Red Bird Youth Collective Project 2026

If you would like to join Red Bird Youth Collective, you can submit a registration form, or if you would like more information you can contact redbird@galwayartscentre.ie

Red Bird Youth Collective launches an ambitious new 2026 project, kindly supported by the Arts Council through the Children and Young People’s Project Award.

Working with artists Paul McDonell and Taïm Haimet, members are currently immersed in developing sculptural skills and collaborative making processes. At the heart of the project is the creation of three fictional political parties: Pangea Party, Green Party and Other Party each with its own visual language, campaign aesthetics and ideological flavour.

Drawing on parody and satire, the collective is playfully interrogating the spectacle of elections: the symbols, slogans, promises and performances that shape public life. Through material exploration, character-building and collective world-making, members are examining how power is constructed, staged and consumed.

Throughout the programme, members are engaging in an intensive series of specialist workshops that combine traditional sculptural craft with digital technologies. The process includes life casting (working in pairs to cast one another), exploring how to sculpt realistic skin and create silicone moulds, and casting and finishing silicone skin pieces – including painting and hair punching during studio sessions at Stiúideo Fia. Participants are also sculpting full figures in Sculpey and curing their work through baking processes.

Alongside these analogue techniques, members are developing digital sculpting skills using ZBrush to create character heads, which are then 3D printed and hand painted. The group is also learning how to 3D scan objects, integrating digital capture and fabrication into their wider sculptural practice. These combined processes support a dynamic exploration of character, identity and material transformation within the project.

The project will culminate in a public exhibition and live presentation later in 2026, where audiences will be invited into Red Bird’s imaginative political landscape.

Paul McDonnell is a stop-motion artist, sculptor, and creative director with nearly three decades of professional experience in sculptural fabrication, model-making, puppet construction, and practical effects for film, animation, and installation. He is the founder and creative director of Stiúideo Fia, Ireland’s only dedicated stop-motion studio and training hub, based in Connemara.

Paul has worked extensively across mould-making, armature construction, silicone and plaster casting, aluminium and mixed-material fabrication, and large-scale sculptural builds. Alongside his studio practice, he is an experienced educator and mentor, lecturing at IADT and delivering specialist training with Creative Futures Academy, National Talent Academy for Animation, and multiple industry partners. His work sits at the intersection of craft, engineering, and narrative, with a strong emphasis on material behaviour, structural logic, and learning-through-making.

Taïm Haimet is a visual artist based in Galway. Born in France of Syrian parents, her personal work explores the inheritance of a Middle Eastern identity deeply intertwined with a history of colonialism, war and loss. The question of where we place the notion ‘Sacred’ on what is lost, or on what is left individually or collectively is at the heart of her research. Drawing from Arab folklore, poetry and mysticism, she imagines ‘sacred spaces’ where these narratives can be honored symbolically and resonate with the contemporary world. Coming from a theatre background, her practice borrows its codes in the staging of space and narrative, and the importance given to the human voice and the body as mediums in and of themselves. Her work stems from family stories and personal experiences connecting with the global questions, which form the frameworks of narrative-based installations expressed through sculpture, video and sound.

She regularly collaborates with That’s Life Studio and has worked with MACNAS in 2023.

She completed a master’s degree in creative practice at the Galway ATU in 2024. She was awarded the 126 Gallery artist residency award 2023 and the 2023 RDS Visual Arts Awards.