Culture Night ’26: John Rainey in Conversation with Michael Waldron

For Culture Night 2026, artist John Rainey joins Michael Waldron of Crawford Art Gallery for a conversation exploring classical sculpture and its continuing afterlives through reproduction, restoration and contemporary technologies of making.

The conversation will bring Rainey’s practice into dialogue with the Canova Casts at Crawford Art Gallery. Made in Rome in the early nineteenth century under the supervision of Antonio Canova and sent to Cork in 1818, the casts formed an important teaching collection for what was then the Cork School of Art. Reproducing celebrated works of Greek and Roman sculpture, they allowed artists in Ireland to study classical models at first hand and point to a longer history in which copying, casting and reproduction were fundamental to artistic education and the circulation of images.

These histories have a particular resonance with Rainey’s current solo exhibition, Deviations, at Galway Arts Centre. Working in cast porcelain, metal and marble, Rainey reconfigures the visual language of classical statuary through processes of duplication, fragmentation and transformation. Bodies shift between states, fragments are grafted or misaligned, and familiar forms become strange, unsettling distinctions between original and copy, preservation and alteration.

With Crawford Art Gallery having recently acquired Rainey’s Dazzle Disco (legs) and Restoration Error Disco for the National Collection, the discussion also traces a direct connection between its historic holdings and Rainey’s contemporary practice.

Rainey and Waldron will consider what happens to classical forms as they are copied, circulated, restored, distorted and remade; how technologies of reproduction shape our encounters with the past; and why artists continue to return to these inherited bodies and images.

John Rainey is a sculptor based in Belfast. He received an MA in Ceramics and Glass from the Royal College of Art (London, 2012), and a BA in Contemporary Crafts from Manchester Metropolitan University (2009). Rainey’s work has had solo presentations at Marsden Woo Gallery (London, 2013), Golden Thread Gallery (Belfast, 2016), Naughton Gallery (2021) and BERG Gallery (Stockholm, 2019, 2022). His sculptures are held in public collections including the UK Government Art Collection, the Irish National Collection, the Ulster Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Collection.

Michael Waldron is an art historian, curator, and writer. He holds a PhD from University College Cork and has published articles in Irish Arts Review, Museum Ireland, and Paper Visual Art, in addition to essays in Irish University Review, The Routledge Companion to Irish Art, and Elizabeth Bowen in Context. He is Curator of Collections & Special Projects at Crawford Art Gallery, where his exhibitions have included, Recasting Canova (2019-24), Laura Fitzgerald: I have made a place (2021), and As They Must Have Been (2022). He is also Deputy Chair of Sample-Studios.

Feature Image:
Canova Casts at Crawford Art Gallery
Photo credit: Jed Niezgoda

Profile images:
1 / Courtesy of artist
2 / Photo credit: Emma Jervis