The Mothership Project, Parenting Artists Ireland (PAI) and Rua Red present After Session with the award-winning art curator and writer Hettie Judah for an informal and intimate daytime event built around art, conversation and community.

Drawing from her vast experience as a curator, and her new book How to Enter the Art World…After, Judah will convene a conversation around the challenges facing artists in making and sustaining a life in the arts.

The session will open with short presentations from five Irish artists, at different career stages, each sharing recent and current work: Monika Crowley, Terri Levine, Kate Warner, Orla Whelan and Aoife Concannon.

These presentations will form the starting point for a wider conversation with Judah, who will act as a sounding board for questions about artistic practice, confidence, careers, and navigating the art world at every stage of life. A Q&A will follow where the audience can pose their own questions about navigating a creative life.

Bring whatever’s on your mind.

Afterwards, stay for tea/coffee and further conversation.

Hettie will be selling and signing copies of her new book How to Enter the Art World…After - a myth-busting guide for artists whose lives are complicated and human.

The event is part of Judah's new After Sessions series, created as part of her book tour to bring artists together for honest conversations about the realities of making and sustaining a creative life.

*This event is child friendly. Children are welcome in the space, however, there will be no designated childcare assistant at this event and parents are responsible for their own children at all times. If you have any questions or particular requirements place email themothershipproject@gmail.com

About Hettie Judah

Hettie Judah is a writer and curator. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Frieze and The Times Literary Supplement, and writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine. Her writing on art can also be found in Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReview and other publications with 'art' in the title.

Hettie is curator of the groundbreaking Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood which toured venues in the UK between 2024 and 2025, before transferring to VISUAL in Carlow, where it ran until early 2026.

The standalone book Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood is published by Thames & Hudson.

Following publication of her 2020 study on the impact of motherhood on artists’ careers, in 2021 she worked with a group of artists to draw up the manifesto How Not To Exclude Artist Parents, now available in 16 languages. In 2022, together with Jo Harrison, Hettie co-founded the Art Working Parents Alliance - a supportive network and campaigning group for curators, academics, gallerists, technicians, educators and others working in the arts. Find out more and join the network: https://www.artworkingparents.com/

Published in April 2026, How to Enter the Art World is an encouraging and practical guide for artists returning to their practice after time away, changing careers, raising families, experiencing illness, or simply questioning their place in the art world. Drawing on Judah's extensive experience working with artists, the book challenges myths about success and offers thoughtful, realistic advice for building a sustainable creative life.

About the Presenting Artists

Monika Crowley is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the absurdity of the everyday through expanded print, painting, and installation.

Terri Levine is a contemporary realist painter whose work explores maternal subjectivity, intimacy, breastfeeding and care. Her work engages with the experience of making art within the time pressures and domestic realities of motherhood.

Kate Warner is a visual artist and teacher based in Co. Wicklow who works predominantly through painting and drawing.

Orla Whelan is a visual artist whose work takes abstraction as a field of possibility in which to speculate on all things invisible or intangible. Eschewing figurative imagery and narrative device, she creates abstract visual propositions for an image-saturated world.

Aoife Concannon is a visual artist with a social practice, whose current artworks straddle both abstraction and representation, exploring themes of bodily experience, transformation and cycles of life/death in both humans and the biosphere.

Description supplied by the event organiser.