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The self-guided trail presents an alternative cultural history of Limerick city through intersecting narratives of contemporary art, architecture and urban development.



The selection of 21 sites and spaces — commercial premises, museums, ex-industrial units, and public spaces — corresponds to notable projects of contemporary art that have taken place over the past 30+ years. A panel can be found at each location providing an artistic summary of the project and a QR code that links to further information. Free printed guides that map this trail are available from various cultural venues and hospitality organisations across Limerick city. A digital version can also be accessed here.



This project is funded by the Arts Council’s Engaging with Architecture Scheme, and Creative Ireland and Limerick City and County Council through Creative Ireland Made in Limerick 2024. 

Self-Guided Trail

Handball Alley, King’s Island

King John’s Castle

River Shannon

St. Mary’s Cathedral

Potato Market

Abbey River

The Hunt Museum

Sarsfield House

Arthur’s Quay Park

Milk Market

Spacecraft Studios

Colbert Railway Station

People’s Park

The People's Museum of Limerick, Coach House

Belltable

Sarsfield Credit Union

Glentworth Street

The Sailor’s Home

Barrington’s Pier 

Cleeve’s Condensed Milk Factory

St. Munchin’s Church

31 Nicholas Street

Foundation Building, UL Concert Hall

Thomond Primary School

Millstream Building

Glucksman Library 

No.1 Pery Square Hotel & Spa

The Commercial

Gardens International

The Grove

Fireplace

A curatorial commission with Michele Horrigan as part of EVA’s initiative Never Look Back.

GET ART sees elements of the EVA archive infiltrate and disrupt the format of the popular board game Monopoly. GET ART recalls the 2016 launch of a version of the game dedicated to Limerick City, where players were given the opportunity to roll dice to buy and trade local city properties and build houses and hotels, aiming to drive their opponents into bankruptcy. In making a comment about the reduction of the city’s image to financial circulation and speculative investment rather than as a cultural entity and a place of lived life, archival research sees decades of EVA artworks made in the urban fabric of Limerick re-imagined to replace property and financial transaction. Exhibition memories are recalled as a journey and interaction with the city.

GET ART was launched during the 40th EVA International, coinciding with an in conversation event between Michele Horrigan and Architect Peter Carroll at The Grove. An archive copy of the board game is located at the EVA Office and Archive. 

Acknowledgements

Never Look Back is supported through the Arts Council’s Engaging with Architecture Scheme and Limerick City and County Council.

Featuring presentations by artists: Xu Bing, Paolo Canevari, Mark Clare, Minerva Cuevas, Fausto Delle Chiaie, Luc Deleu, Joyce Duffy, Jakob Gautel & Jason Karaindos, Liam Gillick, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cao Guo-Qiang, Nancy Hwang, Nicholas Keogh & Paddy Bloomer, Patrick Killoran, Jason Middlebrook, Eduardo Navarro, Áine Phillips, Deirdre A. Power & Jacki Hehir, Jochen Schmith, Santiago Sierra, Superflex, Charlene Teters, Humberto Velez, and Eimear Walshe.

Photographers: Eamonn O’Mahony, Dermot Lynch, Deirdre Power, Jed Niezgoda, Miriam O’Connor, Oliver Smith and others. 

3D Printing: Studio Luden

Design: Daly & Lyon

GET ART

Like many cities and towns in Ireland, Limerick has numerous bars and pubs, which have formed the traditional backbone of social life. As sites of social congregation and informality, they have served as places of particular interest for contemporary artists who are interested in these themes. 

Listed here are a number of bars and pubs that have been host to EVA projects over the years. Many have changed hands. The artworks no longer remain. But they chart the ways in which contemporary artists have sought to penetrate the social fabric of the city, beyond the traditional presentation formats of the gallery or museum. 

Bars

Slattery’s Bar

Wolfe Tone Bar

South’s Pub

White House Bar

102 O’Connell Street

Nancy Blake’s

Mother Macs 

The Square Bar

The Holy Ground

The Launch

Portley’s Bar

Performance has been a key aspect of contemporary visual art in recent decades, with artists drawing on the broader traditions of dance, music, and theatre in ways integral to their own practices. 

Many artists chose to work in performance for political reasons – precisely because it makes no claims to permanence and is resistant to the commodification of more traditional art forms. For the same reasons, performance artworks don’t translate easily into history, existing after the event as photo documentation or memories or even rumours. 

Listed here are a selection of venues and sites, with corresponding performance artworks that have taken place at these locations over a span of 40 years. 

Performances

Limerick City Gallery of Art

Department of Social Protection

The Limerick Theatre and Performance Hub 

Thomas Street

Bedford Row

Cruises Street

O’Connell Street

The Granary

St. John’s Church

Site-responsive artworks can take many forms – sculpture, installation, performance, and more – but all share the characteristic of uniquely engaging with the location and environment of the work’s presentation. 

There have been numerous site-responsive artworks in EVA’s history, but listed here are some of the most memorable. The locations include derelict buildings, busy pubs, institutional venues, and public spaces. The corresponding artworks were all temporary and are no longer on view, but serve as examples of how the city has been a catalyst for artistic inspiration and critique. 

Site-Responsive Artworks

Myles Street

Catherine Street

Merchant’s Quay 

John’s Square

The centre of Limerick city stands out as a model of order and regularity. With singular force, its distinctive grid orientates the city in the landscape. The Shannon meanders wildly but the city appears to be aligned with it. The surrounding hills rise some distance away to the north but the city appears to be arching towards them. Limerick is a destination but it is also a compass: it draws you in and it sets you out.

The Georgian grid of Limerick is approximately half a mile long and wide. Like in all Georgian cities, the ground underneath is nowhere natural. It was scraped, shifted and rammed until the streets formed an artificial well-serviced lattice raised over the original landscape. This lattice is Limerick’s principal monument, a continuous monument.

Edmond Sexton Pery, MP for Limerick, owned most of the land for the extension that is known today still as New Town Pery. He further owned a residence on Sackville Street, Dublin (the present O’Connell Street), the redevelopment of which in the mid 18th century must have had a profound influence on plans for Limerick. The setting out of the grid followed from the placing of George’s Street. Running parallel with the Shannon, it hooks at one end with the new Customs House (now The Hunt Museum) a neo-Palladian building carefully drawn by Davis Ducart in his view of the city. In the east-west direction, the grid divides in three blocks of 300 feet each, with one or two smaller blocks filling the remaining space to the boundaries. Whenever possible blocks are square, their width being matched in the north-south direction. By and large this plan corresponds to what exists today.

Only one aspect of the Georgian grid remains consistently regular: the width of the streets. At 60 feet wide, they are considerably larger than the streets of the preceding Englishtown and Irishtown, from the medieval period. This generous provision was repeatedly mentioned in lease documents. It was clearly deliberate and a matter of some pride. Christopher Colles, Davis Ducart and Edmund Sexton Pery could have been inspired by many a Georgian development, not least Sackville Street in Dublin with its central mall, then justly regarded as one of the most attractive streets in Europe. Such streets were places of promenade, made for fresh air, gossip and display, to be enjoyed by foot at certain times of the day, and in the carriages that became increasingly numerous in the second half of the 18th century. The great width of the streets and the doubling of the area of Limerick fully justify Colles’ inscription on his drawing describing Pery’s plan ‘extensive and elegant’.

The venues listed here have been selected to draw out these unique characteristics of the city, while the corresponding artworks at these venues (all of which were temporary installations and are no longer on view) represent memory traces of architectural and site-specific reflection. 

– Peter Carroll (with acknowledgement to Irénée Scalbert and  Dr. John Logan) (2022)



*



Peter Carroll is an architect who established A2 Architects Ltd with Caomhán Murphy in 2005, becoming Sole Director in 2012. The practice is a registered RIAI practice with Conservation Grade 3 accreditation. Since graduating with 1st Class Honours from University College Dublin in 1995, Carroll has gained extensive Irish and international experience on a broad range of building types and sizes. Prior to establishing A2 Architects, Carroll spent seven years as an Associate with O’Donnell & Tuomey in Dublin, followed by a further three years as an Associate with the Pritzker Prize recipient Rafael Moneo in Madrid, Spain. Since 2008, he has worked as Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture University of Limerick (SAUL).

Continuous Monument

Former Tourist Office, Arthur’s Quay Park

Cruises House Hotel

Augustinian Lane

Thomas Street Centre

O’Mahony’s Bookshop

Former Post Office

Clancy Electrical

103–104 O’Connell Street

Rooney Auctioneers

Chamber of Commerce

Former County Council Offices

Brooks Properties

Riverpoint

The Crescent, O’Connell Street

6 Pery Square

8 Pery Square

A curatorial commission with RGKSKSRG and artist-designer Farouk Alao as part of EVA’s initiative Never Look Back.

RGKSKSRG worked with artist-designer Farouk Alao to create a two-part work titled, It’s a poor city for art where you can’t start a quarrel. Conceived of as an extended tablecloth, that is both an archival object in itself and a catalyst for gathering. It features a printed assemblage of snapshots pulled from the EVA digital archive. Selected photographs, video stills, texts and sketches have been collaged by Farouk Alao into a mash-up of imagery along a 10-metre length of fabric. Seating up to 45 people for a supper or a picnic, the tablecloth acts as a prompt for conversation, quarrelling and dreaming. A luncheon was hosted around the tablecloth with Ireland Invites and Culture Ireland at the Shannon Rowing Club, to coincide with the edition of the 40th EVA International. 

Acknowledgements 

Never Look Back is supported through the Arts Council’s Engaging with Architecture Scheme and Limerick City and County Council. The  luncheon It’s a poor city for art where you can’t start a quarrel was kindly supported by the Arts Council, Ireland Invites and Culture Ireland.

Curator: RGKSKSRG

Designer: Farouk Alao

Photography: Pati Guimarães

Archival Source Material: EVA International

Seamstress: Abbi Gilbourne

Printing: House of U

Food, Drinks & Tablescape: Michelle Darmody