THE TRANSATLANTIC DISPORTAL
With the Irish Gap Year Association
Part of Culture Night Sligo 2026
Culture Night opening: Friday 18 September, 18:30–20:00
18 September - 1 October 2026
Location: Scenius Gallery, Adelaide St., Sligo
Gallery 1 (Adelaide St.): Street-facing installation, viewable 24 hours
Gallery 2: Open Monday–Friday, 10:00–17:00
Admission: Free
About the Exhibition
For Culture Night Sligo 2026, held this year under the theme "One Night for All," Scenius Gallery presents The Transatlantic Disportal alongside a companion piece, Blow-in.
The Transatlantic Disportal
Made collectively by more than twenty students from the Irish Gap Year Association, the exhibition transforms the gallery's two connected spaces into a live, walk-through environment built from found and repurposed materials. Rather than a set of finished, separate artworks, sculpture, sound, light and space combine into a single evolving field, and visitors are invited to move through it freely, encountering shifting relationships between body, object and atmosphere as they go.
Developed collaboratively with the students in the weeks leading up to Culture Night, the work explores belonging, transition and cultural exchange: how bodies move through unfamiliar spaces, and how a shared environment can create moments of connection, discovery and participation between people building something together for the first time.
Blow-in
Blow-in, by Ian Jermyn, is a companion piece to The Transatlantic Disportal, sharing the same found-materials sensibility but working in a different register: a personal account of otherness, of belonging neither here nor there, and of finding oneself a stranger on every shore. It is part of an ongoing series staged at piers, slipways and other man-made structures along the northwest coast, and this showing is the first of further installations and presentations to come.
The installation is on view in Gallery 2, alongside a 4.5-minute film of the piece at work on the pier, projected across the Culture Night evening. Wave energy is captured and pushed through a hand-built pneumatic system into three melodicas. Each surge is a communication with the piece. The sound is only part of it: the gaps between soundings, the hesitation and anticipation, the sustain, the volume, and the unevenness in how the three melodicas vocalise all matter as much. Sometimes all three sound together; other times, only one or two answer.
The work grew from the artist's own experience of living in Ireland as an foreigner, always a "blow-in," and the pier's double life as a place of arrival and departure, and as a site where non-native species, like the artist, grapple for purchase on ground already shaped by others.
Both works open as part of Culture Night on Friday 18 September and remain on view at the gallery until Thursday 1 October.
Free admission, open to all.
Credits
Curated by Ken Gunning & Ian Jermyn
With Scenius Gallery