The Olivier Cornet Gallery has been involved in Bloomsday celebrations since its owner moved to the Dublin 1 area in 2014. Last year, they collaborated with Dublin Sketchers to create a visual response to Ulysses through sketching on location in the Parnell Square Cultural Quarter, resulting in an exhibition. The collaboration continues this year, but this time the Olivier Cornet Gallery has invited five professional visual artists to participate in the Joyce trail sketch crawl alongside Dublin Sketchers. The artists have been drawn from various contemporary practices including abstract and figurative art in various media such as 3D, print-making and painting. The five artists have charted Dublin, mapping the fabric of the city, to seek traces of Joyce’s multi-layered novel.

These artists are Nickie Hayden, whose current practice explores the everyday difficulties and historic traumas experienced by people affected by dyslexia, master printmaker Robert Russell, poet Paula Meehan, Olivier Cornet Gallery artist Eoin Mac Lochlainn, who has created a series of night paintings, and internationally known street artist Maser, who has created work from multiple line drawings and collages based on his experience with Dublin Sketchers.

In addition to the exhibition launch on 10 June, a series of events will take place in the gallery throughout the week of the Bloomsday Festival, where participants will be invited to respond to their visual experience of the show through other art forms such as poetry and music.

The exhibition runs from 10 - 30 June.

While attempting to secure the publication of his short story collection Dubliners in 1906, Joyce wrote a series of letters to London publisher Grant Richards in which he justified the content and structure of his work. In one of these letters, he explained to Richards that the stories presented Dublin life as he saw it under four of its different aspects - childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life - and that the stories were arranged in this order. This exhibition of paintings by Frank Kiely is inspired by the childhood and adolescence sections of the collection, reimagining scenes from the stories in a contemporary setting and probing key themes that remain relevant today; individualism and community, repression and obligation, love and grief.

The ecstatic joy of driving in a sports car in plain view of all, feeling on top of the world. A first crush on the girl next door and its consequences. Broken hearts from meeting invisible boundaries of conventional society. And the darker themes of nefarious intent and facing ones dark curiosity. They are all stories about growing up, and every picture is a vignette of a young person faced with the realities of life. As a whole, Kiely’s bright and inventive paintings evoke the hidden meaning and claustrophobia of Joyce’s classic stories.

Join us for the launch of the exhibition, enjoy a glass of wine and hear the artist discuss his creative process, the intricacies of his work and Joyce’s relevance in contemporary Irish society. Terence Killeen, James Joyce Centre Research Scholar, will lead the conversation.

Frank Kiely studied at the Royal College of Art graduating in 2002. His exhibition ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ ran at the James Joyce Centre in 2017.

The exhibition runs at the James Joyce Centre during opening hours until 21 December 2018