Outdoor workshop offering participants the chance to engage

with the topic of food and architecture through the medium of freehand drawing

Urban Mirror: Mapping Food, Space and the City

Over the course of a Friday afternoon, this outdoor workshop offers participants the chance to engage with the topic of food and architecture through the medium of freehand drawing. How does food shape everyday life in the city? Which spaces connect back to food, are influenced or formed by their relationship to food? From dining spaces both indoor and outdoor to markets, shops, kiosks, cafes etc, this short workshop invites participants to create a collective map of Cork city centre through the lens of food, with the aim of finding new ways of understanding and reading the urban environment. We will provide and use paper doilies as our drawing material, collaging these together to piece together one large group drawing over the course of the afternoon.

The workshop uses the artwork Urban Mirror at Coal Quay in the heart of Cork city as the base of operations. The artwork, created by plattenbaustudio as part of a public art commission in 2023, includes a civic-scale steel outdoor table, with the ability to seat up to 60 people. The scale of the table provides the space to make a large scale collective map as part of the workshop, while the act of gathering and drawing on the table activates the public space around it, literally creating space at the table for us to engage with questions about the city.

This event is funded as part of the Culture Programme for Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the Union 2026

Description supplied by the event organiser.