Art

Must-see visual art exhibitions: Kilkenny cuts, witches and star students

Round-up of the best shows includes Mick O’Dea portraits and work by Jesse Jones

Straenge (2018) by Roisin Duff, from Coalescing. DIT BA Photography, Gallery of Photography

Aidan Dunne's face
Aidan Dunne
Sat Jun 9 2018 - 05:00

Kilkenny Festival Portraits

Mick O'Dea, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Chancery Lane, Dublin Until June 30th (kevinkavanagh.ie)
From 2015 to 2017, Mick O'Dea was artist in residence at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, where he set up studio and, in the presence of the public, produced a series of portraits of many of those taking part in the festival, be they musicians, writers, poets, performers or thinkers. His extensive cast of sitters included Paula Meehan, Paul Muldoon, Dennis Cahill and Martin Hayes, Ivor Browne and Marie Mullen. He also made sketches on the spot of festival events.

Tremble Tremble – Jesse Jones

Project Arts Centre, 39 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin, Until July 18th (projectartscentre.ie) Jesse Jones represented Ireland at last year's Venice Biennale with Tremble Tremble, a multimedia installation reimagining "feminist history and law", imagining a new legal order and centring on the witch as a feminist archetype and "disrupter". Olwen Fouéré features.

NCAD Graduate Exhibition 2018

Fine Art, Design, Education and Visual Culture. NCAD Thomas St Campus, 100 Thomas St, Dublin; and MAs at The Annexe, 101-103 James' St, Dublin. Until June 17th (ncad.ie)
Whatever your interest – be it spotting emergent fine art talent or promising designers or mere curiosity – the NCAD show is an indispens

able instalment of the art-school graduate show season. It is a marathon, but invariably a rewarding one.

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Coalescing

DIT BA Photography. Gallery of Photography, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin Until June 17th (galleryofphotography.ie)
Some 17 graduates, too many to mention individually, feature in this year's DIT Photography BA show. As the title suggests, the work on view coalesces over a period of four years, during which the students' work emerges in relation to that of their peers and companions. The plurality of concerns and methods is grounded in this connectivity, captured here just as each graduate embarks on a new path.

Invited Artists: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Hamilton Gallery, 4 Castle Street, Sligo, June 13th-September 29th (hamiltongallery.ie)
With a nod to the centenary of the ending of the first World War and Sligo's Yeatsian links, the Hamilton's annual Invited Arts show takes WB Yeats's classic poem as a "thematic catalyst". It may be concise, but it offers a wealth of ideas with which to connect, not least its evocation of the subject's (generally assumed to be Maj Robert Gregory) mixed feelings: "Those that I fight I do not hate / Those that I guard I do not love."