The inaugural year of the Art of Change programme has now concluded for 2024!
The Art of Change is a youth arts initiative run by the Kilkenny Arts Office, for individuals aged 13 to 18 years. The programme aimed to empower young people to creatively engage with environmental and climate issues.Participants engaged in a variety of art workshops, experiencing hands-on activities and techniques across different art forms guided by a diverse group of artists. The workshops aimed to inspire critical thinking about sustainability and encourage positive change. The programme hopes to inspire young people to develop a deeper awareness of environmental and climate issues and to recognise their ability to contribute to positive change.
During the Spring and Autumn, 32 young people took part in a series of workshops within youth centres and 77 students within Secondary Schools. These sessions saw the young people delve into different art practices and approaches offering them a new perspective, gaining new skills, encouraging them to ask even more questions!
Participants took part in workshops with the following artists and organistaions:
Education for Sustainability
Education for Sustainability CLG is a non- profit social enterprise aimed at increasing climate literacy and fostering Behaviour change in Ireland. Founded in 2017, as a response to the escalating decline of the natural world, their mission is to ensure that the young people of today are educated about the climate crisis and that they have the knowledge, skills and tools to take action so they can be informed and empowered stakeholders for the future.
Rediscovery Centre- Sustainable Fashion
Introduced the young people to sustainable fashion and explored the impacts of the fashion industry, the concept of sustainability, principles of sustainable and circular fashion, and examined how STEM can provide solutions for the future of the fashion industry and consumer choice. It featured a range of hands-on activities that explored sustainable fashion, including lifecycle of clothing, the principles of sustainable fashion and the future of fashion.
Rudi-Lee McCarthy
His work merges visual art and culinary arts, resulting in a unique and socially engaged practice. His current artistic focus revolves around Food Heritage, Relational Aesthetics, art, health, well-being, and social practice. McCarthy’s art practice invites us to consider the nature of the food we eat. He prompts reflection on where ingredients come from and how they end up on our plates. His multidisciplinary approach combines cooking, conversation, and deeper research into ingredients and recipes, with a particular focus on the tomato. It is a thoughtful and socially engaged practice that asks us to consider the nature of the food we eat, where the ingredients come from and how they came to be on our plate.
Alan James Burns
AlanJames Burns produces collaborative, interactive, socially engaged and site-specific exhibitions. The focal points of their artistic and curatorial practice are disability, climate change and the human mind. Augmented Body, Altered Mind examines correlations between the natural world, neurology, philosophy, and neurodivergence. Immersed in a projected environment and multi-channel soundscape, visitors co-create the artwork in real-time by wearing a brain-sensing headset that detects electric signals generated by different brain waves. By doing so, audiences control evocative visuals reminiscent of environmental and neurological imagery and patterns. Participants of Art of Change got a chance to wear the brain-sensing headset and see their brainwaves converted into a unique image projected up onto a large screen.
Sinead Curran
Sinead’s practice examines the complex relationship of individuals to place employing a visual lens in the context of the ways we live today. Photography drives the work, combines analogue and digital techniques incorporating movement in the image through playful techniques. Sinead works with video installation, video mapping, text, where medium relates to the process. During her workshops the group created cyanotype images, fish lens cameras and images developed using natural materials and solutions easily sourced from the garden and kitchen cupboard.
Maeve Stone
Maeve is a director / writer for film and theatre whose work responds to issues of climate breakdown, and revisits the canon with a feminist lens. She is lead artist for axis Ballymun’s Green Arts Department facilitating a series of events that reach out into the community and raise awareness of Green Issues. In 2024 this includes Rising Tide Ballymun/Belfast, a crossborder project that focuses on the hopes of young people in building towards a more hopeful future, Art Made By Walking; a commission art project that centres walking as an art practice with Lian Bell, Shanna May Breen and Veronica Dyas and will culminate in an exhibition at Axis through winter 2024, and a community art project called ‘Orchard Songlines’ that will bring together young people and elders to create songs that will attach their observations of what their community needs to an urban orchard with poet Jessica Traynor and Composer Tom Lane offering workshop masterclasses through the process. Participants engaged in personal writing exercises, developed and performed scene sketches, and took part in a variety of theatre games that fostered engagement and connection within the group.
Carrie Lynam
Kilkenny based visual artist Carrie Lynam graduated with a first class honours degree in Fine Art from TU, Dublin and holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Community Art Education from the National College of Art; Design (NCAD). She is currently a student on the Masters of Design History and Material Culture at NCAD. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with work in the permanent collection of The National Museum of Scotland, and various private collections. Winner of The Progressive Vision Curtin O’Donoghue Emerging photography prize at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2020. Her practise has been documented through feature articles in various print publications such as Irish Arts Review, Dazed, Love, New York Times Style magazine to name a few and as an invited guest speaker at international art and design conferences with Boston University, National Museum of Scotland and Pictoplasma, Berlin. In addition to her solo artistic practice, she engages with diverse collaborations, such as commissions for John Galliano’s couture house Maison Margiela and most recently with Irish artists Dirty Laundry Collective on a film piece, Venous Returns for the National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks. Carrie led the group in a number of sewing activities making use of scrap materials to create striking imagery using applique techniques.
Mary Conroy
Mary Conroy is a cross-disciplinary artist from Ireland. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Ceramics and a master’s degree in Social Practice. Her practice incorporates sculpture, site-specific installation and community-engaged project work. With a strong emphasis on making, materiality and process, her work investigates relationships between the human and more-than-human world in scientific and cultural contexts. This is often done through collaboration and co-production with communities of place. Mary is a founding member of the Materials Matter Collective; a collaborative research and education project focusing on material sustainability and environmental awareness within the process of art production. She is an artist in residence with Ormston House Cultural Resource Centre, Limerick. Using wheat paste, recycled paper and collage Mary led the participants in a sketch booking workshop.
Jules Michael
Jules’s practice combines socially engaged collaborations with a studio-based process of painting, photography and drawing. The physical surroundings she comes in contact with through the community projects become sources in the studio. Photos and notebook notations made out in the landscape are the basis for her paintings. Most recently, themes are peatlands based. Her community collaborations are in an ecosocial art context. She devises inclusive, embedded actions specifically designed to activate engagement, sharing, creativity and community, while supporting awareness of conservation strategies and habitat preservation. She incorporates the surrounding hinterland of farming traditions, local food production, plant and hedgerow lore into her primary theme of connecting peatlands and communities and especially Drummin Bog, South Carlow’s only raised bog. Jules’s workshop brought the group through the use of natural dyes and mark making. She demonstrated how different colours were achieved with various plants and minerals and how the drying process effected the final result. The group used these natural inks and dyes, along with constructing drawing implements from found organic objects and materials creating a variety of still life sketches of vegetation and flora.
Amelia Caulfield
Amelia Caulfield is a socially engaged artist, filmmaker, and arts facilitator based in Dublin, Ireland. She has a BA Hons in Film and Documentary from GMIT, and an MA in Social Practice and the Creative Environment from TUS. She has also studied Creativity and Change at MTU, and Art, Craft, and Design at Grennan Mill. Amelia’s work spans public art, interactive installation, workshop facilitation, community organising, filmmaking, photography, and print. She is interested themes of community, gathering, civic life, modes of collectively, creativity as a tool for activism, collaborative practice, and values. Amelia’s workshop for Art of Change brought the group through the methods of reductive and resistant mono print techniques, giving the young people a chance to play with the techniques to create different effects. The workshop covered how the use of print, imagery and slogans are hugely effect tools in climate activism.
Thomas Duffy
Thomas Duffy is a Kilkenny based artist musician educator. With a history working in traditional materials of stone and cast metals as well as photography, paper and found materials, his strong draftsmanship is at the core of his visual explorations. He Received a B.A (Hons) in Fine Art, Sculpture from N.C.A.D in 1996. He has studied, researched and performed Afro Brazilian Culture & Music internationally for over 25 years and this curiosity is present throughout his practice. He trained in Stone Sculpture & Bronze Casting at Leitrim Sculpture Centre from 2000 to 2002. Independent arts facilitation, project creation and development and performance are an integral part of Thomas’s practice. The core of Thomas practice is one a constant curiosity about the interconnectivity between all things: tangible, intangible and communal. Overcoming erroneous historic ideas that divide nature and culture, that alienate us and diminish wellbeing for ourselves and the planet, Thomas expresses these concerns through various creative expression: drawing, sculpture, music and the creativity that arises from collective participatory group work. As the Art of Change coordinator and a workshop facilitator, Thomas expertly and sensitively guided the group through the programme. He facilitated workshops that focused the group on the overarching theme of the programme and engaged them in the topic helping them to connect with the issues and their own personal views. Through writing exercises, group willow sculpture construction and the making of homemade felt makers the group experienced a variety of materials and techniques. Thomas led the group on a final evaluation discussion about the programme facilitating an open discussion on their experience of the programme and their hopes for future iterations of the project.
