Conditions of Care
Register your official artwork HERE
Conditions of Care is an engagement-research project exploring Limerick’s public spaces as sites where care and control often overlap.
Parks, pathways, recreational spaces, and shared environments are shaped by decisions about access, maintenance, safety, participation, and responsibility. These decisions influence how people experience belonging, ownership, freedom, and connection within the city.
Through a series of commissioned artist collaborations, conversational workshops, walks, and creative activities, participants will be invited to reflect on their experiences of public space and consider how care and control operate within their everyday lives. The artist invites individuals of all ages and communites to explore questions such as: What does it mean to care for a place? Who is responsible for shaping shared spaces? When does care become control, and when can control become a form of care?
At the centre of the project is a participatory gifting wall that invites visitors to engage in an ongoing cycle of exchange. The wall will open with fifteen registered artworks available for members of the public to take. In return, participants are invited to leave behind something they consider to be of equal or greater value. These are not exchanged with the artist but are instead offered to future participants and the public, creating a growing chain of generosity, interpretation, and collective responsibility. Explores reciprocity not as obligation but as a conversation, while also creating space to consider the role and value of non-reciprocation within communities and public life.
Conditions of Care views public space as a shared civic resource and a site of negotiation between individual freedoms, collective responsibilities, and systems of governance. Through conversation, creative participation, and collective reflection, the project seeks to generate new understandings of how we care for one another, our environments, and our city.
By bringing together diverse perspectives, the project aims to uncover the often unseen relationships that shape civic life and to imagine how public spaces might better support wellbeing, participation, belonging, and mutual care for all who use them.
