Draw Imaginary Animals with Elida!

Open to all - Join our Associate Artist Elida Maiques for this free drop-in drawing workshop taking place in the plaza outside Mermaid Arts Centre. Using coloured chalks and lots of imagination, Elida will invite you to bring to life the wildest and most magical animals you can think of!

Materials provided. FREE, no booking required.

National Drawing Day is an initiative led by the National Gallery of Ireland

About Elida

Elida is one of Mermaid Arts Centre's Transform Associate Artists, and hosts the regular weekly drop-in drawing group FridayFest at Mermaid. She lives in Bray, where she is also the Seed Librarian of Bray Library, and has roots in Guatemala and Spain.

Her work, often in collaboration with different groups, has been exhibited in museums and art centres like CentroCentro Cibeles, Madrid (Spain), IVAM (Valencian Museum of Modern Art), València (Spain) and others. She has a background in drawing and has edited award-winning publications as member of Polen (Spain) and Stray Lines (Ireland).

She continues to explore the boundaries of comics with other disciplines such as dance and music. In 2015, a series of botanical drawings became her long-term project I Am a Forest. It now involves seed-gathering, tree propagation and wildlife/art workshops with her local school and other communities.

Maiques sees in these commoning practices real collective thought and action eroding the assigned places (gender, class, age…). In 2021 I Am a Forest focused prominently on birdsong, music anthropology and archaeology. It became a non-hierarchical forest performance by professional musicians and others. The filmed performance was edited into a short film, which premiered in 2022 in the International Film Festival of Morelia (Mexico).