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arts · Saturday 8 August 2026 · Various 
Val McLoughlin: Quarters
At Ballina Arts Centre · Barrett Street, Ballina, Co. Mayo, F26 NW83
At Ballina Arts Centre · Barrett Street, Ballina, Co. Mayo, F26 NW83
Val McLoughlin is a Ballina artist and Quarters comes straight out of the town. The title refers to the four seasons she spent making studies along the banks of the River Moy, and six of the paintings in the show grew directly from those riverside sketches. As she describes it, “In the studio, the creative evolution of the paintings was an intuitive fusion of recollections, feelings, and physical and visual impressions”, so the finished works are not topographical records of the Moy so much as what stayed behind after looking at it for a year.
Other pieces in the exhibition reach further out, to places that matter to her personally in Cork, Ross and Galicia. One work, Ithaca, borrows from Homer’s Odyssey and takes up the same themes of wandering and coming home that run through the rest of the show. McLoughlin studied at the Crawford School of Art in Cork between 1971 and 1975 and returned to Mayo in 2011, where she set up the weekly life drawing sessions that still run at Ballina Arts Centre. The show hangs alongside Oisín Tozer’s installation In the Pale Light of a Shadow, and both are free to see.
The arts centre is on Barrett Street in the middle of Ballina, a short walk from the Moy bridge and the town’s main streets. Drivers come in on the N26 from Swinford and Foxford, the N58 from Castlebar, or the N59 from Crossmolina and Sligo. Irish Rail runs Dublin Heuston to Ballina trains via Manulla Junction and the station is roughly ten minutes on foot from Barrett Street. Bus Eireann links the town with Castlebar, Sligo, Galway and Dublin. Street parking around Barrett Street is pay-and-display, with bigger car parks a couple of minutes away. The riverside walks along the Moy that fed this exhibition are within five minutes of the door.
Heading to Ballina Arts Centre in Ballina? Mayo has plenty more to see. Read the Ballina area guide, find what else is on, and explore the towns and villages nearby.