Temporary Vacation

VISUAL is pleased to present Temporary Vacation by Mary Cullen Kelly. 

Cullen Kelly makes delicate, intimate paintings concerned with the textures and moods of hidden or overlooked corners; of restaurants, hotels, shops, houses. These spaces are captured in oil paint, reproduced from photographs taken in the course of everyday events. Cullen Kelly describes an interest in making the commonplace appear strange, these works causing her, and us, to look at the familiar anew.

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Mary Cullen Kelly works in printmaking, painting and sculpture. She studied Fine Art Print at the National College of Art & Design and Art Therapy in Crawford College Cork, and holds an MSc in Disability Studies from UCD. Recent studies include the RHA School’s Critical Correspondence course. 

She was a founding member of Blueprint Artist’s Network in Carlow, and has worked with Blackstack Print Studio in Kilkenny, the Pure Thinking community arts project and the We Go On writers group in VISUAL Carlow.

Recent exhibitions include Carousel, Dunamaise Arts Centre (2025), RHA Annual Exhibition (2026, 2025, 2022), Artforms at the Dunmore (2025) Solstice Light, Smashing Times (2025), Dunamaise Arts Centre Open (2023, 2024 (prize winner)), GOMA Open Waterford (2022).

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We Go On is a writing group led by poet Clifton Redmond that meets weekly at VISUAL. Redmond’s poem The Quiet Place has been commissioned in response to Temporary Vacation and can be read below. A longer prose piece by Redmond considering Cullen Kelly’s work is available here: https://visualcarlow.ie/art-ideas/temporary-vacation

The Quiet Place
by Clifton Redmond

No trapped face gazing outward
in this slanted, unpeopled frame

just a strange Fabriano hush – 

bereft of flesh, of breath, of name.

Yet these are far from hollow rooms, 
a museum of the dust-forgotten shelf – 

each bottle bears the sad weight

and contour of a hidden self.