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taking time for yourself. Tey would be led by members of our team who are both art historians but also breath work practitioners or yoga practitioners. We also work with local hospitals, supporting training for their teams, particularly in the occupational therapy area. Increasingly, they are socially prescribing for their patients that they attend our workshops. We find more and more people coming through these health networks.’


Te Mercer Institute has just released a report into the factors that have the greatest impact on successful ageing. Says Barrett: ‘Tey found that 15 minutes a day of creativity has a huge impact. So that could be engaging in making but also looking, dancing, listening to music, reading a book, any of these things if you just dedicate 15 minutes a day.’


It's somehow no surprise to hear Barrett declare: ‘What we want to be is the most welcoming museum in the country.’ I feel that ethos has been absorbed in the curatorial approach to its current exhibition, Take A


The first education curator had a


department with strong links with the community and deeper connections with a particular social housing estate


Breath (on until 17 March 2025): an immersive exploration of the role that oxygen plays in our lives, and the geographical, political and cultural significance of the qualities of the air we breathe. It starts with a deep blue, sub-aquatic installation by artist and freediver Alex Cecchetti, articulating the beauty of underwater environments and their inhabitants, complete with two hammocks in which visitors can relax while watching films of turtles and sea creatures playing across blue, hand-dyed curtains. It includes harrowing art works too – an extended


photograph by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Conditioning (2022) showing a visual map of the air polluted by the Israeli army during continuous unauthorised incursions into Lebanese air space. And there are powerful photographs from Khadija Saye from a series called In Tis Space We Breathe (2017-18), made all the more impactful by the fact that Saye was one of the 72 who lost their lives in the Grenfell Fire. Te show steers us thoughtfully through a whole range of issues, emotions and environments, concluding with a tranquil space with meditative, geometric paintings by Patrick Scott, and a hand-woven tapestry by Isabel Nolan inspired by the knowledge that when oxygen became dominant in the atmosphere, between 2.4 and 2.1bn years ago, it heralded the extinction of a millions of life forms to whom it proved toxic.


Universally relevant themes explored through world-class art and artists, in the most welcoming museum space in Ireland? It seems like a winning formula to me.


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