Irish Life
2024
Irish Life campus, Dublin 1

Lead Artist
In collaboration with Scoil Chaoimhín, WALLS and Business to Arts

Our City, Our Future was a five-month participatory public-art commission developed with primary-school children from Scoil Chaoimhín.

Commissioned by Irish Life, the project invited the children to reflect on their experiences of Dublin and imagine what their local city might become in the future. Through creative workshops, drawings, conversations and three-dimensional cardboard constructions, they explored the places, people and possibilities they wanted their future city to contain.

The children’s ideas became the foundation for a 29.5-metre mural installed on hoarding around the Irish Life campus. The completed work brought their individual contributions together into a shared vision of Dublin shaped by imagination, belonging and hope for the future.

The Co-Creation Process

The project began with listening to the children’s experiences of their city. Rather than introducing a predetermined mural design, I used open-ended creative, meditative activities to encourage them to consider what they valued about Dublin, what they would like to change and what might make the city a more welcoming and sustainable place in which to live.

The pupils developed their ideas through drawing, discussion and model-making. Creating cardboard buildings and structures allowed them to move beyond familiar representations of the city and imagine new forms, spaces and possibilities.

The workshops made room for playful and unexpected thinking. Ideas did not need to be realistic or immediately achievable; they could begin with curiosity, humour, fantasy or a personal experience of the local area. Each contribution offered a glimpse of how a child understood the city and what they hoped its future might hold.

From Individual Ideas to a Public Artwork

As Lead Artist, my role was to bring the children’s many drawings, structures and ideas together into a coherent mural while preserving the character of their original contributions.

This involved identifying recurring themes, visual connections and distinctive images within the workshop material. I then translated these elements into a resolved composition suitable for a large public site, balancing participant ownership with the practical and visual requirements of a permanent mural.

The design process moved between the children’s individual perspectives and the collective identity of the group. Rather than reproducing one drawing at a larger scale, the final mural created a shared imagined city in which multiple ideas could coexist.

This translation from classroom experimentation to public artwork was handled sensitively so that the mural retained the energy, inventiveness and visual language of the children’s work.

Participation and Public Space

The location of the mural allowed the children’s ideas to become visible beyond the school. Installed within the everyday environment of Dublin 1, the work was encountered by local residents, Irish Life staff, workers and passers-by. Workers and passers-by often contributed to the process, from helping to paint the mural, to spending time discussing the area and their experiences with me.

The children also contributed their fingerprints to the finished mural, leaving a direct physical trace of their participation within the public artwork. This final gesture reinforced the relationship between the finished design and the people whose ideas had shaped it.

The commission gave children an opportunity to see their creative work valued at an ambitious public scale. Their visions were not treated simply as preparatory workshop material, but as meaningful contributions to a shared conversation about the future of their community and city.

Creative Outcome

The completed mural transformed construction hoarding around the Irish Life campus into a colourful collective vision of Dublin’s future.

The project demonstrated how public art can create space for children’s perspectives within the city. By moving from personal reflection and playful experimentation to a permanent public outcome, the commission connected creativity with place, visibility and civic participation.

Recognition

The commission was shortlisted for Best Commissioning Practice at the 2025 Business to Arts Awards, recognising the collaborative relationship between artist, commissioner, school and community at the centre of the project.