Mill Cove Gallery, Kenmare, County Kerry
Opening: St Brigid’s Day, 1 February 2026

Mill Cove Gallery is proud to announce a major forthcoming exhibition, The Architecture of Containment — a powerful new body of work by Northern Irish painter Janet Graham, opening on St Brigid’s Day, 1 February 2026, in Kenmare, County Kerry.
This landmark exhibition, curated by John Goode, explores Ireland’s history of institutional control and the silencing of women through the Magdalene Laundries and Mother & Baby Homes. Through her deeply expressive and layered paintings, Graham dismantles the physical and emotional architectures of those institutions — transforming spaces of confinement into acts of remembrance and renewal.
Opening on St Brigid’s Day, the national celebration of women’s creativity, resilience, and compassion, the exhibition offers a profound meditation on healing and transformation. As Ireland continues to reckon with its institutional past, Graham’s work acts as both elegy and exorcism — honouring the endurance of women whose stories have too often been hidden or erased.

A Multidisciplinary Collaboration
The exhibition will feature 15–20 major paintings, presented in three movements:

1. Containment — confinement, obedience, silence

2. Witness — exposure, revelation, reckoning

3. Emergence — resilience, reclamation, light

Complementing the visual works, the gallery will present a special literary collaboration through the long-running Poets Meet Painters initiative. Writers and poets from Ireland and abroad are being invited to create new poems in response to Graham’s paintings. These texts will be exhibited alongside the artworks and published in a limited-edition illustrated catalogue to accompany the show.
About the Artist
Janet Graham, born in Northern Ireland, is widely regarded as one of the most significant painters of her generation from the North-West. Her practice, rooted in both landscape and abstraction, has evolved into a profound engagement with memory, trauma, and transformation.
A graduate of Belfast College of Art, Graham’s mentors included Lawson Burch and Stephen McKenna PPRHA. Her acclaimed 2000 exhibition Disappearing Landscape was opened by Professor Anne Crookshank and featured in a BBC documentary. Her work is held in public and private collections in Ireland, Europe, the USA, and Japan, and she has collaborated with the Irish Embassy in The Hague on projects exploring Irish identity and diaspora.
A Cultural Reflection for Our Time
Curator John Goode describes the exhibition as “a dialogue between art and witness — a space where visual and literary expression come together to restore voice, memory, and dignity.”

“The Architecture of Containment,” he adds, “is not only about confronting Ireland’s past but also about reimagining how we honour resilience and creativity — themes perfectly aligned with St Brigid’s Day.”