The western edge of Ireland has long had a powerful pull on the artistic imagination — a place where geography, memory, and national identity converge. Atlantic Light brings together works by artists who have turned their attention to this enduring terrain, offering not only views of place but reflections on how the West has been seen, shaped, and symbolised over time.

The 19^th century landscapes of James Arthur O'Connor’s (1792-1841) offer some of the earliest artistic responses to the western seaboard, rendered with the dramatic sensibility of the sublime. His paintings present the West as wild, elemental, and timeless — qualities that would become foundational to later representations.

In the early 20th century, the spare, iconic views of Achill, Donegal and Connemara presented by Paul Henry (1877-1958) helped define a visual identity for the nascent Irish state. His stylised clouds, white cottages, and rugged mountains captured a purified vision of rural life — shaped by soft Atlantic light. Maurice MacGonigal (1900-1979), working in a more realist mode, brought social and political consciousness to the landscape, depicting not only scenery but the people and tensions it held.

Few artists wrestled more intensely with the symbolic and emotional charge of the West than Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957). For Yeats, the western landscape was never a passive backdrop — it was a space in which the dramas of memory, identity, and mortality played out. His early watercolours, drawn from childhood recollections of Sligo, later gave way to expressionistic oils in which form dissolves into feeling but the terrain is always unmistakeably Sligo.

By mid-century, artists were beginning to engage with the West in less representational, more formal and philosophical terms. Mainie Jellett’s (1897-1944) abstraction brought rhythm, spirituality and structure to landscape and place; while the visceral, materially rich paintings of  Barrie Cooke (1931-2014) responded to the organic vitality of bogs, weather systems, and riverbeds — attuned to natural cycles and ecological change.

Seán McSweeney (1935-2018) brought a deeply personal and intuitive approach to the western landscape in the later 20th and early 21st centuries. Based for many years in Ballyconnell, County Sligo, his paintings respond closely to the rhythms and atmospheres of the surrounding coastline, boglands, and waterways. His work captures the mutable, weathered quality of the western landscape — a place shaped by light, wind, and the resonance of water and land.

The artists in this exhibition present the West of Ireland as a subject that has continually shifted in meaning across time, artistic practice, and cultural context. Atlantic Light reflects on this evolving visual tradition, tracing the ways in which artists have responded to the western landscape as both a real and imagined place, offering new perspectives on how the land continues to inform questions of identity, history, and creative expression in Irish art.