So Nice Day,
Carrowbeg Artist Group
Gerry O’Malley, Máire Maguire, Anna Rose Lowry, Una Kearns, Trish Kelly, Ellen Cafferkey, Sarah Kelly
27 Sept – 22 Nov 2025
The Courthouse Gallery & Studios (CHG&S), Ennistymon
In Context
So Nice Day gathers work made by “eight artists with the lived experience of intellectual disability”. The Carrowbeg Artist Group are Anna Rose Lowry, Ellen Cafferky, Trish Kelly, Gerry O’Malley, Sarah Kelly, Una Kearns, Elsa Jenny Rockford, Máire Maguire in Westport, Co Mayo. Through close attention to place, materials, and one another, the exhibition grew from their 2023 work with artist and forest-bathing guide Christine Prescott, alongside artist-facilitators Breda Burns and Caroline Masterson. Situated in eco-art and nature-based methods, the practice unfolded through unhurried, site-responsive making with natural, found materials.
Across the Red Couch gallery, you’ll encounter wood-based assemblages, leaf-impression prints, delicate photographic works on Japanese kozo paper and a short film that situates the making. Here, making is not a straight line from idea to object; it is cyclical and relational, led by haptic cues, cadence, and seasonality. Through recurring actions and shared prompts, the artists open up themes of embodied orientation, ecological attention, and impermanence, proposing a way of meeting the more-than-human world that is intimate, grounded, and expansive.
The Carrowbeg Artists have built their practice over more than a decade within a supported studio at Custom House Studios + Gallery in Westport. That continuity, artists working alongside facilitators and social care assistants, matters. It makes the structures of care visible, upholds authorship, and shows how access and artistic ambition can grow together. In this sense, So Nice Day is both an exhibition and a proposition: that sustainability is as much relational as it is material, formed between people, places, and practices of care.
At The Courthouse Gallery & Studios, we recognise this exhibition as part of a wider conversation about inclusion and environmental responsibility in contemporary art. So Nice Day does not place difference at the margins; it centres diverse sensory knowledge as vital to how we understand landscape and community. We invite you to take your time here: move slowly, look closely, and let the works recalibrate your attention. In doing so, you may find that the simplest encounters, leaf to paper, hand to wood, step to ground, can change how we meet the world.
Éanna Byrt - Director / Curator CHG&S
The Journey
“So many of us rush past the natural world, its endless wondrous forms lost to us in the
blur of our own preoccupations. This exhibition, and indeed its genesis, is a gentle
reminder to us all. Stop awhile. See, listen, feel. Reconnect.”
— Ciara Moynihan, The Mayo News.
So Nice Day is an exhibition of work resulting from a collaboration between the Carrowbeg Artist Group and Christine Prescott, Artist and Forest Bathing Guide. The Carrowbeg Artists are a group of eight artists with lived experience of intellectual disability. Anna Rose Lowry, Gerry O’Malley, Máire Maguire, Una Kearns, Sarah Kelly, Trish Kelly, Ellen Cafferkey and Elsa Jenny Rochford have been creating artwork together for over a decade under the guidance of Artist facilitators Breda Burns and Caroline Masterson. The project was funded through Upstart, an initiative of the Mayo County Council.
The original project took place in the Autumn of 2023 through the merging of Eco-Art and Forest Bathing concepts. The work was highly sensory and process-orientated. Through a series of nature immersion workshops designed to stimulate the senses, the Artists were introduced to the possibilities of using materials found in nature. This practice fostered everyone’s sense of connection to nature and place, within the local landscape and with each other. We explored notions of proprioception, transience and sensory awareness together as Artists, social care assistants and facilitators. Each week built on from the last, informed by what we had learned together.
So Nice Day is a whimsical installation of natural objects comprised of: sculptural assemblages of wood and natural pigment; monoprints of native leaves on blackberry-stained paper; photographs on Awagami Kozo paper; and a video work showing the evolution of the project which contextualises the exhibition within its larger framework.
Christine Prescott - Artist and Forest Bathing Guide
Behind The Work
The Team
Christine Prescott — Artist & Forest Bathing Guide
Australian-born, Ireland-based artist working with fragile organic materials and meditative processes to foreground sensory connection, time and place. BA Visual Art (University of Southern Queensland); PGDip Fine Art (Victorian College of the Arts). A Custom House Studios + Gallery resident, recent selections include Here, the Considered Line (Interface Inagh), Meant to Fade (Automat, Saarbrücken) and Notions (People’s Museum of Limerick). Recipient of an Arts Council Agility Award; collaborator with the Carrowbeg Artists on the Upstart-funded project that culminates in So Nice Day.
Breda Burns — Artist Facilitator
Multidisciplinary artist from Westport with solo shows at Luan Gallery, The Model, Hamilton Gallery and others, and a record of national/international exhibitions and residencies (Ballinglen, Cill Rialaig, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, etc.). A socially engaged practitioner, co-initiator of the Luisne Arts Project, and long-time collaborator with Western Care Association. Works weekly as an artist facilitator with the Carrowbeg Artists and contributed to the Upstart-funded So Nice Day project.
Caroline Masterson — Artist Facilitator & Curatorial Adviser
Concept-led visual artist working across sculpture and two-dimensional media; Honours degree (Sligo IT), Higher Diploma in Education (Crawford), welding certificate (Fás Sligo), sculpture certificate (Leitrim Sculpture Centre). Exhibitions include RHA Annual and EVA (2000); recent projects at Custom House Studios + Gallery. Curatorial Adviser and gallery/printroom technician at Custom House. Facilitates weekly workshops with the Carrowbeg Artists and co-produced the immersive eco-art process realised in So Nice Day.
The Artists
Anna Rose Lowry
Celebrates mark-making and colour, often returning to works to build texture and form.
Gerry O’Malley
Works with a deliberate, precise visual language; a clear sense of fulfilment is evident in the finished pieces.
Máire Maguire
A versatile artist with a distinctive drawing style, a considered palette and recurring motifs.
Una Kearns
A representational artist working with landscape and figure; balances painterly handling with precision.
Sarah Kelly
Energetic painter layering and reworking pieces over many weeks to build momentum and depth.
Trish Kelly
Embraces spontaneity and material-led abstraction, with an instinctive sense of colour and composition.
Ellen Cafferkey
Shows sensitivity to varied materials; works that celebrate colour and movement.
Elsa Jenny Rochford
Uses drawing as self-expression, often with a high-contrast, largely monochrome palette.