Creatives and Artists
Ballymun is Brilliant – Creatives and Artists
Creatives and Artists from Ballymun and from around Ireland have joined to explore all that makes Ballymun is Brilliant.
Through out 2024 and 2025, these creatives will be connecting with communities around Ballymun to explore what makes Ballymun Brilliant. Below are the list of these creatives that you will see around Ballymun and will be hosting events, performances and workshops for you to participate in and contribute to. Keep an eye out on our events page for more of these events taking place.
Niamh O’Beirne
Niamh is a multidisciplinary artist with a strong collaborative arts practice. Her work includes literature, theatre, broadcast,performance art and the production of creative spaces of play. These spaces take the form of socially engaged art parties, performance development workshops, creative workshops in costuming craft and ritual magic, mini- festivals, exhibitions, talks and online events.
Currently, she primarily makes collaborative work with artist Helen Flanagan through long-form art project Spooky Beore (2015-present). To date Spooky Beore has produced around thirty participatory art shows and projects as well as broadcast work for Dublin Digital Radio. They present work in an informal and social manner, in keeping with their belief in the principles of cultural democracy and their aim of making accessible, participatory work in non-institutional spaces.
Niamh’s work is presented with heart and humour and is rooted in Irish vernacular cultural practices. Her work is informed by ramble-houses, dance halls, Pattern Days and quarter-day traditions. She draws from folklore and vernacular culture to open non-normative pathways to creative expression. Niamh is deeply interested in human relationship with nature, non-human ecologies and ancestral memory and the power of these to generate new thinking and develop pathways to more equitable and inclusive futures.
Project Details
Over a 5 month period beginning in February 2025 Niamh will co-create Ballymun Spirit/Spiorad Baile Muna in collaboration with community groups, local artists and the wider community in Ballymun. This project’s aim is to to build a publicly accessible living archive of human relationship to place. To meet the challenges of Climate Change we must nourish our connection to land and the ecosystems of place; both human and more than human. The project’s starting point will be to creatively investigate and celebrate our unbreakable connection to the land the communities of Ballymun live within. These connections might be old and generational or new and freshly forming. At its heart, the project is about the intangible value of Ballymun as a place that holds memory and life, and to honor the human and more than human life that continues to live there. The main work of this project will be to co-creating a Spirit map of Ballymun. The mapping will be conducted through a workshop series with collaborating community members which will culminate in a final public showing of the work. The Spirit Map will live on in a public archive accessible to the community.
The Walls Project
The Walls Project is a dynamic creative arts agency and social enterprise specialising in large-scale street art and community engagement initiatives. Best known for its internationally renowned Waterford Walls Street Art Festival, now entering its 11th year, the organisation has flourished since its formal incorporation as a CLG in 2018.
With a wealth of experience in both community-driven projects and public art commissions, The Walls Project excels at harnessing mural arts as a powerful tool for community engagement and access to the arts. Their team is highly skilled in facilitating participatory and collaborative projects at local, national and international levels, fostering co-creation between artists and community members to produce meaningful and impactful artworks.
Recent high-profile projects include collaborations with local authorities such as the DLR Anseo series for Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council (2021 to 2025), New Ross Walls, the Medieval Ferns Experience, and Tipperary Town Revitalisation Projects. Additional murals have been created in cities and towns across Ireland, including Portlaoise, Belfast, Kerry, Cork, Galway, and Westport.
In 2024, The Walls Project celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Waterford Walls festival which saw 55 murals painted across Waterford City over the course of 10 days in August.
Project Details
In collaboration with Ballymun is Brilliant, the Walls Project will run a community-based art initiative in Ballymun focused on climate action and climate justice. This project will begin with two workshops, bringing together a number of local community groups to discuss environmental challenges and their impact on the area. These discussions will aim to amplify local voices, spark new ideas, and promote climate action.
The insights and creative ideas gathered from these workshops will be used to create a brief for a commissioned artist who will design a mural inspired by the community’s vision. The mural will be painted on a selected wall in Ballymun, with workshop participants invited to assist in the painting process. By involving community members at every stage, this project fosters engagement, collaboration, and a shared sense of purpose.
The final mural will be a vibrant, community-driven piece of public art, serving as a visual representation of the community’s commitment to climate action and justice, while inspiring ongoing conversations and action around sustainability.
Cabbage & Kraut
Cabbage & Kraut is a sporadic creative collaboration between long-time friends Maria Canavan and Sarah Quinn based in Dublin, that sprang to life in 2022 with a pop-up exhibition. Since then, the duo have taken part in artistic exchanges and a hybrid art project exploring Dublin’s lost cultural spaces.Maria is a creative producer who also works in art conservation on paintings from the 14th century to modern times, with Cabbage and Kraut she’s tapping into the spontaneity and fun of her past as a street artist. Sarah is a creative producer, and corporate social sustainability professional with projects ranging from site-specific performances, to global community engagement initiatives. Cabbage & Kraut is continuing in the same vein as all her favourite projects: following a spontaneous creative impulse to an unknown fermentation. Sarah and Maria share a love for community spaces, food and a concern for the future of our Irish Food systems. Their experience in the cultural sector has cultivated a fascination with the power of culture to both connect and exclude people. Harnessing that power to connect, Cabbage & Kraut brings an inclusive, playful outlook to their work that invites audiences to engage with serious issues through an accessible, creative lens.
Project Details
After years of demolition and regeneration, Ballymun has found itself a Lidl away from being classed as a food desert. With no shopping centre, no restaurants and no pub, locals face challenges to find spaces to shop, socialise and eat together. Undaunted by systemic failures, Ballymun locals have taken matters into their own hands, , building grassroots communities producing, making and sharing food in innovative, sustainable ways that can show Dublin the way forward.
Cabbage & Kraut aim to celebrate this Ballymun that locals are creating for themselves. In 2025, we will explore the grassroots, greenthumbs and wonderful fruits of labour to co-create a discovery trail for Ballymun-ers and blow-ins like ourselves. Throwing the spotlight on the green growth that has found its way through the concrete cracks and established roots in the community.
Engaging with local groups through research, workshops and events, this project aims to explore ways to encourage broader participation.. Our work will be designed to inspire people to get involved and see the potential of community action. The process will be a map, or a taste or a trail leading to a project shaped by the wealth of community in Ballymun.
Adam Mohamed
Adam Mohamed is a poet from Ballymun. He began writing poetry in 2020 during the pandemic by writing and releasing a spoken word poem ‘Untitled’, detailing the complexities of growing up mixed race/religion in a working class area. This piece went viral, and helped launch Adam’s career. Untitled has since been taught on both the Junior and Leaving Certificate curriculums.
Adam has since developed his craft to include music and is currently working on a debut album
with funding from the Basic Income for Artists pilot. He has collaborated on works with Heinken, Census, Tullamore Dew, Google, and GOAL Next Gen. He was selected to perform
in Berlin, as part of ‘Zeitgeist Irland’, an initiative headed by the Irish Embassy in Berlin.
Arts aside, Adam is a community worker and facilitator. He has been involved with MABS, Young Ballymun, Axis, and Ballymun Tidy Towns. He has developed and delivered creative writing workshops to schools, youth clubs, charities, and writing centers. Most recently, he organized a project with Senator Lynn Ruane and the Oireachtas which brought young politicians from the EU and Balkans into Mountjoy Prison to have discussions about peace security with the men. The first of its kind.
Project Details
My project is to create a short story, poetry, and photo book, developed solely by the Ballymun community, from all ages and backgrounds. The book will revolve around the 4 seasons and each chapter will contain stories and photos which will showcase the unique nature of our community both in climate and in people. The main goal of this is to celebrate ourselves and
our community and give an uplifting window into Ballymun, capturing our essence. We deserve an opportunity to tell our own stories for once! I will collaborate with local youths, local artists, and local community groups to make this happen. We will have many workshops and discussions to generate ideas and content. As an end goal we will get this published, have an exhibition, and do some live readings.
Mark Clare
Mark Clare has a BA in Fine Art (Sculpture) from Central St.Martins College of Art & Design and a Master of Fine Art from the University of Ulster. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and participated in numerous Artist Residency Programs. Over the past 30 years I have developed a research-led, interdisciplinary practice, employing a variety of media including sculpture, video, animation, sound, performance, and photography. In recent years I have produced projects that examine to what extent human activities have had a significant impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. Residencies have been a major component in the development of my practice. This often entails engaging with a variety of local people, with specialist knowledge and skills, to complete a project. It is this particular connection to place/community that allows for distinctive projects to develop. Through these residencies I have built up a wide network of colleagues and collaborators, that includes artists, dancers, choreographers, film makers, engineers, programmers, and scientists from various fields, with whom I have collaborated with in the development of numerous projects in both Ireland and abroad.
Project Details
For Ballymun is Brilliant I will invite local residents to participate in a project that encourages communities to consider their surrounding environments from a multispecies perspective, to challenge our fundamental relationships with nature and what this might mean for the future of biodiversity conservation and communal growth.
Residents will be invited to participate in a variety of creative workshops. In these workshops we will connect to ideas of collaboration and co-existence as a way to learn with nature to create a more holistic, sustainable future. Examples of symbiotic relationships, found throughout all ecosystems, are used to highlight the interconnectedness of the natural world.
Participants are encouraged to tap into the intelligence that exists beyond our brain – in our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships, through collaboration, to learn from each other more readily, communicate more fluidly, and pursue shared goals more effectively.
Through these workshops we will collectively explore connecting to, and exploring with other species to tell the stories of these ecosystems. Through these stories we will develop the artifacts necessary to create, and choreograph, a “procession”, with an emphasis on the symbiotic ecologies relating to these specific locations.
Sophie Carroll-Hunt
Sophie Carroll-Hunt is a visual artist based in Longford and Dublin, specialising in print and illustration. Her vibrant work is often characterised by bold lines, bright colours, and playful repeating motifs, combining aspects of traditional printmaking techniques with digital illustration.
In addition to her personal practice, Sophie is passionate about arts participation and community engagement as she regularly facilitates playful and accessible printmaking workshops and collaborates on creative projects in schools, community settings, and arts initiatives. Recently she held collaborative screen printing workshops in the Dóchas Centre as part of the Visual Arts in Prisons Scheme.
She completed a BA in Visual Art Practice from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in 2016, where she focused on printmaking methods like woodblock and screen printing to create large-scale prints, artist books, and activist zines. Since graduating she has been a member of Black Church Print Studio.
Her work has been exhibited throughout Ireland with recent exhibitions including Blooming Together: Celebrating Women in Irish Illustration, Hen’s Teeth (2024) and Distro: The Reading Room, Muine Bheag Arts (2024).
Project Details
Combining creative expression with environmental activism, artist Sophie Carroll-Hunt is excited to collaborate with
Ballymun community members through a series of accessible workshops aimed at exploring the use of printmaking to
upcycle clothing and textiles.
Community members will be part of the decision making within this creative project, which will begin with an
exploratory workshop where participants can discuss ideas, share goals, and decide upon the printmaking methods
they as a group would like to explore, such as lino block and screen-printing.
This will be followed by 3 further workshops where the group will build upon the ideas discussed in the first session.
Participants will bring old or unused fabrics (like t-shirts or bags) or use textile scraps donated and experiment with
print to upcycle them and create unique pieces, whilst continuing a dialogue around sustainable fashion and climate
justice.
As part of this project, Sophie will also host a pop-up live printing event in collaboration with the Thanks Hun,
Ballymun swap shop, where additional community members will have the opportunity to pull their own print and
transform their clothing, tote bag or a textile patch with a pre-prepared design, created with the group during the
previous workshops.