milis le mil / Chomh dearg le fuil.”
as white as milk/ as sweet as honey / as red as blood . (trans.)

(NFC, 0023 : 190)

(Anna Ní Fhathaigh, School’s Collection, Duchas c. 1920s. )

Joyce says that the soul of Ireland is trapped in a net; it is also collected there. To create ourselves we must reach into that fishing net, that lacework, that woven basket. Do our fingers catch in the gaps?

Owing a great debt to the scholarship of Martín Mac Con Iomaire, Bríd Mahon, Kevin Danaher, Jennie Moran and the thousands of voices woven into the Dúchas Schools collection, my art practice explores and reimagines the patchwork history of cooking culture in Ireland. It does so in the hopes of easing a painful cultural memory of famine, fasting, hunger strikes, institutionalization and food insecurity, which today manifests in the prevalence of disordered eating and Ireland’s disregard for the nutritional needs of those in our care.

Drawing on the aforementioned scholarship, persevering folklore, medieval Irish literature, traditional craft methods (patchworking, Irish lace, delft ceramics), as well as my love of cooking with my friends, the work develops a joyful visual language for Irish cooking. The artistic outcomes of my research into food history tend to root themselves in Irish craft traditions, such as Irish lace crochet, quilting and weaving, underscoring the idea that Irish cooking deserves to be revived with the same significance in our culture as the aforementioned crafts.

The exhibition opening will feature hand-drawn looping animations showing step-by step instructions of how to cook some traditional regional dishes which have fallen out of the culture as a result of colonisation, famine, etc.,

Knowing the level of destruction to people and culture caused by orchestrated famine, in Ireland historically and now as it happens in Gaza, I believe in the significance of reconstructing our food culture in a way which contradicts the individualistic and destructive philosophy of colonization. If the art of colonization is line and boundary, our art must be holding, gathering, sharing.

Exhibition continues 2 – 31 August 2025.

‘Anarchive’, curated by Ciara Corscadden Hennessy of the 126 Gallery Board of directors

Exhibiting Artists:
Amanda Hunt – Aisling Monds – Amanda Walker – Aodán McCardle – Barbara Allen – Brian Brown – Caroline Kuyper – Caroline Vesey – Catherine Canning – Ian Handschuh – David Gepp – Deborah Stockdale – Deirdre Doherty – Fiona Carlin – Frances Bermingham Berrow – Frank Boyce – Gillian Wright – Hans van Meeuwen – Heather McLaughlin – Helen Hancock – Ian Wieczorek – Jacqui Deveney-Reed – Joanne McLaughlin – John McCarron – Josephine Kelly – Karen McLaughlin – Kevin Harkin – Maeve Peoples – Martin Hughes – Mary Connors – Mary-Joyce Davis – Melissa Carton – Myriam Rommers – Nina Quigley – Noel Connor – Paul Campbell – Rikki Louise van den Berg – Seamus Gallagher – Sinéad Smyth – Sinéad Walsh – Stella Norrby – Stephen Cavanagh – Sue Morris – Susan Kyle – Una Walker – Vanessa Marsh – Veronica Buchanon – William-Alexander

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

Lightbox Commission.

Flax is delighted to present our second Lightbox Commission, now illuminated at our Bedford Street site – Louise French’s ‘Scaling Structure’.

Like the paintings in French’s current exhibition ‘All in Colour’, this lightbox piece plays with colour saturation, layering and reversal. It draws on diagrammatic compositions, such as for Sogetsu ikebana, along with ongoing studio experiments with colour and form using a restricted palette and inventing rules for dividing space.

Louise French completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School, Australia, 2022. In March 2023 she joined Flax Art Studios (Belfast) Emerging Artist Programme. She has had solo exhibitions at Threshold Gallery, Belfast, and Ards Art Centre, Newtownards. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions including at RuptureXIBIT (London), R-Space (Lisburn), Arcade Studios and Catalyst, Belfast.

‘Scaling Structure’ is on view 24 hours a day at 29 Bedford Street, Belfast, BT2 7EJ until 31 August.

In parallel, ‘All in Colour’ at Shankill Road Library is on until 31 August 2025 and is the eleventh annual exhibition made in collaboration between @flaxartstudios and @librariesni

Louise French is grateful to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for their Support for Individual Artists grant.

Exhibition continues 1 June – 31 August 2025.

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

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

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

EXHIBITION OPENING: Sunday Aug. 10th 3pm to 5pm – ALL WELCOME

Runs until Sunday, August 31st.

“Say Again, This Place”, is a new body of site-responsive works by artist Shane Malone-Murphy marking his first solo exhibition. Developed for the unique architectural context of the Courthouse Tinahely, this exhibition highlights a continued inquiry into place, memory, and materiality.

more information on Artist: https://www.courthousearts.ie/whats-on-event/shane-malone-murphy-residency-say-again-this-place

Viewing: Wednesday to Saturday – 10am to 4pm
Sundays: 12 noon to 4pm
courthousearts.ie
Y14 X099

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

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

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

Exhibition continues 24th July 2025 to 31st of August.

Sample-Studios is delighted to host our Annual Members Summer Exhibition 2025 in Sample-Studios Gallery, The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion in Fitzgerald’s Park. 40 of our 160+ members will be represented in a wonderfully rich and diverse exhibition, showcasing the richness and diversity of work being produced by our community of contemporary artists. This exhibition is a unique opportunity for audiences to engage with new work across a range of media by a significant number of emerging and established contemporary artists working in and around Cork.

This exhibition features painting, print, drawing, and photography by 40 Sample-Studios members: Hina Khan, Viktoria Kondratieva, Etaoin Melville, Struàn Bell, Annie Forrester, Anthony Murphy, Tetiana Milshyna, Amal Hope, Chris Finnegan, Niamh Hughes, Kim-Ling Morris, Laurie Legrand, Siobhán Gillies, Jacqueline O’Driscoll, Barbara Diener, Rebecca Bradley, Joseph Heffernan, Ben Reilly, Thea Mercer, Éadaoin Glynn, Aisling MacCallion, Grace Haynes, Fiona Boniwell, Sarah Buckley, Amna Walayat, Síomha Callanan, Oonagh Hurley, Leah Murphy, Angela Gilmour, Bernadette Doolin, Michaela McCann, Ann Lambe, Siobhán Collins, Sinéad Barrett, Emma Jacobs, Aisling Roche, Leslie Allen Spillane, Dee Hurley, Mary Cooke, Catherine Callanan.

Gerard Sexton, Creative Director of The Market Gallery, Douglas, will offer opening remarks at the Opening Reception on 24 July from 7:30-9pm. Light refreshments will be served and all are welcome to attend.

This year, we are particularly excited to bring our Annual Members Summer Exhibition on tour! After it concludes in Sample-Studios Gallery, The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, the works will travel to The Market Gallery in Douglas, where the exhibition will be on display from 5 September – 4 October.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibition continues from the 27th of July 2025 to the 31st of August 2025

Art + Soul, the International Art & Sculpture Exhibition, will showcase artwork and sculptures by some of the biggest names in international and Irish art from Sunday, 27th July to Sunday, 31st August 2025, in collaboration with Gormleys Fine Art and supported by Ards and North Down Borough Council.

The event, held over 5 weeks, will showcase over 350 artworks by some of the biggest names in international and Irish art, including Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Julian Opie, and Salvador Dali. The highlight will be an outdoor display of over 100 sculptures carefully curated throughout the hotel’s private gardens.

On display within the hotel itself, there will be over 200 artworks by many leading Irish and international artists, including Peter Monaghan, Gordon Harris, Martin Mooney, John Redmond and Stephen Forbes.

Art and Soul is open to the public daily from 11am to 7pm. Why not enhance your experience and take a guided tour delivered by the experts at Gormleys each day at 12pm, 2pm and 4pm to learn about each sculpture and artwork on display.

Exhibition continues 11 June – September 2025.

SOFIA
Irish Printmaker, Paula Pohli, exhibits her Linocuts in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Paula is delighted to announce a special presentation of her handburnished prints in the LESSEDRA GALLERY (& Contemporary Art Projects).

Lessedra: Paula has a long engagement with the International Lessedra Annual Mini Print Exhibition. Organised by Georgi Kolev.

The Special presentation is on display 11th June until September 2025. During the 2025 Annual Print Mini Print Exhibition.
Launched by Georgi Kolev 11th June 2025

Maeve McCarthy, Returning / Heritage

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibition continues 8 August – 3 September 2025.

A group show – artists exploring family journeys, personal journeys, emigration and emigration experiences .

ERLEND EVENSEN

CELESTE SHIMOURA GOEDERT

ELIZA GUION

GENEVIEVE MOBERLY

MELISSA STIEFEL

August 15-September 5, 2025

Opening Reception | August 15 | 6:00-8:00pm

Opening Remarks by Taim Haimet

Future Artifacts presents the artistic research of five 2025 MA Candidates at the Burren College of Art. Bringing together painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and experimental material processes, our work is rooted in a refusal to lose the imagination battle with facism. In a time of genocide and ecocide, we draw upon history, myth, folklore, and alchemy in our attempts to metabolize collective grief and insist on speculative futures of survival and interdependence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cath Taylor is a multidisciplinary artist and musician.

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

A Walk & Talk Tour with the Artist, facilitated by Gillian Lattimore of Irish Seed Savers will take place on Sat 12 Jul at 10am. All welcome.

Heirloom is an installation of works created by artist Rachel Doolin. The project stems from a culmination of experiential research undertaken during an Arctic-based residency programme, later informed by a creative partnership with the Irish Seed Savers Association.

In 2017, Doolin embarked on a research residency in Longyearbyen, an industrial frontier town situated in Svalbard, a remote Arctic archipelago located midway between continental Norway and the North Pole. Here, buried deep beneath a permafrost mountain, lies a backup of the world’s largest collection of agricultural biodiversity, cryogenically preserved within the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimates that 75% of the genetic diversity in agricultural crops has been lost since the 20th century. As risks from the climate crisis and global conflict escalate, seed banks are increasingly considered a precious resource that could one day prevent a worldwide food crisis.

Heirloom presents a series of visual, installation, and digital works that celebrate the ‘profundity of seeds’ by exploring the human thread that articulates the connection between our past, present, and future. It places the humble seed as a profound nexus in the nature-culture relationship.

This exhibition will be accompanied by a number of workshops and activities. Please see website for details.

Samir Mahmood is a Pakistani artist based in Dublin. In his country of origin, Mahmood trained as a medical doctor, and he immigrated to Ireland in 2008 to undertake further studies in the field. But he abandoned this career to pursue art, and has been working as an artist in Ireland since the mid-2010s. The exhibition Symplegmatic Portals features numerous newly created works alongside an extensive selection of works made between 2017 and 2024. It is the largest presentation of the artist’s work to date.

Symplegmatic Portals is produced by SIRIUS and curated by Miguel Amado, Director.

LAUNCH EVENT

SIRIUS
Saturday, 12 July
2-4pm
Free; no booking required

Samir Mahmood in conversation with Seán Kissane, moderated by Miguel Amado

Samir Mahmood and Seán Kissane, Curator at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, discuss the exhibition’s vision, key works on display, the politics and aesthetics informing Mahmood’s practice and his wider artistic intentions.

Accessibility Note
Our building has accessibility limitations. There are three steps to the front door and a temporary wheelchair ramp is available upon request. Elements of this exhibition are accessed via stairs. Our toilets are also accessed via stairs and are not open to visitors. Public toilets are beside the Titanic Experience, on The Promenade.

Samir Mahmood’s practice encompasses painting, textiles, objects and video, with a particular focus on themes of identity, representation, bodily awareness and spiritual transformation. Specifically, he makes large-scale scrolls and small-format paintings. Both draw from the techniques and materials of miniature painting on the Indian subcontinent – for example rich detail, intricate storytelling and the use of wasli, a specific type of handmade paper, as a substrate. The typical imagery features landscapes or scenes of people that indicate power relations and structures, wildlife or mythology. Mahmood subverts all of this through motifs that explore his lived experience as a queer person with an Islamic upbringing.

Mahmood is influenced by multiple intellectual and visual references: Sufism (a chapter of Islam) and Christianity; the writings of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez; architecture, ritual objects and practices, ceremonies, mysticism, folklore and iconographies from the Indian subcontinent and/or Islam; alternative theories of consciousness; and narratives of queer existence.

Mahmood depicts the male form in states of introspection or conviviality. Figures appear within or surrounded by nature – trees, vegetation, water, mountains and more – in varying expressions of intimacy. In addition, he shows figures in dialogue with sites of politics, including courthouses and administrative chambers, which suggest conservative customs and values. In the work, these bodies undergo a transcendence that speaks to a personal transformative potential, representing a union with the divine or, more broadly, a spiritual awakening, as well as a subversion of normative lifestyles.

A key feature of the exhibition is the series of large-scale scrolls portraying joyous celebrations of sexual freedom, and the garden as a symbol of paradise and utopia across religions. The artist calls these works ‘queerscapes’ – spaces of liberation where bodies are interacting, mutating, coalescing.

The title of the exhibition invokes yet more of Mahmood’s key interests. ‘Symplegma’ can mean renderings of sexual intercourse, composite drawings in miniature painting from the Indian subcontinent or anything that is entwined or entangled. Overall, these interpretations speak to the artist’s embrace of hybridity, especially gender indeterminacy and fluidity, as well as his own blended cultural experiences.

Samir Mahmood lives and works in Dublin, where he operates from Fire Station Artist’s Studios. He has held a solo show at Mart Gallery, Dublin, and has participated in group shows in venues such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin; and The Glucksman, Cork. He holds a BA in Art from the Atlantic Technological University, Galway. His work is in the collection of University College Cork. He received awards from the Arts Council, including the Next Generation, Bursary and Agility.

The Courthouse Gallery Studios in Ennistymon is delighted to announce the opening of its Summer Open Exhibition, launching on Tuesday, July 4th, and running throughout the summer season.

Curated by acclaimed artist and curator Gabhann Dunne, the exhibition showcases an exciting and diverse collection of work from selected artists across Ireland. Visitors can expect a rich display of creativity, including paintings, sculpture, and mixed-media works, offering something for art lovers of all tastes.

The Summer Open celebrates both emerging and established artists, providing a platform for vibrant artistic voices and fresh perspectives. All exhibited artworks will also be available for purchase, making this an excellent opportunity for collectors and visitors to take home a piece of contemporary Irish art.

The Courthouse Gallery Studios invites the public to join them for the opening and enjoy an inspiring evening of art, community, and conversation.

Location:
The Courthouse Gallery & Studios
Ennistymon, Co. Clare, Ireland

Opening Reception:
Friday, July 4th, 2025

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

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

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

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

Bio’s

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Arts Office in conjunction with Cultúrlann Sweeney Library Gallery is delighted to present ‘Painting through the lens” an art exhibition by Pauline Dunleavy.

Pauline Dunleavy is a prominent Irish artist, art-teacher, and community advocate rooted in the dramatic landscapes of West Clare. Born and based in the Kilrush area, she draws endless inspiration from the shifting moods of the River Shannon and the Atlantic coast.

Mediums: Primarily works in oils, but also acrylics, charcoal, and encaustic (pigmented beeswax). Over 25 years of painting, her style has matured into vibrant pieces rich in texture and transparency, often incorporating abstract elements layered with pastel, charcoal, and acrylic before final oil or wax finishes.

She loves nothing more than getting out into the landscape to sketch. Her creative approach begins with music, layered gesso, and quick studies. Uses photo references and mirrors to evaluate composition, spraying, erasing, and layering until the piece feels complete. She finds beauty in the ordinary local scenes such as boglands, seascapes, coastlines and this comes through in her work.

Pauline often photographs landscapes before painting. Referencing photos during her process helps capture the authenticity of light, mood, and composition. She waits days before signing the work to ensure total satisfaction of the piece.

Exhibitions & Community Involvement
2022: First solo exhibition “On Our Doorstep” at Cultúrlann Sweeney Gallery, Kilkee, Officially opened by Artist Ruth Wood.
2024: Exhibition “Inspired Landscapes and Beyond” at Clare Museum, officially opened by wildlife expert Éanna Ní Lamhna.
June 2025: Exhibition “Breaking Borders” in Kinvara.
July 2025: Part of the Summer Exhibition at the Kenny Gallery, Galway. Her other pieces are on display all year round.
July 2025: Kilrush Art Group exhibition at Kilrush Library.
Works can be viewed also at The Kilbaha Gallery throughout the year.
Runs her own Gallery & Craft Shop (Anchor Crafts, Kilrush).
Community Engagement:
Former lifeboat crew and Station Manager with the Kilrush Rnli for over 25 years, it has given her a deep connection to the sea which she portrays on almost every canvas. Pauline is very well regarded in West Clare.

Featured Image: Poster for upcoming exhibition

Exhibition continues 9th August – 6th September 2025

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

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

SOFT SURGE

Shirani Bolle | Ursula Burke | Rachel Fallon | Dee Mulrooney | Lucy Peters | Emily Waszak | The Irish Names Project.

The exhibition will be launched by Laura McCormack, Acting Arts Officer for Westmeath Arts Office on Friday 27th June at 6:00pm. All are welcome to attend. The exhibition will continue until Sunday 7th September.

SOFT SURGE is a group exhibition that critically engages with themes of identity, motherhood, women’s collectivity, grief, resistance, activism, and sociopolitical dissent within the context of contemporary Ireland. Through a range of practices and processes including sculpture, embroidery, weaving, knitting, tapestry, film, photography, and mixed media, the artists featured in this exhibition explore the soft power and radical potential of textiles.

SOFT SURGE features newly commissioned works by Emily Waszak and Dee Mulrooney, alongside existing works by contemporary female artists who mobilise cloth and fibre as both tactile material and affective framework. Drawing inspiration from the Moirae, the Greek Fates who spun, measured, and cut the threads of life, Soft Surge posits its exhibiting artists as weavers of narratives shaped by trauma, resilience, and embodied political agency.

This exhibition has been kindly supported by The Arts Council.

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

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

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

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

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

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