Créatúir na Cartlainne | Tails from the Archive

June 2025 - Spring 2027
Room 11 | Admission free

Créatúir na Cartlainne | Tails from the Archive celebrates our relationship with animals – as a source of joy, humour, awe, inspiration and companionship. Beloved pets, tiny creatures and wild beasts emerge from the archives of the Centre for the Study of Irish Art; hidden between the pages of sketchbooks and illustrated letters, or captured forever in watercolours and maquettes.

The Irish language offers further insight into our connection with the animal world. Layers of wisdom and folk memory are expressed in humorous and evocative words such as bearrthóir (tail-chewing animal) and cluasachán (long-eared animal), and in poetic seanfhocail or Irish proverbs. Familiar and forgotten Irish words reveal a playful, empathetic and keenly observant relationship with living creatures – one that reflects the curiosity and delight in depicting the animal world that we repeatedly encounter in artist archives. ‘Tails from the Archive’ unleashes a menagerie of hidden animals – from both the Irish art archives and from the depths of the Irish dictionary – and reminds us to cherish the lively and descriptive lyricism of our language. There we may rediscover past ways of understanding and co-existing with our fellow creatures.

To preserve our works on paper, this exhibition will be presented in four curated rotations, highlighting recent acquisitions to the Centre for the Study of Irish Art. Featured artists include Stephen McKenna, Dairine Vanston, Conor Fallon, Bea Orpen, Barrie Cooke, Elizabeth C. Yeats, Oisín Kelly, Anne Yeats, Daniel O’Neill, Justin Larkin, Nancy Wynne-Jones, Basil Rákóczi, Jack B. Yeats, Deborah Brown, Walter Osborne and William Orpen.

Curator: Marie Lynch.