Resources

Create News 39 – De-Centring during the Great Dithering

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Sophie Hope is a practice-based researcher and teacher. Her work is often developed with others through the format of devised workshops exploring subjects such as art and politics, physical and emotional experiences of work, stories of socially engaged art and the ethics of employability in the creative industries. She was an independent curator for 10 years, working locally and internationally to develop a collaborative, socially engaged curatorial practice. She has been a Lecturer in Socially Engaged Practices at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London since February 2024 where she is co-developing the Guildhall De-Centre for Socially Engaged Practice and Research.

Sophie shared a provocation to attendees at our 2025 Networking Event: Collaborative Futures. In this issue of Create News, we asked Sophie to expand upon the themes and issues raised by her work in the Guildhall De-Centre and discussed at Collaborative Futures.

published 3 June 2026

related events Create Networking Event 2025
related programme Networking Day

Create News 38 – Paper Trail

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The Create Reading Room offers access to a wealth of books, periodicals and pamphlets related to the development of social art practice in Ireland and beyond. Comprising a growing collection of 500+ published titles, the Reading Room is a designated space for research in a newly refurbished state of the art facility.

In recent years, Create’s Research and Learning Manager, Jennifer Fitzgibbon, has expanded both the library collection and the research associated with the institutional archive and holdings, alongside redeveloping the physical space. In this issue of Create News, Jennifer shares her perspective on Create’s history and future as reflected in the shelves.

published 14 October 2025

related events Create Café Series – help us shape the next five years of Create
related events Create Reading Group on Socially Engaged Collaborative Art

Create News 37 – Embedding Structures of Resilience

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One of Create’s core purposes as a resource organisation is to ensure that artists working in the field of collaborative socially engaged arts are supported to operate to the highest possible standards. In reviewing our training offerings, we consistently hear from artists and community members that conflict resolution and working sustainably with difference is an area of anxiety. In response to this we have in recent years hosted two CPD workshops on this topic, drawing on work by Dr Eve Olney alongside her collaborators Krini Kafiris, Spyros Tsiknas and Rachel Botha.

In order to further explore this important issue, we have invited Dr Eve Olney, socially engaged artist, activist, curator, educator and practice-based researcher to share some of her own experiences of collaborative work, addressing them in terms of identifying common issues that arise during social practice, and which frameworks and processes can be used to deal with difference, diversity and conflict in this work.

published 8 May 2025

Create News 36 – Abundant Futures: Building Equity in a Divided World

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Create’s work has always been to support artists, academics and activists working in community contexts to tackle important social issues. While the principles of this work remain largely the same, the context in which it takes place is ever-evolving.

We invited artist Dana Olărescu to reflect on the contemporary issues of divisive information and the division of communities and to discuss how collaborative socially engaged artists can navigate these challenges in their work.

Dana is a socially engaged artist working at the intersection of installation, performance, and social design, who focuses on challenging minority exclusion and environmental injustice. Through participatory methodologies that democratise access to art and knowledge, she aims to give underserved migrant groups and people habitually excluded from decision-making processes the agency to become active co-producers of culture.

published 10 October 2024

Create News 35 – Art and Social Action International education in collaborative and socially engaged art

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Create’s role as a national resource organisation for collaborative arts has naturally led to a long history of engagement with third level arts education in Ireland. Our organisation has developed alongside the offer of third level institutions and the practice of those working in the sector over the past forty years.

Create often acts as a bridge between formal education and professional practice, supporting recent graduates and other emerging practitioners to develop their methodologies, their critical thinking, and their networks
of support and guidance.

This issue of Create News features some select reflections on the state of socially engaged art education, from our colleagues from SPCUNY (Social Practice, City University New York), who we invited to contribute to this publication alongside those involved in the new MA/MFA Art and Social Action at NCAD, in which Create is a partner.

published 11 April 2024

related programme Dublin 8 Neighbourhood Residency
related programme Art and Society Learning Programme

Create News 34 – Evaluate This! Thinking out loud on process-based evaluation

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Evaluating socially engaged arts practice can be a sensitive issue. This wide-ranging term describes a variety of artworks and projects, and so, how best to evaluate socially engaged practice evokes competing opinions about its character and value. In March 2023, Create invited Dr Gráinne Coughlan, postdoctoral researcher at TU Dublin, to unpick some of the assumptions around evaluation in conversation with artist Dr. Susanne Bosch. This public event, entitled “Evaluate This!” directly informs the current issue of Create News, in which we invited Gráinne and Susanne to expand on topics discussed during this public event, and to share some modes of thinking about evaluation for socially engaged practice.

published 17 October 2023

related programme Evaluative Framework

Create News 33 – Meditations on the role of the artist in the age of impending collapse

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Rita Marcalo is the Artistic Director of Instant Dissidence, a dance company based in Cloughjordan Ecovillage. As a socially and ecologically engaged company, Instant Dissidence foregrounds the role of dance as a social engine.
In 2020 Rita was awarded the Create and SIRIUS Arts Centre Artist Residency Award, funded through the Arts Council of Ireland’s Artist in the Community Scheme, which is managed by Create.
The residency took place within the wider context of Instant Dissidence’s work in dance and the climate emergency. This issue of Create News features the edited transcript of a talk given by Rita at Nordic Street Conference organised by PASSAGE festival / Helsingør Teater (Denmark and Sweden) on 10th June 2022. Rita’s participation at the conference was scheduled as part of Instant Dissidence’s European tour of SlowMo, funded by Perform Europe.

published 17 May 2023

related programme Artist in the Community Scheme

Create News 32 – The Artist Archive, A reflection by Creative Places Tuam Bursary awardees

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Jojo Hynes and Midie Corcoran, Tuam-based artists, were awarded a Creative Places Tuam Bursary in July 2020. The purpose of the bursary was to support and nurture socially engaged artists’ practice, specifically
aimed at artists with a track record of working collaboratively with communities of place or interest. Jojo and Midie have used the time afforded by the bursary to reflect on their experiences as collaborative artists, and to research inspiring collectives and explore best working practices within their community. They were guided in this work by mentor Kate O’Shea.

This issue of Create News features some of their observations and conclusions, in conversation with Kate O’Shea.

published 26 October 2022

related programme Creative Places

Create News 31 – The Power of the Arts in Enacting Social Change

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John Bissett is a community worker who lives and works in Dublin. John has been involved with a broad range of social movements working to effect positive change and to challenge the imposition of policies and actions which dominate and inflict suffering across the social body. He has been involved with grassroots youth and community work in the city of Dublin since the late 1980s. This has led to participation and leadership in many groups and social movements over the past four decades in Ireland, Australia and with groups across Europe. John is currently a member of Housing Action Now and Red Wheelbarrow Productions.

John is currently preparing a book for publication about the lives and struggles of public housing tenants, titled ‘It’s not where you live. It’s how you live’ to be out before the end of 2022. In this piece, John writes about the long history of arts and activism, focusing in particular on his working base of Rialto, Inchicore and Bluebell, in Dublin’s south inner city.

published 22 June 2022

related programme Multi-Story

Create News 30 – Art, Language and Migration

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Francesca La Morgia, originally from Italy, has been involved in a range of community projects primarily with migrant families in Ireland and in the UK for a number of years. In 2017, she created Mother Tongues, a non-profit organisation that aims to support migrant families in raising children with two or more languages. Francesca is the curator of the Mother Tongues Festival, the only festival in Ireland that focuses on multilingualism. This conversation, with Create’s Cultural Diversity Researcher Evgeny Shtorn, encompasses Francesca’s experience as a migrant, an academic, an artist, and her motivation for establishing the Mother Tongues Festival

published 14 April 2021

related programme Artist in the Community Scheme

Create News 29 – Land Walks: A Conversation on Identity, Belonging and the Irish Landscape

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Land Walks is a collaborative sound and visual art project by artist William Bock and residents of West Cork, that maps experiences of belonging and uprooting in the West Cork landscape through walking, storytelling and collaborative field recording.

This issue of Create News is based on a conversation between William Bock, Zoë O’Reilly, researcher and author of recent book ‘The In-Between Spaces of Asylum and Migration’, Vukasin Nedeljkovic, artist and creator of Asylum Archive, Donna Treya from West Cork Development Partnership and project participants Lora Mildred, Mariama Bah and Khanyo Dlamini.

published 8 December 2020

related programme Artist in the Community Scheme

Create News 28 – Utilising Political Imaginaries to Radicalise the Local

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Jeanne Van Heeswijk is an artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalise the local”. She works on long term community embedded projects that question art’s autonomy by combining performative action, discussions and other forms of organising and pedagogy in order to assist communities to take control of their own futures.

This is an edited transcript of a presentation given by Jeanne Van Heeswijk in Common Ground’s Studio 468 in February 2020.

published 19 June 2020