What’s On around Ireland

‘‘a dreamers dream’ is a two-week solo drawing residency by Niamh Clarke at The Kiosk Space, where the gallery will function as an active studio. Throughout the residency, Niamh will create time-intensive drawings while working from a drawing station set up in the space. Literature plays a significant role in Niamh’s practice, and a small reading room will be installed in the gallery, featuring a selection of much-loved books, references, and sources of inspiration that have long informed and continue to shape her practice.

Visitors are encouraged to drop in, chat with Niamh, browse the reading room, and perhaps exchange book recommendations.

Neil Shawcross is well known for his love of books, with a long running series of paintings based on the covers of the iconic penguin books. This exhibition features a selection of these works from across the years. This festival of books and art, includes the covers of well-known classics by Emily Bronte and Andy Warhol and others.

Eminent Authors – An Exhibition by Neil Shawcross RHA RUA MB

Late Night Opening: WED 3rd June from 6 to 8pm

Slow down & reconnect through gentle creative Eco Art Therapy experience each Wednesday in June, 2pm to 4pm. Come to one, two, three or all!

In response to the Open Call, feidhlimidh hosts a session at The Douglas Hyde, including a collective lift of the central work LIFT in the current exhibition EX/IT: LIFT by Abbas Zahedi.

Drawing on their research into energy systems and notions of collective and individual agency, feidhlimidh has invited friends with a commitment to community building to participate in the performance of the piece, as well as the artists DJ Powerbutton and Ireland to play music before and after the LIFT session.

A drop in becoming is a living exhibition, transforming over the course of a month in response to the temporal world we inhabit. Featuring the works of Annie Hogg and Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe, sculptures dissolve, absorb, and digest in an ever-changing encounter. The artists employ sustainable techniques and hand-harvested materials in intimate communication with their natural surroundings that question our changing relationship to the earth. Audiences are invited to become participants in the gallery space as the works engage all five of their senses.

Laois Arthouse are delighted to present new work by artist Donna Wright (Aus), resident at Laois Arthouse, Stradbally. During her residency Donna has developed new work exploring the ecology and mythology of the River Barrow. Working on large swathes of unstretched canvas her works express layered thinking, weaving mythological and biological readings of place. ‘A breath away from gone’, brings together the ancient salmon of knowledge, the sacred hazelnuts, the origin myth of Barrow Goddess Berba and the dramatic decline of the freshwater pearl mussel.

Black Noise celebrates the African diaspora and wider Black communities across Ireland, while recognising the strength that comes from shared experience and collective support. Inspired in part by the spirit of AfroPunk, the exhibition explores how creativity can bring people together during moments of uncertainty and social fracture.
Bringing together artists working across different backgrounds and mediums, the exhibition sees art as a space for connection, resistance, and self-definition. Black Noise is about being seen, heard, and supported on our own terms.

Join us from 6.00pm on Thursday 4 June to celebrate the premiere exhibition of Shane Hynan’s Beneath | Beofhód, a decades-long exploration of the evolving perception and value of peatlands in contemporary Ireland.

Drawing on Hynan’s authentic connection with his local community and region, the work traces the remnants of industrial peat harvesting and the tensions that emerge between the tradition of small-scale harvesting for domestic use and the need to protect remaining peatlands.

Image: Tony’s Footings, Carbury, County Kildare, 2017, from the series Beneath | Beofhód (2017-2026) © Shane Hynan

linn gallery is delighted to present ‘Beauty and The Fool’, a captivating new exhibition of paintings and sculpture by artist Eugene de Leastar. The exhibition opens on Friday, 5th June at 6pm on the first floor of The Narrow Space, 14 Mitchell Street, Clonmel.

Running until 27th June, this intimate collection brings together a striking series of portraits, nudes, and sculptures in bronze and terracotta.

Working between Chioggia, a coastal town south of Venice and on the foothills of Slievenamon, Co. Tipperary, Eugene de Leastar’s latest work explores the idea of beauty, alongside the archetype of the fool as jester and truth teller.

In ‘The Skiapod of Ballymaccus’ Stephen Brandes re-imagines the scarcely credible event of the skiapods, in a body of newly made work that includes drawings, painting and a collection of hand-built figurines, set into a construction of timber and found materials.

‘The Skiapod of Ballymaccus’ opens on Friday, 5th of June and runs until Friday, 24th of July at LHQ Gallery. An opening reception will take place on Friday 5th of June from 5.30pm. Stephen will be in conversation with Curator of Collections & Special Projects Crawford Art Gallery, Michael Waldron at the LHQ Gallery on Saturday, 20th of June at 12noon. LHQ Gallery is open Mon – Fri.

Northern Ireland Photographic Association – Annual Exhibition
Founded in 1967, The Northern Ireland Photographic Association (NIPA), is committed to the advancement of photography in all its forms, for and on behalf of its member societies, groups and associated bodies. The NIPA print exhibition brings together the best of local club photography.
This exhibition, consisting of approximately 100 prints, is selected from over 500 entries, from members of the 24 local camera clubs that form NIPA . Selection is made by three distinguished photographers. Subject matters vary, from landscape to portrait, sport to architecture and nature, guaranteeing there will be something to excite everyone!

Join Pallas Projects/Studios for an in-conversation event with artist Ciara Rodgers and curator Aideen Quirke, discussing Paper Façades make Tender Follies. Bringing her experience as a curator, facilitator, and collaborator working across contemporary art, collective care, and activist methodologies, Quirke will join Rodgers in a discussion expanding on the themes of the exhibition. These include architecture, gendered experiences of urban space, precarity, and the contradictions embedded within the contemporary built environment. Through installation, material experimentation, and spatial intervention, Rodgers’ practice examines how cities

Draíocht is delighted to announce Colourings by Lucy Hill, curated by Helen O’Donoghue, a Draíocht Children’s Commission, part of a series of initiatives to mark Draíocht’s 25th birthday.

Colourings centres on the artist’s own abstract colourings, which she has reimagined through collaboration with fashion designer Orla Langan and sound designer Adam Kennedy.

Colourings celebrates scribbling as a practice of becoming, where colours, shapes, textures and lines merge with sound, touch and movement, emphasising how the experience of colouring can nurture empathy, curiosity and collective imagination.

Cairde Visual / Hamilton Gallery Award Winner 2025 & recent NCAD Dublin graduate. Root Fall traces shifting boundaries and sites of interruption, where in-between spaces hold material resonance, revealing transformation, tension, and embedded memory.

Join us at Outset Gallery for an artist talk, in conversation with Meadhbh McNutt, as part of the exhibition HERmetics: How Painters Think.

This informal discussion brings together exhibiting artists Sinéad Aldridge, Mary Theresa Keown, and Patricia Doherty. Together, they will discuss their individual practices, creative processes, and approaches to contemporary painting. The conversation will offer insight into the ideas, materials, and methods that inform the works presented in the exhibition, while also exploring broader themes surrounding abstraction, experimentation, and studio practice.

A new group exhibition of graduate work from the Master of Fine Art programme at the National College of Art and Design opens at Rua Red South Dublin Arts Centre on 6th June 2026, and runs until June 20th.

Bringing together work by 14 artists the exhibition spans painting, media, print, and glass, reflecting diverse approaches to material, process, and critical inquiry. Moving between the intimate and the societal, the works explore how contemporary life is shaped through shifting conditions of relation, identity, and experience.

A programme of public engagement will run alongside the exhibition.

Join us for an evening of life drawing, live music, drinks and nibbles in the beautiful setting of the United Arts Club at the heart of Dublin city.

It’s a chance to practise drawing and painting in a relaxed, social atmosphere with a live band. Enjoy a few hours of life drawing without pressure or expectations – switch off, relax and see what you create.

What’s in store:

– Life drawing with a life model

– Live music

– Drinks and nibbles to fuel your imagination

– A chance to meet fellow artists and creatives to connect and learn

You are invited to the opening of “Lost Moments” – an exhibition by LORRAINE WHELAN
Launched by Eamon Colman, Aosdana Member
Sunday, June 7th 2026 3pm to 5pm
Viewing Times, Tuesdays to Saturdays: 10 am to 4pm
(Runs until Saturday, June 27th )

Lorraine is an Irish-Canadian writer and artist. Her prose, poetry, and art criticism has appeared in Ireland, Canada, USA, Luxembourg and online. This exhibition of Paintings and Prints can be considered as an archive of memory the works are based on.

Adrian Duncan | 84 mins, Ireland, 2025, Digital

An Irish geologist travels to Germany when she receives a call to say that her father, whom she hasn’t seen for over 30 years, is unconscious in a Berlin hospital after a fall. Over the course of a night in his apartment she learns from his diaries about a tragic trip he took with a friend to Italy to research fascist-era buildings and sculptures. This timely and moving hybrid-documentary is a dreamlike journey through elegant old Europe, which looks at a political ideology through the objects and buildings it left behind.

Followed by a Q&A with Adrian Duncan, hosted by Francis Halsall (NCAD).

In response to the Open Call, feidhlimidh hosts a session at The Douglas Hyde, including a collective lift of the central work LIFT in the current exhibition EX/IT: LIFT by Abbas Zahedi.

Drawing on their research into energy systems and notions of collective and individual agency, feidhlimidh has invited friends with a commitment to community building to participate in the performance of the piece, as well as the artists DJ Powerbutton and Ireland to play music before and after the LIFT session.

Join us from 6.00pm on Thursday 4 June to celebrate the premiere exhibition of Shane Hynan’s Beneath | Beofhód, a decades-long exploration of the evolving perception and value of peatlands in contemporary Ireland.

Drawing on Hynan’s authentic connection with his local community and region, the work traces the remnants of industrial peat harvesting and the tensions that emerge between the tradition of small-scale harvesting for domestic use and the need to protect remaining peatlands.

Image: Tony’s Footings, Carbury, County Kildare, 2017, from the series Beneath | Beofhód (2017-2026) © Shane Hynan

Paperwork is a solo exhibition by Tom Doig at Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group, Cork, running 1 May – 5 June 2026. Developed through a residency and curatorial collaboration with Benjamin Stafford, the exhibition explores collage and found paper imagery as a way of rethinking how knowledge is organised and understood.

The Tea Houses is delighted to present ‘At The Waterline’ by artist and ecologist Tasneem Khan, a multi-disciplinary exhibition exploring the artist’s lived experience of islandness, using it as a lens for thinking about change, adaptation and our relationship to place. The exhibition emerges from an ongoing body of artistic research exploring how islands can be understood not only as geographical locations or terrain, but as spaces through which to consider ecological systems and human experience in a time of environmental instability. Opening Friday May 29th at 5pm, we hope to see you there!

Join Pallas Projects/Studios for an in-conversation event with artist Ciara Rodgers and curator Aideen Quirke, discussing Paper Façades make Tender Follies. Bringing her experience as a curator, facilitator, and collaborator working across contemporary art, collective care, and activist methodologies, Quirke will join Rodgers in a discussion expanding on the themes of the exhibition. These include architecture, gendered experiences of urban space, precarity, and the contradictions embedded within the contemporary built environment. Through installation, material experimentation, and spatial intervention, Rodgers’ practice examines how cities

Boy Dancer is a Solstice commissioned collaboration between poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin and artist Niamh McCann. Blending poetry, drawing, sound and sculpture. It reflects on grief, ritual and remembrance, inspired by Ní Churreáin’s foster brother. Accompanying the exhibition, Solstice Arts Centre is hosting an opening event on April 11th at 2.30 PM, a special public conversation featuring Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Niamh McCann, and poet and critic Gerard Smyth. This event offers audiences a rare opportunity to hear directly from the collaborators about the creative process behind Boy Dancer.

Glimmers is a new body of work that explores abstraction as an embodied and responsive process whilst highlighting the artist’s use of colour, surface and gesture. Yasmine’s work explores painting as both a material process and a site for reflection, memory and perception. This show reflects her ongoing engagement with the physical and emotional possibilities of paint, as well as her intuitive approach to mark-making.

Exhibition Continues from 14/05/2026.

The Irish Contemporaries will take place across two venues with three events in 2026:
18th Street Arts Center | Opening Friday 15th May @1pm
Runs: 15th May – June 6th
Angels Gate Cultural Center | Opening Saturday 16th May 1pm
Runs: 16th – June 6th
Featured Artists across both venues: Deirdre Mulrooney & Gearóid O’Dea

‘where oxlips and the nodding violet grows’ | Joseph Heffernan
Official opening: Sat 9 May 2026, 4–6pm
Exhibition runs: 9 May–6 June 2026, GOMA Waterford
Joseph Heffernan is a Cork-based Irish artist working across painting, drawing, text and assemblage. His practice explores identity, memory and ritual, using found and reclaimed materials to examine how objects carry meaning. This exhibition imagines a speculative world governed by ‘The Ceremony of the Flowers’ – an enigmatic synthesis of poetry, mathematics and esoteric knowledge.
Curated by Aideen Quirke. Free admission. Tues–Sat, 11am–5pm.

Join us for an evening of life drawing, live music, drinks and nibbles in the beautiful setting of the United Arts Club at the heart of Dublin city.

It’s a chance to practise drawing and painting in a relaxed, social atmosphere with a live band. Enjoy a few hours of life drawing without pressure or expectations – switch off, relax and see what you create.

What’s in store:

– Life drawing with a life model

– Live music

– Drinks and nibbles to fuel your imagination

– A chance to meet fellow artists and creatives to connect and learn

Gallery 545 presents a new group exhibition at La Roche House, Belfast, bringing together original artworks by accomplished artists based in Northern Ireland within this striking modernist venue. The exhibition features a wide and exciting art selection, including atmospheric landscapes, nature-inspired paintings, vibrant abstracts and intriguing works on paper, alongside unique sculptures and exquisite textile and glass pieces. Together, the works reflect the richness and diversity of artistic talent in the region.

Exhibition continues from 30th April 2026 to 6th June 2026

The Push and Pull brings together a series of works that reflect on motherhood through everyday moments of care, closeness, and connection. The work draws on time spent in the west of Ireland, where landscape and light shape a quiet, attentive way of looking and making.

Working with tactile materials, these pieces focus on small, often unnoticed exchanges between parent and child; holding, waiting, watching, returning. The work moves between ideas of nature, the body, and memory, where motherhood is understood as something lived and changing over time.

Join us at Outset Gallery for an artist talk, in conversation with Meadhbh McNutt, as part of the exhibition HERmetics: How Painters Think.

This informal discussion brings together exhibiting artists Sinéad Aldridge, Mary Theresa Keown, and Patricia Doherty. Together, they will discuss their individual practices, creative processes, and approaches to contemporary painting. The conversation will offer insight into the ideas, materials, and methods that inform the works presented in the exhibition, while also exploring broader themes surrounding abstraction, experimentation, and studio practice.

A new group exhibition of graduate work from the Master of Fine Art programme at the National College of Art and Design opens at Rua Red South Dublin Arts Centre on 6th June 2026, and runs until June 20th.

Bringing together work by 14 artists the exhibition spans painting, media, print, and glass, reflecting diverse approaches to material, process, and critical inquiry. Moving between the intimate and the societal, the works explore how contemporary life is shaped through shifting conditions of relation, identity, and experience.

A programme of public engagement will run alongside the exhibition.

Exhibition continues from 23/04/2026 to 07/06/2026.

From the Forest to the Ocean by Mary Moynihan is now open at the Smashing Times Gallery, 30 Sandycove Road, Dublin, A96V9P1, running from Sunday 8 March to Sunday 7 June 2026, Wednesday to Friday 1-6pm, Sat + Sun 10am-6pm. All welcome.
From the Forest to the Ocean is a powerful solo exhibition featuring the work of Irish artist Mary Moynihan. Bringing together photography, poetry, and film, this multidisciplinary exhibition draws inspiration from the physical landscapes of nature and the deep interconnectedness of life — from forests to the ocean.

Working in both paint and drawing, this exhibition is influenced both by the imagery and specific colour palette of the language of advertising by the cosmetic industry and the ‘pinkification’ of product marketing to this generation. Painted images mirror the scale of screens through which these messages are disseminated. Larger works on paper in the exhibition arise from research into specific haircare routines, the composition influenced by defined modes of detail erasure and research into early nineteenth century portrait and silhouette collage methods.

Opening: 28th May 6-8pm

Talking Threads is a contemporary textile exhibition by mature students of the MTU CCAD Art Textile programme, bringing together works that explore personal, political, and social themes through stitch, material practice, and constructed form. The exhibition reflects the dedication, creative ambition, and diverse perspectives of the exhibiting artists.

What links our creative consciousness? What feeds our collective output? Away from modern life and the onslaught of global information, our minds draw inspiration from the spaces around us as well as the spaces within. As Illustrators the members of Illustrators Ireland make a living from being creative. Often within the confines of a work week. This means being able to switch creativity on between the hours of nine and five, Monday to Friday.

Tatyana Feeney is a Meath based author/illustrator. She is originally from the US but has made Ireland her home for more than twenty years.
Tatyana grew up in North Carolina, in a rural area, surrounded by woods. Her home in Ireland has fewer trees, but Tatyana has brought the trees of her imagination and childhood into her artwork.
She is the author/illustrator of many picture books for children.
The art displayed here is from her recent book: Crann na nGuíonna, an Irish language story which has been printed with fluorescent inks.
As someone who moved to Ireland from elsewhere, Tatyana was fascinated by the idea of wishing trees.

Exhibition continues from 12/04/2026 to 12/06/2026.

At the Edge of Place brings together a body of paintings shaped by Carey’s time spent in Canada, especially Alberta. Informed by memory, weather, and scale, these works are not descriptive records of place, but painterly responses to atmosphere, distance, and the emotional residue of lived experience.
Developed through a period of change, the paintings draw on moments that remained with the artist long after he had left them. Mountains, snow, water, light, and small human traces become vehicles for exploring awe, stillness, and psychological weather.

‘Long Exposures’ is Kim Coleman’s new expanded photography installation for R-Space Gallery which was developed from interviews the artist conducted with women in their late seventies who had experienced a major European blackout in 2025. Opening reception: Saturday 16 May, 2–5pm. Artist Talk at 4pm. FREE. All welcome.
This exhibition is funded by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and The Richard and Siobhán Coward Foundation.

Territories is a contemporary drawing exhibition by Niamh Clarke exploring memory, landscape, and environmental change. Through drawing, text, watercolour, and Super 8 film, Clarke examines what is submerged, eroded, or half-seen, where meaning emerges slowly through gesture and material. The exhibition invites reflection on trace, time, and the layered relationship between personal narrative and landscape. Territories builds on Clarke’s 2025 solo exhibition Interiorities, reconfigured here within a new spatial and conceptual context at CHG&S.

Featuring in The Courthouse gallery & studios’ red couch gallery upstairs.

The Regional Cultural Centre is pleased to present a photographic portrait exhibition celebrating Donegal fiddle players. Presented in association with Féile Róise Rua, the exhibition features a collection of portraits documenting musicians who continue to practise and sustain Donegal’s rich fiddle tradition.

Clare Arts Office in conjunction with Clare Museum is delighted to present Drift Across, an exhibition by Polish Artists in Clare featuring Gosia Kamieniecka and Anna Kacprzak.
Gosia Kamieniecka’s practice traverses surrealism, symbolism, realism and geometric abstraction, consistently engaging with the shifting boundary between the sacred and the profane, where meaning remains in constant negotiation. Anna Kacprzak has always been fascinated by the image and light relationship, and how a photo camera in motion technique can reveal images, which are not visible to the naked eye.

Lavit Gallery presents a two-person exhibition by painters Ita Freeney and Cathy Dorman. Their respective sources are landscapes and interiors, while for both, the work lies between abstraction and representation. Although no humans appear in the paintings, their presence is implied. Both artists go through a very considered process of experiencing, observing and investigating light and shape, and distil, emphasise and manipulate these elements in their paintings.

Continues from 21st May 2026 to 13th June 2026

“All These Are But Dreams and Shadows” is a collaborative show put together by Kat Kelly and Éanna Heavey which brings their practices into constellation, working across video, sound, text, mark making, collage/assemblage, and installation, to explore journeys through the unconscious, the archetypal, the queer, and the elemental.

Éanna Heavey is a West Cork-based multidisciplinary artist currently pursuing an MA in Art, Psyche, and the Creative Imagination at TUS Limerick.

Kat Kelly is a graduate of Limerick College of Art and Design (TUS), working in collage/assemblage, mark making, print media, text and installation.

Laois Arthouse are delighted to present new work by artist Donna Wright (Aus), resident at Laois Arthouse, Stradbally. During her residency Donna has developed new work exploring the ecology and mythology of the River Barrow. Working on large swathes of unstretched canvas her works express layered thinking, weaving mythological and biological readings of place. ‘A breath away from gone’, brings together the ancient salmon of knowledge, the sacred hazelnuts, the origin myth of Barrow Goddess Berba and the dramatic decline of the freshwater pearl mussel.

Exhibition continues from 03/04/2026 to 14/06/2026.

Visit the Spring Exhibitions at The Douglas Hyde by artists Abbas Zahedi and Bushra Mustafa Dunne, on now until Sunday 14 June 2026. ⁠EX/IT: LIFT is the first solo exhibition in Ireland by artist Abbas Zahedi whose work centres on reciprocity, renewal, social connection, and care. With a background in medicine and training in psychiatry, Zahedi brings scientific, philosophical, and poetic insights to bear on fixed narratives around art, history, and institutional life.⁠ In this instalment of The Artist’s Eye series, Zahedi has invited poet Bushra Mustafa Dunne to write and record a new text.⁠

‘Gathering Winds’ brings together the work of Eva Posas and David Habets (collaborating as Mbuchi); Tom Watt, Tanad Aaron, and Andreas Kindler von Knobloch (working collectively as Forerunner) and Sonya Schönberger.
In two installations and a photographic triptych, the artists take us on an exploration of the element of air, in its omnipresence, inherent restlessness and invisible force.

A new and exciting Creative Art Collective exhibition will open on Friday, 15 May 2026, running through to Sunday, 14 June 2026, at the Mariner Hotel in Westport, Co. Mayo. This vibrant showcase features new work by four artists: Carole Shubotham, Richie Delaney, Katie Delaney, and Stephanie Glynn.
Bringing together four distinctive voices in contemporary art, the exhibition presents a diverse and engaging collection. Free to all.

Exhibition continues from 18/04/2026.

Penti Menti, Sarah Dwyer’s solo exhibition, marking a return for the artist to her native Ireland.

The exhibition at LCGA is the third and final iteration of the exhibition as part of its national tour. Born in Cork and now based in London, Dwyer has a significant international profile. Penti Menti brings together new paintings, drawings and ceramic sculpture created specifically for this exhibition, many of them being the largest in the artist’s career to date.

Exhibition continues from 21/05/2026.

The Olivier Cornet is delighted to host Conrad Frankel’s new exhibition, ‘Silent Light’, the artist’s fifth solo show with us.

“…This work is as much about paint, brushes and surfaces as it is about looking. The paintings have no meaning, they are only there to be enjoyed, for people to rest their eyes on, as I have been doing during the process of creation. In the turbulent times we live in, needless to say, it has felt good to look at light falling upon things, to meditate on form, texture and colour. Gravity and shadows are the secret ingredient in still life paintings…”

See full artist’s statement on the exhibition page.