Fridayfest Climate Café - August

With Guest Speaker Lian Bell

Climate Café evolved from the weekly drop-in drawing sessions FridayFest, initiated by artist Elida Maiques. Since many of these conversations involve climate and ecology, the Mermaid Arts Centre decided to support it with a series of talks and informal meetups.

The Climate Café is connected to participatory projects including The Mermaid Garden Project, where local residents without their own green spaces can grow, compost and exchange horticultural knowledge in our urban garden. The focus is on medicinal, edible and native species and on the relationships forged while gardening.

Think of Climate Café as a site to share knowledge, spark action and seed future projects around climate action. Its loose framework allows alternative methods and research models.Each Climate Café we have a guest speaker and different activities, expect a lively event!

Lian Bell is an artist working across artforms, who also supports other artists and arts workers by designing acts of community-making. With a background in scenography, visual art, cultural project management, and social activism, she has worked for over 25 years with some of the most significant arts organisations and contemporary performance makers in Ireland.



Lian returns to the subjective and ephemeral nature of walks and conversations, the lapses intrinsic to archives and documentation, and the vagaries of imagined and remembered space. She is interested in formally experimental contemporary performance, often collaborating on works that are devised and/or site specific. She brings together groups of artists and arts workers, online and off, to foster solidarity and community across geography and discipline. She advocates for mitching, slowing down, and travelling without flying.



Lian also designs ways to build community and create space for thinking. She coaches artists and arts workers individually, and designs and facilitate artists’ programmes in collaboration with a number of different organisations. She was Campaign Director of #WakingTheFeminists, the grassroots campaign for equality for women that changed Irish theatre.



She studied in Trinity College Dublin, Central Saint Martins, and the National College of Art and Design, has received numerous awards for her work to date, and has undertaken residencies in Ireland, France and Finland. Whether making material-based work, or shaping intangible encounters, all aspects of Lian’s practice overlap aesthetically and ethically.



Visit lianbell.com for more information.