Schedule a visit to Mayo's leading museum
THE National Museum of Ireland - Country Life's open spaces and outdoor areas are a perfect place to enjoy a day out with family members and friends.
Admission is free but booking is required. Book your free ticket online at www.museum.ie.
The museum opening hours are Tuesday to Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday to Monday from 1 to 5 p.m.
Our Irish Chair: Tradition Revisited
See the museum’s exhibition Our Irish Chair: Tradition Revisited, exploring the design and crafting tradition of an engaging Irish chair type - and the creativity it continues to inspire.
It features the National Museum of Ireland’s full collection of 16 Tuam/Sligo chairs. This is the first time this full collection of chairs has gone on display together.
The exhibition also includes a public art project from Tuam, a modern chair by renowned Irish artist Sasha Sykes, and a selection of striking, modern interpretations of the Tuam/Sligo chair, designed and crafted by students of the National Centre for Excellence in Furniture Design and Technology at GMIT Letterfrack.
1845: Memento Mori
See a new glass installation by Seattle-based Irish artist Paula Stokes, which is on display in the Landlord’s Library at the National Museum of Ireland - Country Life.
Consisting of 1,845 hand-blown glass potatoes, 1845: Memento Mori is a famine memorial which has taken the artist 15 years to complete.
The title of the project references the year the potato blight came to Ireland, marking the beginning of a period of mass starvation, disease, and emigration.
The exhibition will stay on display at the museum until May.
One Day: 40 Sunrises
See an exhibition of 40 paintings depicting sunrises from around the world, on display now in the Courtyard Gallery (next to the café).
One Day: 40 Sunrises is a project by Mayo-based artist Ian Wieczorek. It presents the experience of sunrise on a particular day in various locations throughout the world, as experienced live through webcams during lockdown in Ireland. The locations were chosen to reflect as broad a geographical spread as possible.
The paintings are based on real-time screenshots ‘grabbed’ from online streaming, harvested from the internet by Wieczorek over a 24-hour period on a randomly selected day - 15 July, 2020, tracking sunrise around the globe.
The number of paintings, 40, references the notion of quarantine, a word deriving from the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning ‘forty days’, the period required before ships could disembark in port at the time of a much earlier pandemic, the Black Death.