Workshop: Performative Drawing with Joseph Heffernan
Friday 15 May 2026 | 2pm–5pm | DROP IN
Artist Joseph Heffernan, whose current exhibition ‘where oxlips and the nodding violet grows’ runs at GOMA until 6 June, will host a drawing performance on Friday 15 May in connection with this year’s National Drawing Day celebrations.
Drop in to the gallery from 2pm–5pm, where Joseph will be making a series of drawings in the gallery space in response to the exhibition in-situ.
Building upon a recent similar event in Triskel Art Centre, Cork, Joseph will take the objects and images in the exhibition as a starting point and abstract them in an attempt to build new forms and associations. The resulting drawings will then be used when plotting a way forward into a new body of work.
Visitors will be able to observe the artist’s process and creative approach unfold in real time.
This approach is at home with Heffernan’s broader practice. His work – spanning sculpture, painting, drawing and text – draws on found, antique and reclaimed materials to explore how objects accumulate meaning over time. Devotional in spirit, his assemblages and installations create theatrical environments that question how we construct and poeticise personal narratives, and what we choose to hold as significant.
His current body of work imagines a speculative world governed by ‘The Ceremony of the Flowers’, a mysterious game that blends poetry, mathematics and esoteric knowledge into an elaborate system of signs and rituals. Sitting somewhere between the everyday and the quasi-divine, the work invites reflection on belief, faith, and the frameworks we build to make sense of the world.
All welcome | No booking required | Free admission