A RAMELTON-based artist will host a landmark exhibition and poetry anthology in Co Kerry in early February, confronting Ireland’s institutional legacy.
‘The Architecture of Containment’ confronts one of the most urgent and unresolved legacies of the Irish State: the physical, social, and psychological architectures through which lives were controlled, silenced, and contained.
Hosted and funded by Mill Cove Gallery, this not-for-profit cultural project brings together a powerful body of paintings by Janet Graham alongside poetic responses from invited poets.
The works engage directly with institutional memory, state-sanctioned systems of control, and the long aftermath carried by survivors and their families.
The exhibition opens at Mill Cove Gallery, Kenmare, on Sunday, February 1 from 3pm to 5pm.
This will be followed by the launch of the accompanying poetry anthology and a public reading at The Carnegie Arts Centre from 5pm to 6pm, where poems will be read alongside projected images of the artworks.
This immersive format allows audiences to encounter the emotional and historical weight of the work in a shared civic space.
Presented as a free public event, ‘The Architecture of Containment’ positions art and poetry as vital forms of cultural witness at a time when Ireland continues to reckon with its institutional past.
Once production costs are met, all proceeds from the anthology will be donated to a survivors’ support group.
The anthology will be available on the evening for €10.
This exhibition is not only an artistic event, but a civic one.
It calls attention to the essential role artists, poets, and independent cultural spaces play in addressing histories that official narrative and state reports have too often failed to fully acknowledge.
‘The Architecture of Containment’ insists that these stories remain present, not abstracted, not archived away, but seen, heard, and felt.
