Divergent Lines

Luan Gallery is delighted to present DIVERGENT LINES, a group exhibition featuring new work by Kiera O’Toole, Felicity Clear, Mary Ruth Walsh, Michael Wann, Lelia Henry, and Brian Fay. The exhibition opens to the public on 22 April and runs until 21 June. The official launch will take place on Saturday, 25 April at 3pm, with guest speaker Sarah Searson. All are welcome to attend. This exhibition is supported by funding from the Arts Council.

DIVERGENT LINES explores the potential of drawing across a diverse range of artistic practices and mediums, with a focus on abstracted methods of mark-making and the phenomenological exploration of line in space. Through various approaches, ranging from minimalist gestures to immersive environments, the works presented in this exhibition will investigate the potential of mark-making and the construction of line as tools for expression, spatial disruption, and conceptual inquiry.

Where We Are Matters by Kiera O’Toole investigates how drawing can register the affective spatial conditions of place through bodily attention and movement. This site-specific, mixed media drawing emerged from the artist’s sustained engagement with the town centre of Athlone. O’ Toole states: “Wherever we find ourselves, we are already in relation with the environments we inhabit, sensorially and affectively entangled with the spaces around us, whether we consciously register this or not”. Through her methodology, Drawing in-Space (DiSp), drawing becomes a way of attuning to these conditions and tracing how bodies and environments continually shape one another through lived encounter.

Mary Ruth Walsh’s Architecture of the Natural World traces her sustained engagement with human architecture and the architecture of the natural world. Working across drawing, sculpture, and installation, Walsh reimagines architecture through provisional and tactile means, allowing materials to carry the memory of contemporary cultural practices.

The sculptural drawing installation Laminar and Turbulent by Felicity Clear references flow dynamics in both atmospheric dynamics and in water. It is a direct response to the site of the gallery alongside the Shannon River, where this flow can be observed in river eddies and in the movement over the water over the weir. The drawing series Wind Rose: Athlone were informed by wind flow directions over time in January and March of 2026 in Athlone. The data used to make these drawings was taken from Athlone’s local amateur internet weather sites.

Michael Wann’s Tabulinum Purgamentorum (Binned Archive) brings together a selection of drawings purportedly salvaged from an abandoned municipal building, framed within a narrative constructed by the artist that blurs the boundaries between documentation and fiction. While questions of authorship remain deliberately unresolved, the works are positioned as fragments of a larger, incomplete system of observation or notation—one whose original purpose resists clear definition. Whether these images functioned as environmental studies, cartographic records, or something more speculative remains open to interpretation. Embedded within the artist’s fictional framework is the suggestion that the drawings may once have formed part of a state-commissioned effort to document a river in decline—a project that was ultimately abandoned or dismissed. Within this context, the works take on the character of a failed archive: a body of knowledge interrupted, discarded, and left to deteriorate.

In her large-scale charcoal drawing and mixed media installation, Lelia Henry explores the life that once existed on the islands of Lough Ree. Island life was tough, yet many remained on the islands farming and fishing until the 1970’s. By then, rural electrification and modernity had erased much of what had made island living distinct, and what was once a way of life disappeared. What remains is a layered and fading legacy of habitation, self-sufficiency, and a deep relationship to the land and the water that surrounded them. Traces of those lives still sit on the landscape of the islands, and it is these traces Lelia explores in this work.

Brian Fay’s drawings use different representational strategies to record, depict, and present models of permanence and temporality using pre-existing artefacts, objects, and artworks. In responding to a variety of historical works by artists including Anni Albers, Vermeer, Cimabue and Thomas Kirk, and examining objects; from the unintentional marks on a table left by other artists, the traces of woodworm on a tree trunk, to the iconoclastic political destruction of a 19th century statue of Horatio Nelson – Fay’s work concentrates on the individual material histories and the ideas of destroying and remaking meaning.

Information on the exhibition and accompanying upcoming events can be found at luangallery.ie and on Luan Gallery’s social channels @luangalleryathlone on Instagram and Luan Gallery on Facebook. Divergent Lines will continue until Sunday, 21st June. Admission to the gallery is free for groups and individuals. Tours for schools and groups can be arranged by contacting the gallery in advance. Luan Gallery is open to the public Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am – 5 pm and Sundays and Bank Holidays from 12 – 5 pm.