Tree Drawings on the Sky – Sarah Walker
Oliver Sears Gallery, 29 Molesworth St, Dublin. Until June 22nd. oliversearsgallery.com
Mainly inspired by the sight of trees against sky while driving through the Irish countryside – travelling to look after her mother during her final illness and ferrying her sons to boxing matches – Sarah Walker’s tapestries, were woven by The Dixon Carpet Company, previously known as V’Soske Joyce in Oughterard, Co Galway. The luxuriant textures and bursts of colour seem appropriate to themes of time, memory, change and elegy.
Art and Architecture – Helen Devitt, Angela Fewer, Roseanne Lynch and Vivienne Roche
Lavit Gallery, Fr Mathew St, Cork. Until June 2nd. lavitgallery.com
The “making of place, both real and imagined” in Devitt’s reinventions; Fewer’s “fantastically conceived architectural spaces”, at once familiar and strange; bronzes, drawings and works on leather by Roche whose work is often architecturally sited, and Lynch’s meditative photographic studies of architectural spaces.
Townscape – Mary Burke
Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Sq, Dublin. Until August 26th.
Mary Burke, known for her depictions of suburbia, turns her attention to Stradbally, Co Laois, with oil pastels based on 12 homes there, from Stradbally Hall to the Parochial House, the residence of undertakers John and Anne Lynch on Main St to John and Irene Delaney’s house in Brockley Park, an outstanding estate designed by Frank Gibney with Laois County Council in the 1950s. Laois arts officer Muireann Ní Chonaill curated.
Xenophon: From the Beginning – McGibbon O’Lynn
Droichead Arts Centre, Stockwell St, Drogheda, Co Louth. Until June 2nd. droichead.com
McGibbon O'Lynn is the collaborative practice of artist Siobhan McGibbon and writer Maeve O'Lynn. The ongoing Xenophon project is a kind of archaeology of the future, in which they imagine a post-human world of "strange, unfamiliar and fantastical scenarios", manifest in disorientating "medical and cultural artefacts".
Kozo – Richard Gorman
Ballinglen Gallery, Ballycastle, Co Mayo. Until June 5th. ballinglenartsfoundation.org
Kozo paper is made from the bark of the mulberry bush and Richard Gorman has not only used high-grade Japanese kozo for many years, he even became involved in integrating the manufacturing process in his work. Here, while work – and fundraising – is ongoing on Ballinglen’s new contemporary art museum space, he shows gouache paintings on echizen kozo washi paper.
