The Hugh Lane Gallery’s Citywide Salons art education project is a curated programme that brings together artists and communities to explore and stimulate artistic practice.
Aimed at a diversity of ages, audiences and languages, these Citywide Salons serve as a critical meeting point to investigate artistic methodologies in community spaces throughout the five areas of Dublin City Council as well as at the Hugh Lane Gallery. Citywide Salons are conversation focused events, melding the curiosities and complexities of the ‘hosting’ artist and community group, creating a welcoming place for inspiration, collaboration, creative expression, and shared experience.
This programme was curated by Emma Ross Sermons, Hugh Lane Gallery Fulbright Curatorial Scholar, 2024-2025, in coordination with Jessica O’Donnell, Head of Education and Community Outreach.
Stemming from an original project concept by Jessica O’Donnell, Hugh Lane Gallery Citywide Salons take inspiration from the seminal Irish artist, Sarah Purser (1848-1943), who’s exuberant and determined art-activism inspired the civic and cultural life of Dublin city. As well as being an acclaimed painter, founder of An Túr Gloine, founder of the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, Purser was an enthusiastic supporter of Hugh Lane’s endeavours and instrumental in Charlemont House becoming the permanent home of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. Among her many achievements, Purser was also an energetic supporter of her fellows and was extraordinarily active nearly right up to her death at the age of 95. Her studio in Harcourt Terrace and her Second Tuesday Salons at her home at Mespil House were famous meeting places for an exciting mix of contemporary characters eager to exchange and share ideas on art, music, literature and more.
Hugh Lane Gallery Citywide Salons project is supported by the Creative Ireland programme.
Photo credit: Aiesha Wong
Taking Care: Storytelling Through Food
With artists Jennie Moran and Victory Nwabu-Ekeoma, these salons were shaped around the value of storytelling and exchange through food culture.
Both framed in potluck or barbeque style, these salons focused on care and hospitality, using food as a central vessel for the exchange of culture and ideas. They celebrated a mixing of ideas and aspirations, prioritized question asking between participants and left everyone full and fed.
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A Salon with Jennie Moran
Jennie Moran led a food heritage workshop with learners from the Catering course at the Discovery Community Training Centre in Darndale, guiding participants through an exploration of hospitality as a vehicle for generosity.
In advance the learners prepared a dish connected to their food heritage–something resonant to their identity, culture, family, or ancestry. They prepared everything from coddle, Shepherd’s pie, Irish apple cake, and fettuccine Alfredo, to cinnamon rolls, bolognaise, devil’s food cake, egg pudding, and rosemary roasted potatoes.
The conversations meandered between personal and familial relationships to food, where and when we feel welcome or unwelcome and how we care through food.
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Food and Memory: A Salon with Victory Nwabu-Ekeoma
This salon officially launched Victory’s exploration for the third edition of Bia!, a zine and project exploring food, memory and migration.
Together, Victory led a round table of shared stories across plates, creating a space for participants to reflect on how food links past, present, and future, and what it means to offer, share, receive and welcome.
Dinner served, family style courtesy of Fondita Mestiza, a cultural project which seeks to promote and share heritage through food, under the covered patio in Mud Island Community Garden.
Learn more about Bia! Zine
Learn more about Fondita Mestiza
Photo credit: Aiesha Wong
Photo credit: Emma Ross Sermons
Precarity: Space & Power
With artists Grace Wilentz, Emma Quin, Ashleigh Downey, and Kathryn Maguire, these salons explored the role of the individual in interaction with structures, from the physical walls of the gallery space to community gardens and green spaces.
Focusing on relational thinking, these salons meandered through thought experiments– making, breaking, and reshaping personal observations to create something new in-between the cracks.
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After Nature: Art in the Anthropocene
This three-week creative writing workshop with Pathways was a creative imagining in response to themes in Ailbhe Ni Bhriain’s Dream Pool Intervals exhibition at Hugh Lane Gallery.
Through drawing, writing, and collage exercises, participants folded familial memories into writings on nature, place, and home. They completed poems, one of which was even transformed into a song.
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Something Stronger than Concrete: A Salon with Emma Quin
Together with an intimate group of Dublin’s emerging artists and artist-curators, we explored Emma’s inquiries into the spaces we inhabit, how we maintain a sense of ownership when precarity is second nature and instability is inbuilt. Emma poses the organisation as an idea, a practice, a conversation- built not by bricks but by the people who inhabit it.
We navigated the relationship between arts organisations and the spaces that house them, understanding how we can nurture place-making beyond traditional building structures in times of necessity and plenty.
Photo credit: Merve Sagit
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Corridors of Connection: A Salon with Ashleigh Downey
At Taplin’s field in the Liberties with the South Inner City Community Development Association – Ukrainian Family Group and garden volunteers.
And at Crumlin Pearse Park Community Garden with CLAY Youth Project, a local mental health support group and garden volunteers.
In community gardens across Dublin City, artist Ashleigh Downey invited participants to explore the in-betweens of visible and invisible corridors. Through mark-making with natural materials, mindful walking, and gentle observation, we turned to our senses to help reflect on themes of movement, connection, resilience and belonging.
Special thanks to Taplin’s Field Community Garden and Crumlin Pearse Park Community Garden for their lush and inviting spaces.
Photo credit: Merve Sagit
Reshaping: Sound and Memory
With artists Taim Haimet, Michelle Hall, Anca Danila, and Jazz musicians Richard Ng, Johnny Batista, and Segun Akano, these salons reshaped connections between sound, memory, and expression.
These artists and musicians provided their practice, their music and multi-disciplinary expression, as examples for salon participants to jump into, creating a frenetic space for pure exploration.
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A Salon with Taim Haimet
With NCAD’s Master of Social Action Cohort
Artist Taim Haimet has worked mainly on grief, whether that is of a person, a country or as a witness to the devastations of war via screens. When something beautiful is vanquishing from this world, Taim explores how we create ‘scared spaces’ to perpetuate their presence as a conscious refusal of closure, a way to refuse the story to end.
Over two hours, Taim shared the stories of others, her friends and family, their movement, love and grief for place and family. Taim tells us all of how she returns to the place of loss and stretches and expands it into total presence, refusing things to die, be forgotten, or separate from us.
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Soundscapes in Motion
With Ballymun Regional Youth Resource and Salmagundi
Guided by the rhythms and melodies of musicians Johnny Batista, Richard Ng, and Segun Akano, artist Anca Danila facilitates sessions of total expressive movement. Frenetic and electric, we transformed line, colour and rhythm into movement and powerful expressions of the self.
Video credit: Merve Sagit
List of Partners & Participants
- Ballymun Regional Youth Resource
- CLAY Youth Project, Crumlin
- Crumlin Local Mental Health Support Group
Crumlin Pearse Park Community Garden and Volunteers - Darndale Discovery CTC Centre – Catering, Hair & Beauty, Barbering, and Woodworking courses
- Diaspora food and art creatives
- Dublin City Culture Company
- Dublin’s emerging artist-curators
Fondita Mestiza - HACE Men’s Group
- Hill Street Prep for Preschool Parent Café Group
- Mud Island Community Garden Volunteers
- NCAD Masters of Art and Social Action
- NCP Support Group for Ukrainian Mothers
- Pathways Centre
- People with a visual impairment
- RADE – Recovery through Art, Drama and Education
- Salmagundi Group
Taplin’s Field Community Garden - Senior Citizens Service Group – Daughters of Charity Community Services
- Ukrainian Families – South Inner City Community Development Association (SICCDA)
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About the Citywide Salons Programme Curator
Emma Ross Sermons, 2024-2025 Fulbright Curatorial Scholar.
Emma graduated from Sewanee: The University of the South in 2023 with her bachelor’s degree in art history. Her senior honor’s thesis focused on contemporary artists confronting destructive environmental practices through socially engaged projects—taking on ecological resilience and community resistance as intertwined pairs. Following her graduation, Emma worked closely with two of the artists central to her thesis, Åsa Sonjasdotter and Mel Chin.
Emma spent much of her time in Dublin elbows deep in community gardens across the city, special thanks to Taplin’s Field in the Liberties and Mud Island Community Garden. This resulting project, particularly the salons taking place in community gardens, emerged out of her lived experiences and roots in Appalachia. Emma’s work seeks to highlight the precarity and resiliency these corridors and in-between spaces hold.
