On May 12, to celebrate our Horse theme for Kinsale Arts Week 2011, and with a little help from our friends at Carrickmines Equestrian Centre (the home of Polocrosse in Dublin!), we brought Tommy the Pony to the life room at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA).

We have teamed up with the RHA to curate a major exhibition, The Horse Show for Arts Week. With work by Irish and international artists, including Basil Blackshaw, Paddy Lennon, Peter Curling, Janet Mullarney, Maider Fortune, Max Streicher, Katherine Beug and Nevan Lahart, it’s going to be some ride!

So to get things going, we brought Tommy to town – where the only hiccup was that the life room is on the third floor. But urged on by the idea of being a muse – and by carrots and hay, Tommy gamely stepped into the lift, and posed his pony heart out.

You can see a slideshow of the day at the Irish Times. And Tommy even made the Six One News on RTÉ!

The Horse Show premieres in Kinsale, and then tour to The Source Arts Centre in Thurles, the Ballina Arts Centre, Mayo, and concludes at the RHA in 2012.