LEONARDO 500 IS IN TOP 10 OF THINGS TO DO IN GALWAY

Our exhib opening on Tuesday the 15th is featured in this week's Galway Advertiser, thanks a mill to Kernan Andrews. And it also made the Top 10 Things to do in Galway this week!

LEONARDO 500 - EXHIB OPENING

Artwork by Fiona Ormsby

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Group 8 will hold the opening of its annual exhibition, LEONARDO 500, on Tuesday the 15^th October at 6pm in the Church Gallery in Ballinasloe library. The exhibition will run for two weeks from that day and features writing, paintings, photography, textiles, ceramics, mixed media and sculpture inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, whose quincentenary is this year. Writer and art curator Margaret Hickey will open the exhibition.

LEONARDO 500 is the result of collaborative work the members of Group 8 undertook, taking inspiration from the life, art and ideas of Italian painter, inventor and literal Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci was an extraordinary thinker, responsible for the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and designs for the first flying machine, parachute, and machine gun. Sigmund Freud said of him, ‘He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the others were all still asleep.’

Group 8, was founded in 2009 and is comprised of eight visual artists and two writers: Joyce Little – visual and multimedia artist; Tommy Campbell – sculptor and woodturner; Lily Kelly – visual artist; Grellan Ganly – visual artist; Úna Spain – visual artist; Nuala O’Connor – writer; Zara Little-Campbell – writer; John Soden – painter; Walter Coughlan – ceramicist; and Fiona Ormsby – textile designer.

Group 8 is a non-profit, professional arts group whose aim is to foster awareness, imagination and co-operative learning between the artist and the community. The group hosts exhibitions, literary events, artist talks, readings, workshops and book launches. See thegroup8.blogspot.com for more.

All are welcome. Free admission. Refreshments will be served.

ART & WORDS - Author Nessa O’Mahony to Read

Dublin-based writer Nessa O’Mahony is the next guest in artist collective Group 8’s Art & Words series of talks in Ballinasloe. She will appear at Gullane’s Hotel, Ballinasloe, on International Women’s Day, Friday March 8^th at 7pm. Nessa will give a reading from her début crime novel The Branchman and she will be interviewed by Group 8 member, Nuala O’Connor. Admission is free. Refreshments will be served.

Nessa’s novel The Branchman was published in late 2018 by Arlen House. Set in Ballinasloe in 1925, it features Detective Michael Mackey, ex-British Army and Civil War veteran and one of the first members of the Free State’s new elite Special Branch. Mackey is assigned to the Garda Barracks in Ballinasloe and uncovers a plot by subversives to disrupt the peace. 

The novel is inspired by the real-life adventures of Nessa’s grandfather, Michael McCann, who was a member of the original Special Branch and was stationed as a Garda in Ballinasloe from 1929 to 1945.  Donal Ryan has described the novel as ‘a taut and absorbing thriller’ while writing in the Irish Times, Declan Burke said that ‘most fascinating, perhaps, is O’Mahony’s evocation of the wider political backdrop, that fragile, imperfect peace that took hold in the wake of the War of Independence and the Civil War.’