Opening Reception Thursday 21 June, 6 – 8pm

The title of the exhibition, The Coercion of Substance, is taken from Seamus Heaney’s poem The Artist from his 1984 collection Station Island. The title suggests the idea of the artist taking pigments, oils and other materials and cajoling and manipulating them into something new on a canvas. This describes perfectly both the desire and the journey first begun by Samuel Walsh in the late 1970s when he began his career as an artist and which has culminated in this new exhibition.