Join us this summer for a range of art making workshops and activities. Expand on your artistic skills and choose from a variety of free workshops that explore a wide range of interests including drawing, painting, zine-making, dancing and more!
Join us this Summer at IMMA for a range of art making workshops and activities. Choose from a variety of free workshops that explore a wide range of interests including drawing, painting, zine-making, dancing and more. Take this amazing opportunity to explore your creativity, while taking in the magnificent surroundings of the IMMA site. There is something on offer for every age and every level, just bring your lovely self, to play, create and have fun!
Meeting Point: Main Reception
Free, drop in. More details here.
Over the school holidays, enjoy a family visit to IMMA with some creative time during the summer break. Children and grown-ups can enjoy exploring artworks, and participate together in making your own artwork, led by IMMA’s Visitor Engagement Team. Free and drop-in.
Location: Matheson Creativity Hub
Free, All welcome, Drop In
Visit IMMA on Sunday afternoons and enjoy some creative time with your family. Based on artworks from IMMA’s exhibitions, families can discover their inner artist while having fun and creating amazing masterpieces. Led by our Visitor Engagement Team, this is a wonderful family experience. Art materials are provided by IMMA.
These workshops will take place in our Project Spaces. Upon arrival, please ask a member of our staff at reception in the Main Building for directions to the workshop.
Our Explorer at Home activities are also available for you to discover, there are lots of creative activities for families to do at home.
To get the latest updates about any upcoming Explorer events, follow our social media channels and join our mailing list for families.
Free, booking required. Book here.
This two-day workshop will introduce participants to the fundamentals of Ciara’s ‘Thread Drawing’ techniques: a combination of free motion embroidery, hand stitch and raw-edged appliqué. Through a series of practical demonstrations and as much one on one tutoring as possible, she will walk you through her process and arm you with the knowledge to begin your own stitchery journey.
Ciara O’Connor is a Kerry-based visual artist whose practice centres on free-motion embroidery as a medium for investigating identity, feminism, and the psychological architecture of recovery. By utilizing the rhythmic, repetitive nature of stitch, she recontextualizes domestic craft as a vehicle for processing trauma and navigating memory.
The workshop will cover:
Please read before booking: This course is aimed at those who wish to explore new ways of working. It is not a sewing workshop. Basic sewing machine skills are essential, and you must bring your own/borrowed sewing machine. Any type of machine can be used, but if using one without an option to drop the feed dogs then you must purchase an Embroidery/Darning Feed Dog Cover prior to your workshop. Drawing skills are not essential. Some materials supplied, though a list of materials will be sent to participants prior to the course.
Location: Matheson Creativity Hub
Free, booking required. Book here.
This immersive workshop invites participants to explore the rhythmic, meditative act of hand-stitching as a vehicle for navigating personal history and connection. Through a series of intuitive hand-stitching exercises, we will focus on the repetitive nature of the stitch as a grounding practice, allowing ourselves the time to sit with our emotions. We will prioritize the journey of making over technical perfection, providing a supportive environment to sit with the “slow work” of healing/reflection. No previous drawing experience is required as image transfer techniques will be demonstrated on the day.
Location: Matheson Creativity Hub
Free, booking required. Book here.
Join Mika and Ciara from our Visitor Engagement Team and learn to make your own unique monoprints using the Gelli plate method, inspired by our outdoor sculptures and IMMA’s gardens.
This summer workshop for children aged 9-12 years will demonstrate different techniques of gelli plate printing before kids have a chance to make their own one of a kind prints to take home.
We recommend kids bring their own apron or wear old clothes.
Location: IMMA Studios
Free, booking required. Book here.
Inspired by the exhibition Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman and the work of Camille Souter and Alberta Whittle, this three day workshops invites participants to explore painting as a starting point for reassembly through collage.
Facilitated by artists Leda Scully and Eleanor McCaughey, the workshop will begin with close looking with selected works from Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman. Participants will consider how gesture, colour, texture, and narrative operate within painting, and how these elements can be re-appropriated forming new compositions. Through guided discussion, the group will reflect on themes of identity, place, and memory present in the exhibition.
On the first day, participants will create a series of expressive paintings, focusing on intuitive mark-making, composition, and material exploration. These works will act as raw material rather than finished pieces.
In the second and third sessions, participants will cut, layer, and reconstruct their paintings into collages. Through processes of repetition, and juxtaposition, they will develop new compositions. This stage will encourage experimentation with scale, surface, and spatial relationships, allowing participants to reimagine their initial work through an expanded, process led approach.
Please Note:
Location: Matheson Creativity Hub
Free, booking required. Book here.
This is a gentle, immersive workshop, combining a sound bath with mindful creative practice. Moving into a guided sound journey to support deep listening, relaxation and embodied awareness, participants are then invited into a creative process inspired by visual music, an art form that explores how sound can become colour, movement and form.
Responding to the sensations, emotions and mental images that may have arisen during the sound journey, this practice supports participants in expressing their experience beyond words. It is not about the image created, but about letting sound move through the body and into marks on the page. No artistic experience is needed. The workshop is open, playful and accessible, offering a calming and creative way to process, reflect and connect through sound.
Please note: Once booked into workshop, Participants are encouraged to send an image to [email protected] of an object they would like to work from in advance of the workshop (perhaps something that reminds you of something or someone important – my stitched still life for my father had a can of WD40 and my mother’s had a vintage tea cup – it can be anything you like!) and a small piece of fabric (a scrap of clothing, an old handkerchief, or a remnant) that holds a personal connection, though all essential materials will be provided.
Location: Matheson Creativity Hub
Free, booking required. Book here.
This is a an infectiously heartening and hopeful touring panel discussion celebrating the art of welcome in different cultures.
We will gather to listen to stories and learn about customs and rituals of hospitality from different communities. This is a reminder of the system that humans in every corner of the earth have created for welcoming strangers. Followed by SNACKS! Pure joy.
Artist biography: Jennie Moran is a visual artist whose work explores hospitality as a creative and connective philosophy. Blending sculpture and food, she founded Luncheonette, an art/hospitality project at National College of Art and Design in 2013. She lectures widely, mentors in organisational hospitality and curates discursive events. She is chair of the Oxford Food Symposium and the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium and is the recipient of a Getty Research scholarship. Jennie is the author of ‘How to Soften Corners’ and was named Best Emerging Voice at the Irish Food Writing Awards.
Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, writer, mother, soil lover and composer. She was Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, practicing and teaching hospital medicine for 23 years until she was fired in May 2025 for her advocacy of Palestinian life and liberation. A scholar of the health impacts of colonialism on human and planetary health, she founded the Deep Medicine Circle to advance the concept of Whole System Health, where healed relationships between people and with the web of life confer health. She is newly appointed at Trinity College Dublin as Adjunct Professor of Land, Food and Medicine and Senior Research Fellow at the School of Medicine, where she is bringing the Farming is Medicine program to Ireland to help build local food sovereignty and supporting the articulation of a Liberation Medicine. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice. Together with co-author with Raj Patel, she wrote the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.
Teresa Buczkowska is CEO of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, a writer, and a media commentator on migration, democracy, and women’s rights. She is a regular contributor to public debate in Ireland and internationally, with work published in The Irish Times, Irish Independent, Dublin Inquirer, The Journal, and The openDemocracy. In recognition of her advocacy and public engagement work, she received the Women of Europe – Woman in Media Award in 2024. She is also a 2021 Social Change Initiative Fellow and a 2022 Obama Scholar.
Oein DeBhairduin is a writer, activist and educator with a passion for preserving the beauty of Traveller tales, sayings, retellings and historic exchanges. Oein is the author of the award-winning Why the moon travels and Weave. He is the Traveller Culture Collections Development Officer with the National Museum of Ireland and seeks to pair community activism with cultural celebration, recalling old tales with fresh modern connections and, most of all, he wishes to rekindle the hearth fires of a shared kinship.
Location: Matheson Creativity Hub
Free, booking required. Book here.
In this workshop, participants are invited to share the story of their favourite food, meal or memory through zine-making, collage art and storytelling. Together, we’ll create a communal cookbook filled with memories and the meals that matter.
Artist biography: Victory Nwabu-Ekeoma is an Igbo-Irish zine-maker and founder and editor of Bia! Zine – an independent publication that explores food, memory and migration in Ireland.
Location: Studios 9 and 10
Free, booking required. Book here.
Learn to create imagery with natural dyes. In this workshop, you will learn how to paint with a thickened mordant and then dye the whole cloth in one dye bath. You will get different shades from the same dye depending on which of the two mordants you use.
Please read before booking: This is a 2 day workshop – when you book for the Saturday you automatically also book in for the Sunday. You must be available to attend both days.
Location: Studio 8
Free, booking required. Book here.
Please note:
No weaving experience is necessary.
Bring an old t-shirt or fabric offcuts to create your woven piece.
It could be hung as a wall piece or used as a new pocket for your tote bag if you bring one.
Weaving Kinship: Material Culture and Belonging
After a tour of selected works from Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman, we will return to Studio 8 for a hands-on weaving workshop led by Cristina Nicotra that explores cycles of wear, work and reuse across generations.
Held during Heritage Week, the workshop draws on a tradition of textile reuse shared across Ireland, Europe and beyond, practices passed down by women and indigenous communities as both necessity and care. By cutting an old t-shirt into yarn, warping a simple loom, and weaving it into cloth, participants learn the complete process from start to finish. Echoing Whittle’s engagement with care for the environment and Souter’s lifelong attentiveness to the everyday and its materials.
The workshop is grounded in repetitive, hands-on movement, weaving as a mindful and communal practice. Seated together, participants move through the same slow gestures of cutting, warping, and passing thread over and under. Building a shared rhythm that steadies the body and settles the mind. This repetition becomes a form of quiet company, a way of resourcing ourselves and turning towards one another. Care is expressed not through words but through the shared labour of making. Participants are invited to think of their textiles as archives of lived experience, and of weaving together as a practice of community and love.
Artist biography:
Cristina is an interdisciplinary artist and curator based in Dublin. Her practice explores the emotional, political and ecological dimensions of human and more-than-human entanglements, connecting textile practice with embodied and participatory experience.
Recent practice includes Thread of the Liberties (Liberties Festival, 2026); Open Fields, with UCD (2026); and her performance Wild Cabbage at the Fashion Designer Showcase, GalleryX, Dublin (2024). Since 2021, she has been teaching weaving, textile and embroidery workshops, including at Pallas Projects, Rua Red, the Dublin Fibre Festival and Portobello Community Hall.
Her curatorial work includes Earthbound Tales and the Entangled Life programme at Pallas Projects (2025); Brigid, with The Liberties Weavers, Pallas Projects, Dublin (2024); and Entanglement and Mint Tea, an itinerant gathering (2026).
Cristina is a long-standing member of The Liberties Weavers and holds postgraduate qualifications in Art and Ecology and Sustainable Exhibition Making (NCAD) and Climate Entrepreneurship (Trinity College Dublin). She is also a qualified yoga and meditation teacher.
Location: Studios 9 & 10
Free, booking required. Book here.
The workshop starts with a guided tour of the Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman exhibition. Guests are encouraged to take note of the titles of artworks that resonates or sparks curiosity within them.
The workshop then moves to a short break after the tour, which is then followed by a guided poetry workshop where the titles and artworks themselves are used as the muse for discussion and co-creation of new poems.
Guests are encouraged to explore their interpretations of the artworks to address the “elephant in the room”: the intersection of ecological and humanitarian concerns and how these shape social cohesion across the globe. Participants will then be encouraged to share their co-written poems with the room. The workshop will close with an invitational live art demonstration in which the titles used in during the poetry workshop and/or the title of newly created poems are inscribed onto the body of elephant drawn on a canvas, forming a collective visual reflection of the day’s dialogue.
Artist biography:
Alymat Aderayo Salam is a poet and multidisciplinary storyteller who curates spaces by using poetry and art as in invitation for communal reflection. Her practice bridges the impermanent nature of identity, cultural traditions, and the role language plays in shifting perspectives and understanding.
Sara Aguisol is a multilingual poet and abstract painter whose work explores consciousness, awareness, emotion, and the search for meaning through the depth of lived experience.
Location: Matheson Creativity Hub
Free, booking required. Book here.
This two-day workshop will introduce participants to the fundamentals of Ciara’s ‘Thread Drawing’ techniques: a combination of free motion embroidery, hand stitch and raw-edged appliqué. Through a series of practical demonstrations and as much one on one tutoring as possible, she will walk you through her process and arm you with the knowledge to begin your own stitchery journey.
Ciara O’Connor is a Kerry-based visual artist whose practice centres on free-motion embroidery as a medium for investigating identity, feminism, and the psychological architecture of recovery. By utilizing the rhythmic, repetitive nature of stitch, she recontextualizes domestic craft as a vehicle for processing trauma and navigating memory.
The workshop will cover:
Please read before booking: This course is aimed at those who wish to explore new ways of working. It is not a sewing workshop. Basic sewing machine skills are essential, and you must bring your own/borrowed sewing machine. Any type of machine can be used, but if using one without an option to drop the feed dogs then you must purchase an Embroidery/Darning Feed Dog Cover prior to your workshop. Drawing skills are not essential. Some materials supplied, though a list of materials will be sent to participants prior to the course.
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