Blog 2: Deirdre O’Reilly, Visual Artist with Creativity in the Classroom

Deirdre O’Reilly is a Dublin‑based visual artist working across sculptural forms in clay and printing on porcelain. Alongside her studio practice, she has spent more than twenty‑five years deeply engaged in arts in education, working as a visiting artist with Creativity in the Classroom and as an arts facilitator with Draíocht Arts Centre. Her focus has consistently centred on children’s art, creative play, and accessible, hands‑on approaches to making. Collaboration, material exploration, and the belief that creative experience is essential to how young people learn underpin all of her work with schools and community groups.

O’Reilly has also completed several Per Cent for Art commissions for schools and community spaces, developing these projects in close collaboration with children. These commissions have allowed her to bring her studio practice and her educational ethos together, creating artworks that reflect collective authorship and the imaginative capacity of young makers.

Her artistic work has been exhibited widely and is held in public collections. She has shown at the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition at the Royal Ulster Museum in Belfast in both 2023 and 2024. In 2022 she received the Irish Ceramics Award, and in 2021 she was awarded an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. That same year, her large‑scale outdoor installation at Sculpture in Context at the National Botanic Gardens received a Distinction and won the Public Vote Award for Most Popular Outdoor Sculpture.

Her work is featured in the latest edition of Irish Ceramics. A graduate of NCAD, she is also a ceramics tutor at the National College of Art and Design.

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.

Creativity in the Classroom: Colour, Curiosity and Collaboration

As a visiting artist working through Creativity in the Classroom, I’m fortunate to spend up to nine weeks at a time with each class group. That time matters: it gives children full authorship over their ideas, space to develop, and the confidence that comes from genuine collaboration. This term I worked with 5th Class boys and girls from Presentation Primary School Warrenmount, Dublin 8 and their energy shaped the whole project.

Getting started

We began with colour mixing, exploring a palette of blues, yellows and reds. Working in groups, each team used a hula hoop and circular templates to create intersecting shapes across large sheets of paper. These shapes became dedicated spaces for experimenting with colour. The children negotiated how to divide the page, shared discoveries, and surprised themselves with the range of tones they created together.

5th Class students create colourful shapes during Creativity in the Classroom

Drawing techniques

Over the next sessions, we shifted into drawing techniques using 2B, 4B and 6B pencils. I brought in images of birds and demonstrated how I approach a drawing—where to begin, how to fill the page, and why mistakes are part of the process. The children started with A4 studies before enlarging their drawings to A3, focusing on observation, shading and texture. Their concentration and excitement for this technical challenge were remarkable.

5th Class students pencil drawings of birds

Printmaking

When they were ready, they prepared their drawings for printmaking. Each child simplified their bird, transferred it onto foam board, and added texture through mark making. Printmaking with a large group can be lively, but with the right setup the children can take full control. Using their earlier colour‑mixing sheets as backgrounds, they produced vibrant collaborative prints, along with individual A3 prints finished in black marker. The results were joyful, confident and entirely their own.