Through the fusion of music and art, you’ll translate beats, tempos, and moods into dynamic visual compositions.
Thursday 21st August 2025, 5:45-7:45 pm
Hugh Lane Gallery – Sculpture Hall
Guided by the rhythms and melodies of professional musicians Johnny Batista, Richard Ng, and Segun Akano, along with drawing activities led by artist Anca Danila, this session invites you to explore the connection between rhythm, emotion, and creative expression through guided art-making.
Discover how sounds transforms into line and colour, rhythm into movement, and art into a powerful expression of self. We’ll leave time for storytelling, where participants can share their own experiences with sound and drawing.
This workshop for adults is free, numbers limited and advance booking essential via Eventbrite.
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Anca Danila explores the convoluted world of modern identities. Specifically, her paintings investigate the interplay between our ‘true’ selves and the ever-multiplying identities we adopt in our lives. Leaning into the mobile affect of digitalised globalization, they attempt to make sense of how past and present, family and larger social dynamics are playing in the kaleidoscope of the identities we hold at different moments in our lives. By visually translating insights from psychology, sociology, and anthropology, Anca’s paintings create a dialogue between ‘past’ and ‘present’, ‘here’ and there’ in a space of togetherness beyond borders. Her paintings confront us with the many identities that we all adopt to navigate our shared world and the manners in which we interact, conflict, and harmonise with our own sense of self.
SEGUN AKANO Band Leader, Drummer and Songwriter Segun’s musical journey started at a very early age in Lagos Nigeria as drummer, then eventually choir coordinator of the Araromi Adubuleja CCC choir before moving to Ireland in 2002. Segun played the Agbamole drum (a locally made 3 piece drum) to the spiritually charged congregations at crusades and services. He would later end up as the choir keyboardist. He was known as the school drummer at primary and secondary schools while in Nigeria. He performed as a drummer in a couple of school plays, earning him the nick-name “the drummer boy”. After moving to Dublin, Segun started playing the drum-set at a Pentecostal Church in Naas, Co-Kildare before becoming a fully “secular” drummer focusing on Tony Allen style drums in 2006. He has since performed all over the country at Festivals and gigs such as The Main Stage, World Festival of Cultures 2005 with Colours Afrobeat Orchestra, Cork Jazz Festival, Limavady Jazz Festival (NI), Galways Arts Festival, Sea-Sessions Festival 2009, Felabration etc. Segun’s extraordinary appetite for music shines through at gigs or on stage. A founding member of Yankari Afrobeat Collective, Dublin Afrobeat Ensemble and The Living Things. Segun loves working with other talented musicians, artists, dancers, performers and composers from all over the world.
JOHNATHAN BATISTA DOS SANTOS Composer, Performer, and Socially Engaged Artist Johnathan Batista dos Santos is a Brazilian-born, Dublin-based composer, performer, and socially engaged artist working at the intersection of contemporary music, improvisation, and activism. His practice explores themes of social justice, immigrant rights, and environmental awareness, blending sound, storytelling, and collective creation. As a performer, arranger, and band leader, Johnathan has appeared at festivals including Bray Jazz Festival (2023, 2024), Electric Picnic, and the Italian Fusion Festival. With his Brazilian jazz ensemble, Brazilica, he has performed at the Global Village Festival and Brazil Day at Trinity College Dublin. Johnathan’s contemporary classical works have been showcased at venues such as Smock Alley Theatre. In 2021, he was commissioned by the Latin America Solidarity Centre to create Earth Justice, a multimedia project addressing environmental justice through music and film. His collaborations extend into visual art and film, notably partnering with multimedia artist Thaís Muniz on Atlantica, an exploration of diasporic identity. His commitment to community-centred art led to the co-founding of Revolutionary Stage, a theatre collective inspired by Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. Collaborating with theatre-maker Orla Devlin, the group will premiere a new play at the Smashing Times Festival of Art and Human Rights in October 2025 — supported by the Artist in the Community Scheme (Research and Development, 2023) and Realisation Award (2024). As a 2024 Arts Council Agility Award recipient, he is currently expanding his practice into electronic and experimental music under the mentorship of Shane Latimer. His upcoming work, set for release in August 2025, investigates identity formation through outsider/insider dialectical perspectives. Upcoming projects include the release of his single Raskolnikov’s Room in June 2025, recorded at Windmill Lane Studios. Inspired by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the piece delves into the psychological turmoil of moral conflict and redemption.
RICHARD NG Performer, Composer, Arranger, Community Activist Richard Ng is a Chinese-Irish musicial artist based in Dublin. He has been actively involved in the Dublin scene since 2010, and has collaborated on projects with a wide variety of artists from many genres and disciplines. His core values are the community as the heart of any project or performance, and the expression of the individual as the spark of that community. Richard is a graduate of the Newpark BA in Jazz Performance (now DCU), and has received further instruction in composition for video game media under Jason Graves. His performance credentials include festivals such as Electric Picnic, All Together Now, London Jazz Festival and radio and television spots for RTE Arena and the Tommy Tiernan Show. Richard currently heads up the horn section for Yankari Afrobeat Collective, and is a founding member of the modjazz collective Lavery. Most recent recordings include; Yankari’s upcoming album, Lavery’s Jade Garden EP, a guest appearance on Overhead The Albatross’ single Your Last Breath, and performances on Johnathan Batista’s Earth Justice EP and the upcoming Raskolnikov’s Room. Richard believes in the spirit of art as a paired learning experience; that the performer and the audience may live and share the same space, and come through having passed something intangible and beautiful between each other.
