Dunlavin Festival of Arts

05/11/2026

A daily updated news website relating to the small but dynamic village of Kilcullen, Co Kildare, IRL.

05/11/2026

31/10/2026

A Celebration of the Life and Work of Leonard Cohen on the 10th Anniversary of his Death.

27/10/2026

Míle buíochas to the RTÉ Nationwide team for coming down to Dunlavin over the festival weekend last June 🎥✨ It was so exciting to see our festival, our town and our people featured on national television! From the Cailleachs and Vizzards Midsummer Parade, to the artists, volunteers and community who brought the whole weekend to life, you captured a whole town coming together to make something. Wicklow Arts Office Creative Ireland

Missed it? Catch the episode on the RTÉ Player 📺
https://www.rte.ie/player/series/nationwide/SI0000001172?epguid=IH10016303-26-0120

17/10/2026

The death has occurred of James (Jimmy) Birchall of Dunlavin, Wicklow Ireland, on 16/10/2026. You can view the full death notice and add your condolences here.

07/08/2026

In 1982, the RTÉ cameras found them: the Vizzards of Wicklow, masked, cloaked in rags, playing music. One of the last times the tradition drew breath in the open air. For forty-four years, they lived inside the reel. Wrapped up. Waiting.

This midsummer, we invited them out. A parade led by a penny farthing. Behind, hats braided in the weeks and days before, tents unpicked and remade as costume, masks painted and decorated by the schoolchildren. And moving among them, unhurried, the Cailleach, the veiled one, she who keeps the year, whose winter waits at the far side of this longest day.

The straw came from Trevor Carter in Athy, one of the last growers in Ireland still growing it for thatching and hat making. Mary Maxwell of the Fingal Mummers taught the making of the hats. Hand to hand.

And then the music and dance. The Imaal Hall, a céilí poured into it. RTÉ came back too.

To Stefan, who led us out on his penny farthing. To Mary and Trevor, for the craft and the straw. To the musicians, the schools, the scouts, the families, and every hand that made a mask, hat or costume. Buíochas ó chroí.

16/07/2026

Congratulations to our feedback questionnaire competition winners: Carmel Whelan, John O’Reilly and Chris Lawlor! 👏
A big thank you to our sponsors for making it possible:
Blessington Lakes Golf Club Blessington Lakes Golf Club
The Shackleton Experience Shackleton Experience Athy
Kevin O’Brien Framing

15/07/2026

Ancestral Dawning. Before the town woke, we arrived at first light to mark the turning of the year. Midsummer, at the threshold between night and day. At this moment, local voice artist Signe sounded out to the landscape, inspired by Sámi Joiking, her vocals echoing across the early awakening landscape, enacting a living relationship with place. It was extraordinary.

Three local jugglers, Nick, Uisce and Peadar, stood atop the ancient Tournant Moate as the sun rose. This prehistoric mound has long been an ancient magnet for our ancestors, a place of significance and ceremony in the landscape. Their thrown objects traced arcs of light across the early morning sky, marking time, holding the season, being present together in a living and breathing place. We were incredibly lucky with the appearance of the sun.

Huge thanks to Nick Bryson for directing this gathering and to Signe for her incredible voice work, to Uisce and Peadar for their embodied poetry, and to everyone who woke before dawn to be part of this very special moment.

This project was funded through Creative Ireland. Creative Ireland

07/07/2026

💙💛 It takes a whole town…

Dunlavin Arts Festival doesn’t happen without the people who quietly show up to make things real.

This year, artists’ projects came to life all across the town thanks to a brilliant community effort.

Huge thanks to Noel @ Ballymore Scaffolding, Joe Lawler (materials, trailer transport & de-install expertise), and John Lawlor Tynte House, Margaret Lynott and Noreen for providing accommodation for our visiting artists.

To Noreen and the Ukrainian sewing group and other sewers for hours of beautiful handwork.

To Fiona, Aoife John & Colm for getting stuck into the initial clear out of the garden, and Arthur, Eoin and crew for clearing scrub and cutting new pathways on the run-up weekends. And to Dermot Page for the stretch tent install and deinstall.

And gratitude to Wicklow County Council Arts Office and Creative Ireland for their funding support, which makes so much of this possible.

We are so lucky to have such a community-built, town-wide and full of heart festival. Thank you all 🙌

06/07/2026

Home as a Verb - Midsummer Garden Exhibition

One of the standout pieces from this year’s festival was Malú Colorín’s Home as a Verb; an interactive installation made from a bell tent of Irish linen, hand-dyed with plants gathered right here in West Wicklow.

Inside, visitors found a simple invitation on a clipboard: take a moment to think about what home means to you. What is home? Where is home? What makes you feel most at home? People were invited to write their answers on paper and pin them to the tent walls.

The response over the weekend was incredible 💛 So many visitors stepped inside and shared something honest; thoughts on family, comfort, quiet, rest, love and the small everyday moments that make a place feel like home. By the end of the festival the tent walls were full of these little handwritten reflections, fluttering alongside ferns and branches, a beautiful, growing archive of what “home” means to our community.

As Malú describes it, the piece explores belonging as an action, an ongoing process of making ourselves at home and putting down roots, rather than something fixed or given.

Huge thanks to:
🌿 Malú and Eamon for installing the piece
🌿 Our wonderful volunteer invigilators for minding the garden all weekend
🌿 Fiona Craul for so generously providing the stunning Midsummer Garden space

About the artist:
Malú Colorín is a Mexican natural dyer, designer, artist and community organiser living in West Wicklow. She builds, nourishes and maps communities of place and of practice.

Her work draws on the traditional garments of her native Mexico while embracing the rich heritage of Irish textiles. Working slowly and mindfully, she builds an intimate connection with each of her dye sources and the land where they grow.

Malú’s practice explores identity, belonging and reciprocity, mapping the relationships formed between humans, more-than-humans, and place through fibre, thread, cordage, wild clay, plants, rocks and natural pigments — often in collaboration with other humans or her more-than-human kin.

🔗 talu.earth/malu-colorin