Creative Campus
Spuddy Encounters
Spuddy Encounters is a collaborative art project exploring food traditions and the act of eating together. In particular, it will focus on examining and working with the potato, a versatile and humble vegetable that is a food staple in many cultures.
Our 2025 Creative Campus team of artists - curator, Ala Buisir and recent NCAD graduates Mollie Donegan and Steph Saidha - will lead the way in a playful and thought provoking group process that prioritises the interests, views, and experiences of this year's participants. The mediums of art will be food/cooking, photography, print, and sculpture, but as a participatory arts project, the direction will be shaped entirely by the participants as they go.
The project will be based in The Making Space in Mountain Park, Tallaght every Tuesday from mid April to late May. Examples of activities could include alternative photography, documenting participants encounters with potatoes, cooking together, creating a collective menu, and the idea of playing with your food!
At the end of the project, the team of artists will work together with the participating schools to create a showing of the final outcomes. One student will also be awarded a scholarship for the NCAD portfolio course, taking place this summer.
More details about the project, and about the participating schools, will be announced here soon, so watch this space.
We are delighted to announce that Ala Buisir has been chosen as the curator, alongside Steph Saidha and Mollie Donegan, who have been chosen as the two Graduate Artists of Creative Campus 2025.
Ala Buisir
Ala Buisir is an award-winning visual artist & journalist. Born in Ireland with Libyan roots, Ala is a graduate BA in Photography from TU Dublin and MA in Journalism from DCU. She is currently undertaking a PhD by practice at the University of Limerick, in which she investigates the ‘othering’ of Muslim women in the Western world by societal Islamaphobia and Western tropes of Islam. In doing so, she aims to use this research to inform participatory arts-based interventions that challenge Islamaphobia against Muslim women by amplifying Muslim women's voices and creating avenues for digital storytelling in which these voices are agents in their narrative.
Ala’s work documents the social and political tension around us today. The aim is to raise awareness by presenting events through different perspectives in hopes that it may also bring about change.
She is also the co-founder of Gorm Media - an impact-focused digital media start-up with a mission of unifying across differences and advancing belonging for marginalised communities - and a board member of the Amal Women's Association - a Muslim women-led organisation which provides front-line services to Muslim women connected to the Muslim community nationwide.
Steph Saidha
Steph Saidha is a Limerick-born visual artist, whose work focuses on the connections between people, landscapes, traditions and play. Through a blend of studio research, engagements with communities of place and storytelling, her practice is committed to creating playful works that invite people to engage with art in a slowed-down, embodied and decompressing manner. Her research draws on interdisciplinary methods taken from socially engaged art, hospitality, critical pedagogies and care work. While this work can take many forms, it often tends towards photography, film, drawing, text and installations.
Steph completed a BA in Fine Art Media at the National College of Art & Design (NCAD), Dublin in 2023 and an MA in Art and Social Action at the same institution in 2024. Most recently, her series of prints, Wrapper Drawings, were on exhibition in The Limerick Show at Ormston House from November 2024 to February 2025.
Mollie Donegan
Mollie Donegan is a socially engaged visual artist based in Tallaght. She recently graduated from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) with a First-Class BFA in Sculpture. Her practice focuses on site-responsive installations, performance, and print, transforming familiar and functional elements of built environments into interactive and playful experiences.
Her work highlights the significance of communal gatherings and shared spaces, particularly in urban settings, as a means to explore and challenge power dynamics and address unjust systems.
Mollie's achievements include being long-listed for the RDS Visual Art Award. Her final-year critical research essay, titled Social Art Methodologies Used to Respond to Displacement and Empower Those Experiencing it in Ireland: A Case Study of Tallaght, was highly commended and selected for inclusion in the NCAD Library.
Recent exhibitions and projects include the Dublin Art Book Fair, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Muine Bheag Arts COMMUNE Programme (Graduate-in-Residency, August 2024), Open Studio Sunday Wishes at DE LICEIRAS 18 in Porto, and NCAD Works Degree Show (June 2024).
More info about Creative Campus 2025 to follow.
What is Creative Campus?
Established in 2012, Creative Campus is an annual site-specific arts programme supporting emerging artists to create work that engages diverse audiences in South Dublin County. This initiative of Tallaght Community Arts is in partnership with the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) Access Programme, South Dublin County Council Arts Office and Noise Dublin.
Creative Campus supports graduate artists to gain valuable experience in working in the heart of communities and to develop the skills needed for such projects.
Previous Creative Campus Programmes
Creative Campus 2024
Students from Coláiste de hÍde and Mount Seskin Community College were the participating artists for Creative Campus 2024. The students spent two days working with NCAD graduate artist Lauryn McNamee, foraging for leaves, mushrooms, twigs, and any interesting looking pieces of nature from Watergate Park, which were then used to create cyanotype prints. The solution was mixed and applied to a sheet of paper. Then, using the rays from the sun and UV lamps indoors, their artwork darkened and developed into beautiful negative prints.
Creative Campus 2023
The Creative Campus 2023 programme was based in St. Enda’s Park, Rathfarnham and was an exploration of the physical and mythical landscape of the park. The featured works were personal responses to the park and the imaginative worlds that exist, just below the surface. NCAD graduate artists Brianna Marshall Crowe and Kate Power worked with artist/curator Tony Fegan to create works inspired by the history and landscape of the park.
Creative Campus 2022
Surface Beneath / Faoin Dromchla
The Creative Campus 2022 programme was based in St. Enda’s Park, Rathfarnham. The intention of the programme was to explore in detail the environs of St Enda’s Park, and to create installations of work that personally respond to the physical landscape of the park and the imaginative worlds that exist just below the surface.
Creative Campus 2021
Me-and-der-ing
The Creative Campus 2021 programme was based in North Clondalkin Library. Our graduate and participating artists navigated the area in and around the new North Clondalkin Library. We were delighted to welcome NCAD graduate artists Joanne Clerkin and Claire O'Sullivan to the 2021 programme. They worked alongside our 2021 curator Jonathan Stokes and producer Jennifer Webster.
Creative Campus 2020
A Stitch in Time
Creative Campus 2020 was located in the beautiful valley of Glenasmole in the Dublin Mountains. NCAD graduate artists Julia Collins and Andy Wielens worked alongside artist/curator Jonathan Stokes and producer Jennifer Webster to create works inspired by the valley and its community. We were delighted to invite students from Mount Seskin Community College and Glenasmole National School to become participating artists in Creative Campus 2020.
Creative Campus 2019
Linger 4 Longer
County Library, Tallaght was the location for Creative Campus 2019. Our creative exploration/theme was the interface between the interior of the library and the exterior of Chamber Square. Over a 3 month period from March - May, our artists and co-curators explored all aspects of Chamber Square, the buildings that surround it and the people who use it. Creative Campus graduate artists and participating second level students re-imagined Chamber Square as a thriving hub of activity, a celebratory public space, a place to Linger 4 Longer.
Creative Campus 2018
By a Better Deed
Creative Campus 2018 was located in Pearse Museum, Rathfarnham. Drawing on the location and its history, the project investigated contemporary perceptions and interpretations of who, or indeed what a hero is. This three-month project was heavily focused on the participation of second level students in conjunction with our curators and artists to produce a collaborative body of work. The passive and proactive roles of the group were engaged with while investigating the subject through a variety of art forms such as creating installations with sculpture, digital video and live art actions.
Creative Campus 2017
D24 - A User's Manual
Creative Campus 2017 was an investigation of Tallaght, exploring a wide variety of locations in and around the area, in a spirit of curiosity and celebration. Over a three-month period our artist curators explored aspects of Tallaght's history, geography and culture. The programme included the participation of Tallaght Young Film Makers.
Creative Campus 2016
Centenary
Centenary was the theme of Creative Campus 2016. The participating artists were asked to address the theme of our 1916 centenary celebrations, the proclamation and what it represented to them. Creative Campus 2016 participating artists were given the opportunity to work with curator Jim Cathcart at his studio at The Making Space – Tallaght.
Creative Campus 2015
Between
St. Dominic's Community Centre was the location for Creative Campus 2015. The participating artists were asked to address the theme of community engagement. Tallaght Community Arts had been working with St. Dominic's Community Centre over the previous five years in an ongoing arts development process.
Creative Campus 2014
Think Outside The Book
The traditional library exists in a physical space, it focuses on storage and preservation, cataloguing and quiet learning. Libraries now exist as hybrid spaces, as much virtual as real, the library network animated by and situated within communities of users. Sources of information based on paper, coexist with digital and online archives. The SDCC Library network and, in particular, County Library Tallaght, served as a framework for the work of the participating artists of Creative Campus 2014.
Creative Campus 2013
Vestige
Creative Campus 2013 was curated by artist Siobhan Carroll with artist Chloe Brenan serving as project manager. The venue was a store in The Square Shopping Centre, Tallaght. The theme was an exploration of South Dublin County’s industrial heritage. The team visited sites where former industries were located, and met with staff of these places, in particular the Saggart Paper Mill.
Proud to be funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and South Dublin County Council