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arts · Wednesday 15 July 2026 · Various 
Richard Proffitt and Paddy Critchley Exhibition Opening
At The Dock Arts Centre · The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim
At The Dock Arts Centre · The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim
Two artists, two very different bodies of work, one afternoon in Carrick-on-Shannon. The Dock Arts Centre opens a double exhibition on Saturday, 15 July 2026 - Richard Proffitt’s immersive installation work running alongside Paddy Critchley’s new paintings. Entry is free, no booking needed, and the opening runs from 2pm to 4pm. It suits anyone with an interest in contemporary Irish art, and the combination of a large-scale installation and figurative painting gives the afternoon real range.
Richard Proffitt’s exhibition, titled From A Cosmic Drift Through Higher Prairie, draws on painting, sculpture, video and sound, assembling found and repurposed material into a site-responsive environment. The work circles themes of abandoned worship, the wreckage of counterculture, and an alternative spiritualism that never quite landed. It has the feeling of somewhere recently left - ghostly, layered, and odd in the best sense.
Paddy Critchley’s Ragged Trousers is a series of new paintings centred on working-class life in Ireland today: rent, cost of living, poverty, emigration. Critchley is himself a house-painter from Laois, and elements of the trade - ladders, wilted flowers, an almost physical weight of absence - run through his canvases. The exhibition title borrows from Robert Tressell’s 1914 novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a book about worker exploitation that reads as if it were written this decade. Critchley’s work is held in the permanent collections of The Hunt Museum and Limerick City Gallery of Art, and he won the De Veres Art Award at the 191st Annual RHA Exhibition.
The Dock is Leitrim’s main arts centre, a proper gallery in a riverside building with the kind of space that lets installation work breathe.
Carrick-on-Shannon sits on the N4, roughly 160km north-west of Dublin - about two hours by car. Bus Éireann runs regular services from Dublin on the Sligo route, with Carrick-on-Shannon a scheduled stop; the journey takes around two and a half hours. There is parking in the town centre, and The Dock is close to the main street, right on the banks of the Shannon.
The town is a decent afternoon out in its own right - a compact riverside centre with good places to eat and a busy marina. There is more to see in Carrick-on-Shannon and across Co. Leitrim.
Heading to The Dock Arts Centre in Carrick-on-Shannon? Leitrim has plenty more to see. Read the Carrick-on-Shannon area guide, find what else is on, and explore the towns and villages nearby.