Love Hospital Popup Art Show @Min an Lea, Gortahork, Donegal, Ireland, with Ian Joyce, Tomohiro Nomura, Hiromi Yamanaka and Tiger Stangl, 21.-22.6.2025. Paintings, prints, sculpture (Ian), patchwork art (Hiromi), textile prints (Tomohiro) and live performances (all and the instruments)
Sound by the artists
additional photos: Assumpta Smith
artists clothes by @overflowing_fashion
listen on bandcamp: @Mín a’ Leá by Love Hospital
Love Hospital: A Quiet Healing Through Art and Sound
By Ammara Arshad
I didn’t witness _Love Hospital_ in person. I arrived at it slowly, through a video clip and glimpses of the space and artworks shared over time. Even from a distance, something about it stayed with me. It felt honest, tender, and quietly transformative.
Set within Min an Léa, a countryside gallery nestled in the landscape of Donegal, the event didn’t unfold like a typical exhibition. It moved more like a ritual where art, music, and place came together to offer something rare and restorative: care.
The spirit of the gallery echoes the life and work of Irish visual artist Ian Joyce. His deep connection to the land, the Irish language, traditional music, and the culture surrounding Mount Errigal feels present in every part of the experience. His works don’t stand apart from their setting. They seem to rise from it. There is a calm in his art, shaped by weather, silence, and time.
The wooden installations, sculpted from ancient bog oak, stood quietly in the space. Worn by erosion and age, they didn’t feel like objects but like stories. They invited stillness. They reminded me of what remains after the tide goes out, softened, changed, still intact, yet transformed.
Alongside Joyce, the presence of Japanese artists Tomohiro Nomura and Hiromi Yamanaka added a subtle harmony. Yamanaka, a cloth artist and patchwork instructor, and Nomura, a painter and multi-instrumentalist, recently came together under the name Overflowing Fashion. Their work moved gently through the space, not only on the walls but in the garments that wrapped the participating artists, turning each figure into a moving canvas. The gallery felt less like a venue, more like a sanctuary, a place that embraced these works with tenderness. Hiromi’s quilt, made slowly over a year, carried traditional Japanese patterns stitched with fragments of Tomohiro’s dreamlike paintings. Around it, mandala flags, textile prints, and digital echoes of his painted worlds hovered in stillness. Nothing felt forced or separate. Their collaboration was a soft conversation, grounded in attention and care.
Berlin-based German graphic designer Tiger Stangl drew the artists and elements together through her curatorial and musical intervention. Rather than frame the works, her presence seemed to connect them, giving the event an invisible rhythm. There was a sense that everything was quietly in conversation, held together not by structure but by intuition and trust.
Music moved through the room naturally. It wasn’t there to perform. It was part of the atmosphere. The sounds held the space without demanding it, making everything feel a little more alive. The experience was surreal at times, but also deeply grounding.
In a world that often feels fractured, noisy, and uncertain, gatherings like Love Hospital feel like medicine. Not the kind that tries to fix or explain, but the kind that reminds us we’re still here. That beauty and presence still matter. That listening to the land, to each other, and to silence is its own kind of healing.
Love Hospital wasn’t a spectacle. It was a quiet offering. Even though I wasn’t there, it reached me where I am, and I’m still carrying it with me.