A new photographic exhibition exploring rural Ireland from a skateboard has gone on display at the Courtyard Gallery in Turlough Park, Castlebar.

It explores aspects of the lived, social and economic history of rural Ireland through a series of spaces, reflecting on a range of themes from loss and dereliction to endurance, resilience, and renewal.

The images and stories were compiled in 2025 for a special issue of the Irish skateboarding publication, Goblin Magazine.

Many of the featured roads and spaces have an ‘underground history’ of being used for different purposes - from road bowling and handball to all-night raves and ‘boy racers’.

Róidín uses skateboarding to reach imperfect, overlooked, and often beautiful spaces outside towns and cities. The project documents not only the spots themselves, but the histories and cultures embedded in them. It reflects on public space as something far broader than formal plazas or town squares. Its focus is on how communities repeatedly reclaim space in their own way.

“Running through the exhibition is a wider rural story: dereliction, emptied buildings, and the fading of informal gathering places. The decline of spaces like handball alleys is treated as a mirror of rural change - a reminder that public space is never permanent, and only exists through the people who choose to gather and make it theirs.” 
- Goblin Magazine

Róidin is open now in the Courtyard Gallery at the National Museum of Ireland, Turlough Park, Castlebar, Co. Mayo. Admission is free.