What’s On | Visual Arts Events in August
Looking to pack in some last-minute summer fun this August? Check out these visual arts events taking place around the country this month!
Exhibitions:
Land(ed) | Group Exhibition
Lavit Gallery
1st – 31st August
Land(ed) is the title of a multidisciplinary exhibition which runs at the Lavit Gallery in Cork to coincide with Cork Craft Month in the city and county. The works featured will reflect each of the craftsperson’s engagement with the theme of land and landscape. It will showcase materials and forms which represent a distillation of that landscape. The title for the exhibition also offers potential word-play and allows for ‘land’ to be considered as an action or activity, the landed object is one that is brought into existence by a human hand or one embellished with precious natural resources and found materials.
Wilhelmina Weber Furlong Retrospective
City Assembly House
1st – 29th August
Celebrating the life and legacy of Wilhelmina Weber Furlong (1878-1962), one of America’s earliest avant-garde Modernist painters, the Irish Georgian Society will present the first major exhibition of Weber Furlong’s work outside the United States this August in Dublin.
Weber Furlong was a major American artist who pioneered Modern impressionistic and still-life painting at the turn of the twentieth century. Considered as one of the first female Modernist painters in the early American scene, Wilhelmina Weber Furlong had a long association with the Art Students League in New York, the pioneering art school who offered the same opportunities for men and women, uncommon in the 19th century. Her influence on important American Artists is now understood through her position in Manhattan at the famed Art Students League, her circle of friends (all celebrated artists of the early Modernist movement), and her popular studio and art galleries in Manhattan.
Paintings | Ann Quinn
Custom House Studios
1st – 28th of August
“Every piece of work I have made is based on a specific place I have spent time in. My paintings are about places, but in fact I am going for the atmosphere. I use places in order to instill an atmosphere, it is the main element I go for.”
A Mid Career Retrospective | Mary Cody
KCAT Art Centre
2nd – 18th August
Mary Cody’s mid-career retrospective exhibition will open on the 2nd of August and will continue from 3rd to 19th of August 2019 at KCAT Art Centre in Callan. This exhibition attempts to document a selection of work over her career and in particular the shift in Mary’s artwork from figurative compositions to abstraction.
Through a process of layering wool and paint Mary creates abstracted artworks that speak out to the viewer through colour, form and texture. Through an honest exploration of materials each piece embodies a unique energy that explores the boundary between painting and sculpture.
A Distant Place | Michael Killeen
KAVA, The Courthouse
3rd – 17th August
KAVA (Kinvara Area Visual Arts) are delighted to host A Distant Place – an exhibition of the works of Michael Killeen. At around 20 years of age – in the late 1930’s
Michael Killeen left Kinvara under mysterious circumstances, and afterwards appears to have had a tortured relationship with the town of his early years. With his brush and canvas Michael Killeen captured vivid scenes of the social and cultural life of this rural seaside village in the early half of the twentieth century, with Galway Hookers on the water, Climín racing, and Dunguaire Castle prior to restoration.
While that distant place remained both the primary focus of Killeen’s work, and the centre of his emotional life, Michael would never again return to Kinvara, yet he painted from afar the watery vistas that fill this exhibition for his remaining forty years, and up until his death in 1980. This is a story of the re-emergence of an artist, a long-lost son of Kinvara.
Fabrication: Unravelling facts from folklore | Susan Robinson
Seacourt Print Workshop
3rd August – 5th of September
Fabrications examines the fine line between facts, fiction and folklore. Combining Screen-printing, Stitch, Knitting and Crochet, Robinson examines, embroiders and embellishes our understanding of memory and the human brain.
Where did the idea of ‘Woolly Thinking’ come from? How exactly does someone’s mind ‘Completely Unravel’? What is a ‘Hare-Brained Scheme’? How does one put ‘a Twist in the Tale’?
This exhibition gathers all these curious threads to produce some rather imaginative Textile Art.
7th Annual Signal Open
Signal Arts Centre
6th – 18th August
Over the last 250 years ‘Open Submission’ exhibitions have become established as an essential element of Arts infrastructure. They act as one of the most accessible routes for artists to have their work seen by the public and are almost invariably amongst the stepping stones in an artist’s career. These exhibitions provide an opportunity for artists to come together as a community to show and sell their work and provide the public with an eclectic insight into what’s happening in the arts both locally and nationally.
The Signal Open Exhibition is now in its 7th year and has become an annual event in artists’ calendars. We have been delighted by the response and the quality of work submitted each year and we are very grateful to all of the artists for their support.
Objects in the Mirror are Closer Than They Appear | Group Exhibition
Platform Arts
8th – 26th August
A site responsive exhibition of sculpture, installation, works on paper and audio visual works by artists Sophie Behal, Maeve Lynch, Rosie O’Reilly and Cliodhna O’Riordan. Drawing on Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of perception the work in the exhibition will be conceptually linked by investigations into the object and the experiencer as fluid entities; dissolving, melting and transient.
Out from in-between | Aileen Hamilton
Linenhall Arts Centre
9th August – 8th September
Out from in-between is an exhibition by Aileen Hamilton featuring new drawings, paintings and sculptural work. Aileen reflects on walking and the act of moving through and connecting with the landscape. Central to her work is the perception of space and time and how an imagined sequence of events unfolds within the limits they impose. Aileen considers ecological cycles and organic processes within her drawings, exploring the delicate balances and repetitive patterns that bind the natural world to form. Isolated, fragmented landscapes appear suspended or floating in a fragile or exposed state. Aileen applies directional lines to depict a flowing energy that seeps in and around her work. This energy grows from a central point – expanding, diffusing and folding back on itself. Recurring motifs emerge and set up rhythms among vivid and muted tones. Using a variety of media, Aileen shifts her focus back and forth between flatness and depth.
Concurrent | Art Club
Pallas Projects/Studios
15th – 18th August
Art Club presents Concurrent, an exhibition comprised of seven visual artists in collaboration with Dublin-based Independent Record Label Bad Soup. The exhibition was cultivated through a series of conversations surrounding young artists engaging in the creative community in Dublin. Obstacles which we face with regard to studio availability and affordable exhibition spaces are catalysts in the process of our making. We hope this collaboration will broaden the parameters in which we find ourselves working in and will spark conversations regarding the importance of solidifying our creative communities.
back on the beach in the freezing hail | Paul Hallahan and Lee Welch
Garter Lane Gallery
24th August – 31 September
back on the beach in the freezing sand is the third iteration of Paul Hallahan and Lee Welch’s two-person exhibition of recent paintings that look to Utopia and the end of perceived history, following on from and the tide was way out at dlr Lexicon, then and it was raining out of a low sky at Sternview Gallery, Cork. With both artists adopting very different approaches to the theme, the exhibition is made up predomity of paintings alongside a sculpture by Hallahan. The works pose questions as to how we see the world and includes a combination of abstracted landscapes and figurative based paintings. The exhibition also includes a unique collaborative painting by Hallahan and Welch made for the exhibition.
Festivals:
Creative Peninsula Festival
Ards and North Down Borough
1st – 31st August
Now in its 18th year, this thriving annual event features Creative Peninsula in the Square, Creative Tours, Open Studios, Exhibitions, Workshops, Demonstrations and more, all taking place throughout the beautiful and picturesque Ards and North Down Borough.
The region is well known for its many Artists and Makers and during the event visitors have the opportunity to view their work, purchase or commission a unique piece or try their hand in a workshop. So, why not come along and join them in our celebration of creativity!
EastSide Arts Festival
Belfast
1st – 11th August
From the 1st to the 11th of August places and spaces across east Belfast will transform into hubs of creativity and diversity for the annual EastSide Arts Festival. Supported by Arts Council of Northern Ireland, this year’s exciting programme is filled with glorious new experiences, amazing and inspiring activities which are open for everyone to enjoy. There’s so much to do across music, comedy, film, theatre, talks, workshops, exhibitions, literature, events for the young and old, community events and heritage tours over the 11 days!
The Enniscorthy Arts Trail
Enniscorthy
2nd – 5th August
The Enniscorthy Arts Trail is back again this August Bank Holiday Weekend to coincide with the Enniscorthy Rockin’ Food Festival 2019.
This unique and very successful project, established in 2018, sees selected vacant buildings in Enniscorthy town transformed and offered to artists as gallery spaces, workshop hubs and cultural centres during the August Bank Holiday weekend alongside the immensely successful Rockin’ Food Festival.
During the Enniscorthy Arts Trail artists are given spaces to creativity showcase their work, host a workshop or creative event, paired with other artists and working together to bring high quality creative events to Enniscorthy over the course of the August bank holiday weekend sharing the buzz and enjoying the crowd brought to you throughout the Rockin’ Food Festival weekend, carefully organised by project manager, Nadia Corridan.
Cleggan Claddaghduff Festival of the Sea Art
The Sea Hare Café, Joyce’s Bar, Cleggan
2nd – 11th of August
The Cleggan Claddaghduff Festival of the Sea is hosting an exhibition of art work by 9 artists from the Cleggan and Claddaghduff area. This mixed media exhibition is themed around the sea, and jncludes drawing, painting, sculpture, textiles, photography and film.
Located in the Sea Hare pop-up café in Joyce’s Bar, Cleggan, the exhibition will be open daily from 10-6 from 2nd-11th August.
The exhibition opening is on Friday 2nd August at 6:30 pm, followed by a performance by the locally based Curlew Theatre company at 8pm (€10) and by an evening of music and set dancing from 10pm.
Beara Arts Festival
Beara Coast Hotel
3rd – 11th of August
The Mayor of the County of Cork, Cllr. Christopher O’Sullivan, will officially launch Beara Arts Festival 2019 at the Beara Coast Hotel, Castletownbere, at 3pm, Saturday August 3rd. The occasion will also mark the opening of the exhibition, Landscapes of a Life: The Paintings of John Eagle.
Beara Arts Festival is delighted also to have commissioned a new work by local artist, Mary Sullivan; Breathe is an immersive visual and sound installation in an underground tunnel at Lonehort Battery on Bere Island that launches at 3pm, Sunday August 4th.
