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arts · Monday 6 July 2026 · Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 - 17:00 
Maitiú Mac Cárthaigh Solo Exhibition - Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre
At Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre · Marsh, Skibbereen, Co. Cork
At Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre · Marsh, Skibbereen, Co. Cork
Maitiú Mac Cárthaigh is a West Cork native and recent graduate of the MA in Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and this solo show at Uillinn marks a significant milestone - it is the result of winning the 2025 Cork County Council Emerging Visual Artist Award, which carried a residency at the arts centre and the solo exhibition as its centrepiece. The work explores rural queerness and agricultural processes in Ireland through bio-installation, print, sound, and video, and it does so without sentiment or romanticisation. If you are curious about contemporary Irish visual art that takes the West Cork landscape and farming life as raw material and turns them into something genuinely challenging, this is worth the journey.
The exhibition brings together several distinct works made during the artist’s residency at Uillinn. A video is projected onto a screen made of agar bioplastics - material handmade by Mac Cárthaigh from seaweed-derived gel - giving the moving image a translucent, almost organic quality. A sound piece narrates the fictional life of a young gay farmer, threading together the isolation and community of rural life. Family photographs are printed using earth pigments, grounding the personal in the agricultural. Elsewhere in the installation, materials sourced directly from agricultural co-ops - polywire, baler twine, silage plastic wrap, and artificial insemination gloves - are used to interrogate ideas around sterility, community monoculturalism, and queer assimilation into dominant rural culture. It is a body of work that asks what belonging looks like when the land you come from was not built with you in mind. The exhibition runs from 6 July to 5 August 2026, Tuesday to Saturday, and admission is free.
Skibbereen sits on the N71, roughly 90 km south-west of Cork City - allow around an hour and a quarter by car. From Cork City, Bus Éireann routes 237 and 252 serve Skibbereen, as does West Cork Connect route 230, which takes approximately 90 minutes. Uillinn itself is on Marsh Road in the town centre and is easy to find on foot from the main street. The closest car park is the town car park, a two-minute walk with a two-hour limit; the Fair Field Car Park a few minutes further offers unlimited parking. The building has full wheelchair access, a lift to all floors, hearing induction loops in both galleries, and gender-neutral accessible bathrooms.
Skibbereen is a market town with a strong arts tradition and a good few places to eat and drink well after the gallery. There is more to see in Skibbereen and across Co. Cork.
Heading to Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen? Cork has plenty more to see. Read the Skibbereen area guide, find what else is on, and explore the towns and villages nearby.