Water, Memory and Flow with Ruth Le Gear (Artist) and Louise Waters (Yoga Teacher / Foundations of Cognitive Health)

** This session is designed for adults (18+). There's plenty for younger explorers across the festival. Take a look at our family-friendly activities throughout the week. **

This gentle, participatory workshop brings together artistic practice, water, movement, meditation and sensory experience to explore ideas around memory, attention and connection.

Artist Ruth Le Gear has worked with water for over twenty years, collecting and working with waters from different landscapes and places as part of an ongoing exploration of water, memory and our relationship with the natural world.

For this workshop, Ruth will bring a collection of different waters held in small glass vials. Participants will be invited to hold the waters, spend some quiet time with them and notice what arises, a sensation, memory, image, colour, feeling or thought.

There is no expectation to experience anything in particular; instead, the waters become a simple starting point for attention, conversation and curiosity.

Louise Waters Community Leader for program Foundations of Cognitive Health Ireland, and a holistic health practitioner and yoga teacher with 25+ years of experience. She is the founder of The Natural Therapies Centre in Sligo.

She will open the session with a gentle seated grounding practice, bringing attention to the body and breath and allowing people to arrive into the space. Simple breathing, meditation and, where appropriate, voice or chanting can be introduced as ways of exploring rhythm, vibration, concentration and connection.

Following the experience with the waters, Ruth will lead a wet on wet watercolour process. Water is placed onto the paper first and colour introduced into it, allowing the pigments to move, meet, bleed and change. Rather than trying to make a particular image, participants will be encouraged to let the water lead the process.

Nothing needs to be held or controlled; colours can flow into one another and find their own form, creating individual and beautiful paintings. The workshop will close by returning to Louise’s practice through a simple seated meditation, breath practice and relaxation. Depending on the group, this may include the Sat Nam meditation or a gentle use of voice and sound.

Louise will offer practices that participants can comfortably return to themselves after the workshop. Throughout the session, Ruth and Louise will weave their practices together, moving between sensory experience, conversation, making, breath and rest.

The intention is to create a welcoming and restorative space where participants do not need any previous experience of art, yoga or meditation and where there is no right way to take part. At its heart, the workshop asks us to slow down and pay attention: to water, to colour, to our bodies and breath, and to the memories and associations that can emerge through simple sensory experiences.