Each Ballinglen Fellow is asked to give one - or more at the artist’s discretion - important finished work of art for the Ballinglen Permanent Collection. An acquisitions committee of visual art professionals will make the selection. This takes place when the artist has completed a body of work made during a Fellowship or after as the work continues to develop - sometimes, this takes a year or two.

The Ballinglen Permanent Collection is an integral part of The Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship Programme.  We have created  a significant and growing permanent collection of contemporary art that documents the widely varying responses of Ballinglen Fellows to the same raw material of community and environment. At the same time, the collection chronicles, in a unique form, the history of Ballinglen since its inception in 1992.  All works in the Ballinglen Permanent Collection are now housed in the recently opened Ballinglen Museum of Art in ideal archival conditions.

At Ballinglen, we manage to achieve an extraordinary amount  with modest financial resources. We function effectively within these limits by not taking on projects or making commitments we cannot fulfill. We have neither the space, the curatorial staff, nor the conservation staff, which would enable us to include in the Ballinglen Permanent Collection either complex installation works or large-scale sculpture - as much as we would love to.