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.

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: 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:

• This workshop will run over three consecutive Fridays and participants must be available to attend all three.
  
• This workshop is open to participants of all levels of creative experience. Attendance is free, but places are limited and must be reserved in advance.
  
• This is a hands-on workshop and materials may be messy. Participants are advised to wear protective clothing (e.g., an apron) and to bring a camera phone to document their process.

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: 

• Free drawing on fabric using your sewing machine 

• Transferring images from paper to fabric 

• Suitable fabric selection 

• Marking making with a sewing machine 

• Raw-edged applique techniques 

• Hand-stitching over applique 

• Creating ‘floating’ drawings 

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.