artist's residency

The Cill Rialaig Artists’ Retreat, which opened in 1993, was founded by Noelle Campbell Sharp as a place where artists, writers and musicians can spend a period of dedicated time developing their own work. The retreat is situated on Bolas Head, a remote peninsula overlooking Ballinskelligs Bay on the rugged Atlantic coastline of County Kerry, Eire. Seven derelict cottages, each with studio space, have been renovated on the site of a deserted pre-famine village; an eighth cottage serves as a communal meeting house.

The landscape here is wild, open and forever changing - ocean, sky and mountains merge and re-emerge as mists, sunshine and rain squalls follow one another with surprising rapidity. It is a liminal place, a place which the monks who lived here centuries ago would have called 'thin'; a place where the boundary between time and the timeless seems to dissolve.