NEST Photography Commissions - 7 Schools Now Completed

During 2023, Artistic Director of NEST Veronica Coburn facilitated hundreds of workshops with children in Dublin 15, collating a large collection of drawings and thoughts about local life as she travelled from school to school. 23 young people were chosen to continue on in the NEST project, but Draíocht really wanted to go back into schools to continue some of the conversations that we started.

So during January and February, we sent photographer Liadh Connolly to revisit some of these classrooms to explore concepts of identity and self-representation through photography with the young people. Working alongside Liadh, students experienced a professional photoshoot setting and were supported by her to express their own individuality through poses and movements.

The resulting exhibition of colour photographs, directed and captured both by the students themselves, and their classmates will be nested on a black and white collaged wallpapering, created from the original preparatory words, thoughts and ideas from Veronica's workshops during 2023, sessions that were part of the process that led to the Spréacha Soar Festival for Children & Young People taking place this March.

Liadh's exhibition, You, Me, Us opens on 17th February in the First Floor Gallery.

Liadh Connolly is a Dublin based photographer. Her passion lies with meeting new people and exploring their stories and personalities through photography.

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Draíocht is delighted to deliver NEST, a visionary, artistically ambitious project of scale that will see 23 stories inspired by Dublin 15’s children and young people, aged just a few days old to 22 years old, our youngest citizens, brought to life through collaboration with leading multi-disciplinary performance artists - playwrights, theatre makers, spoken word artists, dance artists, and music artists - to produce 23 new contemporary works that map our present through the eyes of our children and young people.

NEST's 23 new pieces of work will be performed in homes and schools across Dublin 15 on March 1st 2024 to peer audiences and families. Then the project will culminate in the Spréacha Soar Festival for Children & Young People, from 11-16 March, when all 23 works will take over Draíocht’s two stages.

Led by Artistic Director, Veronica Coburn, NEST is about citizenship, alongside the idea of home, both individual and collective, a single house, a familial place, a society. It will mark the Decade of Centenaries by exploring the ideals of our origin state, liberty, equality and equity in a contemporary context.

On Saturday 17th February, two complementary NEST Exhibitions will open to the public:
In the Ground Floor Gallery, a newly commissioned series of portraits and still life's from leading visual artists Zsolt Basti, Sahoko Blake, Una Sealy RHA & Dorothy Smith RHA, featuring the children and young people participating in NEST, Curated by Sharon Murphy.

In the First Floor Gallery, a photographic and text installation will be the focus of an exhibition featuring self portraiture and testimonials made by children and young people from Dublin 15 schools participating in NEST. Created and led by artist Liadh Connolly.

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NEST is based on HOME THEATRE, an original idea by Marcus Vinicius Faustini (Brazil) and Kerry Kyriacos Michael (UK). Draíocht’s iteration, HOME THEATRE (Ireland), took place in 2018.

NEST is funded by ART: 2023, a Decade of Centenaries Collaboration between The Arts Council and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

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