Deviations by John Rainey at Galway Arts Centre

What to Expect

John Rainey works in cast porcelain, metal and marble, and Deviations pulls together sculpture from three bodies of work made between 2021 and 2026. The through line is classical statuary and what happens when you refuse to treat it as fixed. Rainey reconfigures its visual language to propose alternative sculptural histories, using slips, misalignments and reconstruction as method rather than error, which unsettles the usual assumptions about craft, precision and the body.

One series, Retrofits, joins plaster-moulded forms into composite mythological figures, letting the structures drift away from their sources and open into new possibilities of form, material and meaning. The effect across the show is of bodies that will not resolve into a single reading, which is where the exhibition’s argument about more fluid identities sits. Tom McLean curates. The exhibition opened during Galway International Arts Festival 2026 and stays up through the end of September, so it is one of the longer runs on the city’s visual arts calendar.

Good to Know

• Runs until Sunday 27 September 2026 at Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street Lower.
• Gallery hours: Monday to Saturday 10:00 to 17:00, Thursday late until 21:00, Sunday 12:00 to 17:00.
• Artist John Rainey, curated by Tom McLean.
• Work in cast porcelain, metal and marble drawn from three series made 2021 to 2026.
• Admission is not stated on the Galway Arts Centre listing; the centre’s Thursday Gallery Lates programme is free.
• Opened as part of Galway International Arts Festival 2026.

Getting There

Galway Arts Centre is at 47 Dominick Street Lower in the West End, across the Wolfe Tone Bridge from the Spanish Arch and roughly five minutes’ walk from Shop Street. Drivers reach the city on the M6 and N6 from Dublin, Athlone and Ballinasloe, or the M18 and N18 from Limerick, Gort and Ennis. On-street pay and display parking runs along Dominick Street and Sea Road and turns over quickly; larger car parks are a ten minute walk away at Eyre Square and the Cathedral. Ceannt Station, for trains and Bus Éireann coaches, is about fifteen minutes on foot.