Every month, architects and design experts share their recommendations for the latest exhibitions and events from across the country.
THIS MONTH:
Eimear Arthur
Eimear Arthur is an architect, writer, and assistant lecturer in architecture. She is Managing Editor at Type and teaches on the Master of Architecture programme at TUD. While at Níall McLaughlin Architects, she was part of the team that produced Ireland’s entry to the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Her writing has been published in Tolka, Architecture Ireland, house + design, and RIBA Journal, exhibited as part of Open House Dublin 2024, and broadcast on RTÉ radio. Eimear holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.
March is an important time for architecture worldwide, with the Pritzker Prize Laureate announced early this month. Could an Irish architect be recognised so soon after the 2020 honouring of Shelly McNamara and Yvonne Farrell? Whoever is named, the award is a welcome catalyst for public conversation around the work of the world’s best architects.
Bringing the focus back to our shores, I’m hoping to finally make it to Bogskin at the RHA, which brings together artworks that explore the legacy, both physical and intangible, of boglands in Irish life and culture. The exhibition includes documentation of Tom de Paor’s 2000 N3 pavilion, which was Ireland’s inaugural entry to the Venice Architecture Biennale.
The Say a Song Project, an immersive exhibition combining soundscape, film, and visual art to represent the Ireland that’s live in our oral history, launches with an event at TU Dublin’s Blackbox Theatre on 15 March, and earlier that day, artist Niamh Lawlor will run an Irish language sketching tour of the Hugh Lane Gallery as part of Seachtain na Gaeilge.
Speaking of Gaeilge, Orla O’Kane and the Ailtireachtúil Collective in partnership with the AAI, will present an evening of Irish language architecture lectures at the United Arts Club on 12 March featuring Aidan Conway of Marmar Architects, Anna Ryan Moloney, Aoife-Marie Buckley, and Ultan Ó Conchubhair of Gró. Works.
Open Ground is running at VISUAL Carlow. An exhibition of drawings and paintings by late Scottish artist Carol Rhodes, the aerial works explore man-made technological landscapes – mines, airports, factories – and their relationship to the earth. Imagine what she would have made of data centres.
With the ongoing devastation of Palestine, Ukraine, Myanmar, and Sudan, and the United States’ withdrawal – again – from the Paris climate agreement, the effects of war, colonialism, and industry on health, life, and the environment is an urgent concern, one explored at IMMA’s multi-modal Take a Breath exhibition, which runs till St Patrick’s Day.
