VALERIE BYRNE OUTLINES A SCULPTURE TRAIL IN CORK CITY CENTRE. Island City: Cork’s Urban Sculpture Trail is a unique trail of five public artworks, featuring work by six artists, for locals and visitors to enjoy. Located on the central island in Cork City, the trail is easily walkable. It animates the city and illuminates Cork’s unique heritage in an arresting, intriguing, and playful way.  Island City presents the best of high-quality contemporary arts practice in the public realm. The artists were invited to reflect on the rich history and heritage of the city centre locations and their ..read more

Mermaid Arts Centre 11 May – 22 June 2024 Showing jointly in ‘Horses’ at Mermaid Arts Centre, Hannah Ní Mhaonaigh and Émile Crowther have influenced each other’s practices since first collaborating in 2014. Rather than interweave their work, curator Anne Mullee divides the gallery between them, facilitating open conversations that flow back and forth, shuttle-like, while also engaging the visitor.  The first image encountered is Émile Crowther’s Beautiful Colm (2024), an analogue C-type colour print of a dead pigeon on a carpet of grass and daisies. Lying with its underside facing upwards ..read more

Crawford Art Gallery 2 May – 30 June 2024 Martin Healy’s film, A Moment Twice Lived (2016), is being shown in Crawford Art Gallery’s screening room as part of a programme to present moving image works from the gallery collection. Healy’s film has a further Crawford connection in that the gallery’s elegant wood panelled library provides the location for its opening scenes. It is a room from another era, where time feels suspended, especially in contrast to the modern bustle of Cork city centre, which it overlooks. This makes it the perfect setting for Healy to begin his delicate and haunting ex ..read more

Jonah King VAI Member For over a decade, I have delved into the intersection of science, technology, and our evolving relationship with nature. As a digital media artist and filmmaker, my work encompasses writing, performance, and education. These diverse approaches allow me to challenge and reconsider the anthropocentric views that often dominate ecological discussions. Traditionally, my creative process involved collaboration with actors and non-actors, drawing on methods from filmmaking and theatre that were collectively devised. However, the constraints imposed by the Covid-19 lockdown for ..read more

CARISSA FARRELL DISCUSSES JOHN BYRNE’S NEW PUBLIC ARTWORK COMMISSIONED BY FINGAL COUNTY COUNCIL. John Byrne’s new public artwork, An Comórtas/The Contest (2024), commissioned by Fingal County Council, was on temporary public exhibition in the Carnegie Library, Swords (1 May – 1 June 2024) prior to its permanent installation in the future Swords Cultural Quarter development. An Comórtas is described as a work, “created with, for and about the people of Fingal” that features 55 Fingal residents who volunteered to be part of this project through call outs in the local press, social media, an ..read more

Galway Arts Centre  12 April – 25 May 2024 The protagonist in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (Chatto & Windus, 1978) says that “time, like the sea, unties all knots.” Captured, legislated, yet unfathomable, the sea appears as both documented and ungraspable in Martina O’Brien’s recent exhibition, ‘draft fissure’, at Galway Arts Centre. Across ten works, in a range of media, developed through a UCD Parity Studios residency with iCRAG (Ireland Research Centre in Applied Geosciences), the artist brings together attempts to capture and exploit oceanic life through legislation, technology ..read more

SEÁN KISSANE DISCUSSES AN EXHIBITION AT IMMA THAT CELEBRATES THE LEGACY OF AN IRISH MODERNIST SCULPTOR. Currently showing at IMMA, ‘Hilary Heron: A Retrospective’ celebrates the pioneering work of Dublin-born modernist sculptor, Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977). This is the first major exhibition of Heron’s work since 1964 and it brings together artworks from national and international collections. Part of the IMMA Modern Masters series, this retrospective seeks to correct the critical neglect of Heron’s work in the decades following her death.  It had been the intention of Riann Coulter and I ..read more

Pauline Rowan, ‘Under a Vaulted Sky’ Caline Aoun, ‘When the Invisible Touches the Surface’  11 May – 6 July 2024 Pauline Rowan, ‘Under a Vaulted Sky’, 2024, installation view, The Dock, May 2024; photograph by Ros Kavanagh courtesy of the artist and The Dock. Two exhibitions, hosted simultaneously at The Dock, offer different experiences – one emotive, the other tactile – based on explorations of environments and nature itself. Caline Aoun considers states of transformation, and the accumulation or dissipation of energy, while Pauline Rowan focuses her lens on a small community, set in a ..read more

JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS EILIS O’CONNELL ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF HER PRACTICE OVER FIVE DECADES. Eilis O’Connell, ‘In the Roundness of Being’, installation view, VISUAL Carlow; photographs by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and VISUAL Carlow. Joanne Laws: Perhaps you could start by outlining the environment and appetite for sculptural practice in Ireland in the late 70s, as you graduated from Crawford School of Art and Design? Eilis O’Connell: There was a passion and intensity for sculpture in those days. I remember a show called ‘OASIS’ (Open Air Show of Irish Sculpture) and annual exhibiti ..read more

Thomas Pool: What can you tell us about your practice? How did you come to be an illustrator and graphic designer, and what motivates your work? Stephen Heffernan: Becoming an illustrator was almost an accident. I was studying web design in college, and realised that I hated programming. I didn’t really have the concentration for it, but I really liked the design aspect. I never really knew that design could be a job. When I was a teenager, I was very into graffiti and cartoony and comic-style drawing. A friend from school had shown me this magazine of graffiti across trains in Europe; it was ..read more