A programme of workshops across 8 City Connects post-primary schools exploring the over-arching theme of community.
***Our Education and Community outreach programmes are taking place entirely off-site in locations throughout the city during our refurbishment period***
We are delighted to be partnering with City Connects, a pilot government programme in the North East Inner City (NEIC) area. The aim of City Connects is to ensure that each and every student receives all the services and resources they need in order to succeed and thrive. While this pilot is already working across 10 primary schools, there are ongoing efforts to extend its model to post-primary students.
In addition to our primary school programmes run in partnership with City Connects (Art in the Classroom and Art Aficionados After School Art Club), we have begun a new project, The Art of Belonging. This project is being offered to 8 Secondary Schools in the NEIC through City Connects and explores the overarching theme of community through various sub-themes, such as wellbeing, identity and ecology. This project aims to allow students to engage with the community through a variety of media, encouraging an expression of self-identity and a sense of belonging.
This project delivers artist-led workshops to each school and is curated by Tori Boccarossa, Schools Coordinator.
The Art of Belonging Phase I
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Art Wellbeing & Community: Affirmations of Care
This workshop, with artist Sarah Ward, explores wellbeing through communal and collaboration. Students are encouraged to create affirmations for others, exploring how words and symbols can support emotional wellbeing and empathy, to create artwork that represents collective care.
Kindness, support, inclusion are emphasised for their artworks. Wellbeing exercises, body scans, stretching, bilateral drawings, and artist demonstrations of creative wellbeing practices form the building blocks of these workshops.
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Our Shared Streets: Photography, Community, and the Art of Observation
This workshop introduces students to street photography and portraiture through the lens of community, encouraging them to see their local environment as a shared social and cultural space with artist Donal Talbot. The students explore how artists document, represent, and ethically engage with the communities around them.
Through discussion, observation, and creative exercises, the students consider how photography can highlight connection, belonging, everyday encounters, and the subtle relationships that shape public life. The workshop emphasises respect, attentiveness, and responsibility when photographing others, reinforcing photography as a collaborative and community-aware act rather than a detached one.
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Paths of Belonging
In this creative art workshop with Anca Danila, students explore the theme of community, shared experiences, and belonging through painting and drawing. Inspired by street signs, each participant creates a personal sign that reflects a value, experience, or memory they share with their peers.
Discussion and reflection is ongoing, encouraging students to think about the theme of community, shared activities, values and experiences. They then explore the visual language of signs, symbols, colours, and simple imagery, and translate their ideas into a painted street-sign artwork. All the signs are displayed on a drawn map, creating a collaborative visual mapping of the community, shared experiences, and connections that celebrates unity and participation.
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Expression through Printing
In this workshop with artist An Gee Chan, students are introduced to screen printing as an artistic approach to image-making. Embracing the theme of community, this workshop explored expressing identity on a personal and on a community level.
Community identity involves how groups manifest their shared values, traditions, and culture through rituals, symbols, and shared spaces to foster belonging. In this case, art-making defined this class’s unique, group identity.
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Textiles and Protest Art: a Collaborative Quilt Project
This workshop with Michelle Hall explores historical examples of fabric based art
and craft practices, and where textiles and activism overlap in communities globally. Students are introduced to the ways in which areas of interest or concern can be communicated through creative, art-making practices, with the use of text and imagery.Each student creates a fabric square with their own unique design, informed by their own interests and creativity. All of these pieces come together through collaboration with the collective display of quilt squares, reflecting how these group artworks come together as a form of communication, preservation, and community.
