Blog 3: Duffy Mooney-Sheppard, Visual Artist with Creativity in the Classroom

Duffy Mooney-Sheppard is a visual artist, storyteller and children's theatre maker with over fifteen years of experience bringing creativity to life for children from toddlers to primary school age. She brings this playful methodology to the adults she works with too.

She is currently the Creativity in the Classroom Artist at St James's Primary School in Dublin 8, part of a long-running programme weaving the arts into everyday school life. Her recent work includes The Butterfly Doctor and Island Homelands, immersive visual arts experiences for young children in The Ark’s theatre and The Well, a permanent visual arts and performance space developed with theatre maker Darren Yorke at Marino Institute of Education.

In children's theatre, she collaborates with Darren Yorke and Liam McCarthy. Their production Boss Rob: A Masterclass for Aspiring Artists won the Excellence in Innovation in Children's Theatre award at Dublin Fringe Festival 2024.

Her illustration work has been shown at the Graphic Studio Gallery (Dublin), Candid Arts Trust (London) and the Bologna Children's Book Fair (Italy). She holds an MA in Children's Book Illustration from Cambridge School of Art and qualifications in Art & Design Education and Fine Art Print from NCAD, and is supported by Arts Council funding. She also regularly shares her practice with educators and community workers through CPD programmes.

Creativity in the Classroom is an artist – teacher collaborative programme involving five primary schools in Dublin 8 and 12. Established in 1997, this innovative school-based arts programme was set up in the belief that the arts could actively and positively support the emotional and social wellbeing of the children in the area. The programme was a recipient of a Portal Documentation Award in 2025.

We’re delighted to continue our guest blog series, sharing perspectives from the arts in education programme, Creativity in the Classroom.

A Butterfly, a House, a Garden: Improvisation, transformation and play in making art together

A student participating in Creativity in the Classroom with Duffy Mooney-Sheppard

“That reminds me of…”

I began working as an artist with Creativity in the Classroom in 2024. What I love most is the opportunity to become embedded in the school community, getting to know the children, teachers, and staff over time. This closeness brings something rare to my facilitation, something I genuinely treasure: inspiration comes from them, from where they are, and from what we make together.

I never arrive with a full plan for the six weeks. We start somewhere, and I respond week by week to what emerges. I’ll often open a session by saying…

“Last week when you did this, it made me think of…” or “Remember when you said this reminded you of …”

I’ve come to see how important it is to share this thinking with them. They get to witness an artist making associations and connections, using one thing to ignite the next, something entirely natural in play, and something they do instinctively. Seeing it reflected in our time together gives our making and collaboration a sense of meaning and momentum.

Two Senior Infant Classes, March – May 2026

It began with a butterfly trapped in my shed, the first one I’d seen that year. We watched a short video I took of its capture and release, then talked about the signs of spring we’d each been noticing. From there, we got our hands into scrunched paper and masking tape. The children noticed that at this stage what we’d made looked like cocoons. We added wings and antennae, transforming them into butterflies. When they were finished, we danced together around the classroom, visiting flowers represented by battery-operated lights scattered around the room. As we moved, we discovered, to my surprise, that the wings made a sound when they flapped to the music.

Butterflies led us naturally to flowers, and to one of my favourite picture books — The Boy with Flowers in His Hair by Jarvis. Using strips of coloured card, we experimented with bending, rolling, and sticking in different ways to create large, flower-inspired constructions. From simple beginnings the work became wonderfully involved and complex — masks, crowns, elaborate neckpieces, and things that reminded us of houses or bouncy castles.

Later we looked at these alongside images of the fantastical architecture of Dr. Seuss and the extraordinary buildings of Gaudí, then we turned to cutting card. Fold the card and cut: a semicircle opens into a circle, a triangle becomes a diamond, random cuts produce a star. We took suggestions from the group: can we cut a stairs? and figured things out together. We were thinking with our scissors. We began sticking the shapes together and they became houses, some became rockets, and we fixed them to watercolour sheets with Blu Tack.

The following session, we looked again at the flowers, insects, and animals you might find in a garden, on the walk to school, or in the park. In one class I heard about a ladybird found on the way to school, brought into class and kept in a jar as a class pet before being released later that day. Inspired by these images and stories, we painted across our watercolour sheets, then near the end gently peeled away the Blu-Tacked houses, finding their negative shape in each garden.

On reflection, all of our work had been about transformation. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly. A strip of card, bent or rolled, becomes something sculptural that surprises even the hand that made it. A sheet of card, folded and cut, holds its secret until you open it: what went in as a triangle comes out as a diamond, what went in as a semicircle becomes a circle. And lifting a shape from wet paint, finding its exact outline left behind, brought real gasps. Something was there, now gone, and yet it left its mark. That absence becomes the image.

In truth, of course some days feel wobbly and we are a little bit lost and other days we are moving together, inventing, sharing, ideas flowing. On this, I have to thank the teachers and SNAs at St. James’s for welcoming these creative experiments warmly into their classrooms. And while I set out to facilitate these moments of flow and discovery for the children I work with, experiencing this together, being part of their joy and delight, gives me so much motivation and inspiration as an artist.

All image credit: Senior Infants from St James National School, Dublin 8 taking part in Creativity in the Classroom. Photo credit: Duffy Mooney-Sheppard