It's going to be a long, hot summer, with nude group photo sessions in Cork and Dublin, Turner Prize artists and our first ever public art 'theft fest' to raise the arts temperature around the country this summer, writes Con Power
 
Carlow town will explode with cultural verve for Éigse Carlow Arts Festival (7–15 June). ƒigse is acclaimed for artistic collaboration, innovative programming and the celebration of Carlow Town as a festival specific platform. Visiting curator Rob Lowe brings together a wealth of UK, American and Irish talent, promising one of the strongest visual arts exhibitions in years. 'We Don't Need Nobody Else' captures myth, fiction, reverie and nightmare. Chinese artist Hock Aun Teh's large scale abstract expressionist paintings marry the spontaneity and expressive freedom of T'ang calligraphic masters to the colours and hi-tech materials of modern Western art. At IT Carlow, Kilkenny Road, 'Singing the Real' is an exhibition of contemporary Irish art organised by the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. The exhibition forms part of the RHA National Touring Programme 2008. Ten artists ranging in age from mid-20s to mid-70s exhibit: Barrie Cooke, Dorothy Cross, Grace Weir, Susan Tiger, Cecily Brennan, Nick Miller, Neva Elliott, John Gerrard, Gary Phelan and Martin Healy. 'Singing the Real' explores the combination of scientific method and art practice, a strong strain in Irish art today.
 
The 2008 Cork Midsummer Festival promises a feast for the senses over 21 days and nights (15 June – 5 July). Commissioned by The Cork Midsummer Festival and Dublin Docklands, artist Spencer Tunick offers the general public the 'chance of a lifetime' to become part of his first back-to-back city art project in Cork on 17 June, before moving to the Dublin Docklands on 21 June. Groups of nude participants will be photographed outdoors by Tunick as part of his controversial series of installations that have previously taken place in cities around the world including New York, Amsterdam and Mexico City. 'An unforgettable collective civic moment' is likewise promised in Dublin Docklands - the project is part of a series of invitations to artists such as Antony Gormley, Willie Doherty and Idris Kahn to create new works for the area.
 
The Dunlavin Festival of Arts (20–22 June) in West Wicklow is celebrating its 26th festival year with a host of art exhibitions and events. Pauline Flynn, Bob Lynn, Joe Dunne, June Brilly, Eamon Colman, Stephen Lawlor, Charles Harper, Trevor Geoghegan and Barry Linnane will be among the participating artists in an exhibition at the Market House Gallery. The Schoolhouse Gallery will stage the work of emerging artists and recent graduates from NCAD. Another feature will be an exhibition of new works by Seamus O'Byrne at the Blue Door Gallery.
 
The Temple Bar Cultural Trust Summer Programme promises an eclectic range of cultural events in Dublin city centre, throughout July and August. The Dublin Circus Festival (10–13 July) will be a four day outdoor extravaganza of spectacle and street theatre. Jameson Movies on the Square will run from 5 July – 30 August, while the weekly Designer Mart at Cow's Lane will present a fusion of arts disciplines, from photography to fine art and innovative furniture design made by Irish and Ireland-based artists and designers.
 
In Bantry, the West Cork Literary Festival's 10th anniversary is being marked by seven days of readings, workshops, seminars, exhibitions and music (6–12 July). 'Ten Years On,' an exhibition by photographer John Minihan in Bantry Library, will feature photographs of authors who have attended the festival over the past decade. Minihan's friendship with Samuel Beckett produced some of the most remarkable photographs ever taken of the writer and he has won wide acclaim as an outstanding master of photographing writers and artists. Sculptor Rowan Gillespie will give an illustrated talk entitled 'Written in Bronze' on 9 July in the Maritime Hotel, Bantry. In his sculpture Famine, Rowan had to rely almost entirely upon the written word for his intensive research. He will explain how he gradually started to incorporate excerpts from diaries, poems and literature as integral elements in his bronze depictions of literary giants such as W.B. Yeats and James Joyce. This approach has influenced much of the artist's work, including his most recent public sculpture Proclamation.
 
The Earagail Arts Festival (10–20 July) celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This festival attracts some 35,000 people to Donegal each year and is the only festival of its kind in Ireland to extend to an entire county. The visual art programme includes a Victor Vasarely Retrospective at the Glebe Gallery and the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny.
 
Scottish artist and Turner-prize nominee Anya Gallaccio will create a specially commissioned, site-specific installation for Kinsale Arts Week (12–20 July). This will be the first time that this artist's work will be seen in the Republic. For this commission, Gallaccio has developed a piece inspired by the location of Charles Fort at the edge of the Atlantic. She will insert stained materials such as perspex and glass into the old windows of the fort, illuminating this ancient building and the landscape it inhabits. In 2003 Gallaccio was nominated for the Turner prize for solo presentations of her work at Tate Britain and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Her past works include Red on Green in which she placed ten thousand rose heads on a bed of stalks which gradually withered as the exhibition went on. Will St. Leger brings his 'rogue' exhibition 'Art Raid' to Kinsale, a visual arts piece with the extraordinary claim of being the first ever art exhibition at which you are actively encouraged to steal the works on show! The latter exhibition will be housed in the Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery.
 
Over its 30 year history the Galway Arts Festival (14–27 July) has become a showcase for Irish and international arts. The festival collaborates with artists and companies around the world to initiate, commission and produce new work. Engaging with the city in unusual and imaginative ways Galway Arts Festival 2008 will feature indoor and site-specific installations, illustrating the finest examples of contemporary visual arts, including the photography of Walker Evans, the giant sculptural installations of Canadian Max Streicher, one of the world's pioneer video and new media artists Bill Viola, and new mixed-media photography and painting from Canada's Joni Mitchell among others. The programme of visual arts has a very strong Irish focus this year with solo exhibitions and new work from Alice Maher, Anne Mulrooney, Philip Lindey, Ruth McHugh and Pauline Bewick. As part of its commitment to the development of Irish artists, the Festival will this year inaugurate what will become an annual showcase for the work of emerging Galway artists. Kevin Mooney, a 2007 fine art graduate from Crawford College of Art and Design and current guest at Galway's ARTSPACE Studios, has been invited to exhibit his work during the Festival. ARTSPACE was formed as an artist's collective by a group of Galway-based artists in 1986 and is the city's oldest and most established artists' collective. As part of the Festival the Ashford Gallery presents an eclectic exhibition of 15 painters on tour to Galway & Mayo Institute of Technology. Included are works by Anne Hendrick, Ann Quinn, Cara Thorpe, Claire Kerr, Colin Martin and Eoin O'Connor. The Bold Gallery is hosting 'Yeats on a Train' from illustrator Annie West. Lynda Cookson will mount two exhibitions at the Radisson SAS in Galway this summer – 'Dancing In Sunshine' during the Festival and 'Taking Equestrian Art into the 21st Century' during Race Week. Philip Lindey's exhibition at Norman Villa Gallery is highly appropriate as the artist's images have featured in recent festival posters. English-born and brought up in Sligo, Lindey has for some time been based in Galway.
 
The Youghal Visual Arts Festival (19-27 July) includes a central gallery with a themed exhibition, a mile long 'walking gallery', artist-led workshops open to the public and community and schools exhibitions. The main themed exhibition is entitled 'The Lost Summer'. The 'walking gallery' sees artists from far and wide use shop and business windows on the mile-long Main Street of Youghal to create an inspiring gallery experience for everyone. Also watch out for the Youghal Carpets Photographic Exhibition where artists Marcella Reardon and Derek Speirs record the last weeks before the final closure of the celebrated factory.
 
Boyle Arts Festival (25 July – 1 August) has established itself as one of the must visit events in the summer arts calendar. Its visual arts exhibition in the magnificently restored old military barracks now called King House has received several awards since its launch in 1990. This year works from over 100 artists will be on show including Basil Blackshaw, John Shinnors, Sean McSweeney, William Crozier, Liam Belton, Barrie Cooke, Felim Egan and Thomas Ryan. Art@work is a residential programme co-ordinated by Roscommon County Arts Office where local, national and international artists spend a period of weeks in a Co Roscommon company, making art through either using the materials of the company in question or inspired by the environment, staff and working practices therein. A mixed media exhibition at Roscommon Arts Centre (12 July – 23 August) marks the culmination of the 2008 residencies.
 
Sligo Festival of the Arts runs in conjunction with the WB Yeats International Summer School. (26 July 26 – 8 August). RDS Taylor Art Award winner Harriet Tahany will exhibit drawings, paintings, and collage at Teach B‡n art gallery in Drumcliffe.
 
Art in the Open 2008 (1-4 August) is a unique festival of painting 'en plain air' in the bustling harbour town of Wexford. The event culminates in an adjudicated exhibition with awards of over E3000. While artists have drawn from life since antiquity, the concept of completing a finished landscape 'al fresco' dates only from the Impressionists. Many artists find the concentration demanded to complete a landscape on location imbues the work with an immediacy that is difficult to recreate in the studio. This is a rare opportunity to see artists working publicly as all submissions to the exhibition must be completed during the four-day festival.
 
The Kilkenny Arts Festival (8-17 August) is again programmed by a panel of specialist curators who are specialists in their field. Returning curators for 2008 are Hugh Mulholland for visual art; Colm Tóibin for the literature events; Gerry Godley for jazz, world and traditional music; and Emer McGowan, for the children/young people's programme. New to the Festival, Tom Cree will curate the theatre and dance programme. Kilkenny is a centre for year round cultural activity, due in no small part to the efforts of Kilkenny County Council's Arts Office and its Arts Officer Mary Butler. The city has two local authority Arts Office managed exhibition spaces for the visual arts - the Watergate Theatre Gallery Upstairs and No. 72 John Street. The latter also serves as a visual arts residency studio. The Arts Office has also been a key player in the establishment of ArtLinks, a professional development service for artists of all disciplines, based on a partnership between the arts departments of local authorities in Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford, Wicklow, Wexford, the Arts Council of Ireland and artists from these counties. For the Festival this year, the Arts Office has scheduled Neil Butler's 'New World Symphonies: Journeys End' at No. 72 John Street (4 August - 12 September) comprising ten large painted perspex panels. Neil studied fine art at the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork and the Byam Shaw at Central Saint Martins London. Through his painting Neil tries to make sense of visual culture by deconstructing the visual narratives we are surrounded by and reinvesting them with new meaning and significance. He takes images out of their original context and through methods of 'cut and paste' and reframing he strips the image of its original 'meaning' and invests it with a new one within the context of a painted object, through isolation, forced juxtaposition and repetition. Highlights of the 2008 Kilkenny visual arts events include an exhibition at The Blackbird Gallery featuring work from Michael Gemmel, Neal Greig, Cormac Healy, Odette Farrell and Martina O'Brien alongside international and local artists. 'Muses, mentors and heroes: Image of Longing' is at the National Craft Gallery (9 August - 5 October). Ceramicist Brigit Beemster will show new work at Red Aesthetic (7 August - 4 September). The Butler Gallery's permanent collection is always worth a visit. This year paintings by Nevan Lahart and Paul Doran have been added to the collection, which also includes newly restored works on paper by May Guinness and George Russell, work carried out through funds received from The Heritage Council. During the Festival, the Butler Gallery will show work by Atsushi Kaga (9 August - 5 October). Kaga makes drawings, paintings and animations that include self-portraits of his alter ego, 'Bunny', his panda father and kangaroo mother, and a host of reappearing symbolic characters. Behind the playful and surreal fa�ade of Kaga's misleadingly simple and faux crude works, there lurks darker issues of cultural politics and personal identity. Also at the Butler, 'Little War' is a new sculpture by Brian Hand, on view nightly in Castle Park (14-17 August). This is a large-scale visual experience. An authentic Victorian carousel becomes a purple, white and green time machine that enters into a dialogue with the ghost world of militant politics by women in these islands before World War One and the fictional life of Mary Poppins. It is a circular work that blends the past and present while spinning on horseback in mid air towards the future. Heritage Week 2008 will run from 24 August – 1 September with a packed programme of activities planned around the country.