Connect with us
Limerick City Gallery of Art has launched a new exhibition SORE SPOT by artists Helen and Eve O’Leary. Photographed with the two artists is LCGA acting Director Siobhan O'Reilly. Photograph: Liam Burke/Press 22 Limerick City Gallery of Art has launched a new exhibition SORE SPOT by artists Helen and Eve O’Leary. Photographed with the two artists is LCGA acting Director Siobhan O'Reilly. Photograph: Liam Burke/Press 22

Art

Helen and Eve O’Leary launch Sore Spot exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art

Published

4 months ago

on

Helen and Eve O’Leary launch Sore Spot exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art. Photographed with the two artists, Helen and Eve O’Leary, is LCGA acting Director Siobhan O’Reilly. Photograph: Liam Burke/Press 22

Limerick City Gallery of Art has launched a new Helen and Eve O’Leary exhibition Sore Spot, running until January 18, 2026

Limerick City Gallery of Art has launched a new exhibition SORE SPOT by artists Helen and Eve O’Leary. Our photograph shows artist Eve O'Leary with one of her works. Photograph: Liam Burke/Press 22
Eve O’Leary with one of her works. Photograph: Liam Burke/Press 22

Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) launches a new exhibition entitled Sore Spot, by artists Helen and Eva O’Leary.

This exhibition features works that, when combined, aim to find moments of clarity and connection between different media – paint and photography.

Together, through works considering fragmentation and cohesion, they offer a meditation on care, resistance, and the stubborn hope that emerges from making sense of a broken world.


advertisement
advertisement


advertisement
advertisement


advertisement
advertisement


advertisement
advertisement

Sore Spot notes the distance between both artists as mother and daughter — geographic and generational. A map of crossings, this combined work thinks about what the hands can make when words fail, and explores how materials might offer a kind of reconciliation — or at least a pause in the noise, to find logic in chaos.

Eva’s body of work in the exhibition, Splitting Image, includes photographs of American girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen reacting to their own image through a two-way mirror. Responding to a generation fluent in selfies, tags on social media, and the act of posing, the works highlight the dissonance between real and reflected identity.

Attending the event were artists Helen O’Leary and Diana Copperwhite. Photograph: Liam Burke/Press 22

Helen’s works respond to the deep emotional and physical Irish landscapes that form the basis for her practice, engaging with a ‘flipbook of faith, money, possibility, belief, absurdity, disappointment and the ethical collapse of so many systems that never worked for so many’. Representing a kind of ‘history of rupture and the hope of restoration’ and, in keeping with her resistance to fixed definition, her constructions blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture.

In Sore Spot, both artists come together to disassemble monoliths of language, patriarchy, capitalism, and beauty, (while also trying to find cracks large enough for empathy and humour), and, in doing so, rebuild from fracture — in ways personal, political, and formal.

Limerick City Gallery of Art has an exhibition to celebrate The Invisible Visable by artist Caoimhe Glennon from Taughmaconnell, Roscommon. Glennon was the LCGA Award winner 2025, Sculpture & Combined Media. Photograph: Liam Burke/Press 22
Related Topics:

Richard is a presenter, producer, songwriter and actor. He was named the Limerick Person of the Year (2011) and won an online award at the Metro Éireann Media and Multicultural Awards (2011) for promoting multi-culturalism online. Richard says that the ilovelimerick.com concept is very much a community driven project that aims to document life in Limerick. So, that in 20 years time people can look back and remember the events that were making the headlines.