Join Hollie Kearns, curator of Colour Field at Workhouse Union to plant an experimental artist’s garden, nurturing plants used for colour making. Please wear something appropriate for gardening and dress for the weather! Plants will include St John's Wort, Dyers Coreopsis, Woad, Weld, Goldenrod, Dyers Camomile, Black Knight Scabiosa and Rhubarb crown.

These plants will be used later in the Summer for colour-making workshops. Please join our newsletter to make a booking as workshops are announced.

*Meitheal is the Irish word for a working party.

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Colour Field is a cultivated garden situated in a fallow paddock at Workhouse Union, where we nurture colour-giving plants. The project is led by curator Hollie Kearns with support from the Workhouse Union team. There are a mixture of growing spaces from a polytunnel, to a mulched flower garden, to wild verges and hedgerow. Plants are cultivated for colour but we are also connecting to the many dye plants that are natural to the site, such as nettle, dock, hawthorn and yarrow.

Natural dyeing is a nature connection practice that brings us into closer companionship with native and introduced plants. This practice has a long and rich heritage in Ireland, which we celebrate through programmes of contemporary art and textile workshops.

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Hollie Kearns is an independent curator and producer with a strong interest in cultural and ecological heritage. Hollie is a co-founder of Workhouse Union. From 2018-2024 Hollie was the Learning and Public Engagement Curator at Butler Gallery. She sits on the board of the Acorn Project Collaboration, and was a coordinator at the Heritage Council of Ireland’s Irish Walled Towns Network. Her approach to practice is to work closely with artists to create rich community, heritage and ecological contexts in which to propose and produce new work. Participation, inclusion and collaboration have consistently been the framework for artistic production in her work.

Alongside curatorial practice, Hollie maintains a personal practice in natural dyeing and quilt-making, and a parallel research practice that is currently focused on a confluence of Irish plant and textiles histories, sustainable art practices and nature connection. She balances this work with co-parenting a young family.

https://workhouseunion.com/pro...