Open 10:30–5:00, Tuesday – Saturday
Professional Development for Art Teachers
Artist-Teacher-Researcher/ Winter Session 2026
Friday 2nd January 8.30am-2pm
Highlanes Gallery, the municipal art gallery for Drogheda and the North East is situated in the heart of the Boyne Valley, and close to Brú na Bóinne and Newgrange, which has some of the finest examples of megalithic art in Western Europe.
Join us for an in-depth morning with a visit to the site at Newgrange, led by Muiris O Suilléabháin and Clare Tuffy, followed by an artist’s talk and workshop back at Highlanes Gallery, with artist Annette Smyth and a short gallery talk about Highlanes Gallery’s 20th programme and feedback session with the group around ambitions for continous professional development sessions for the future.
Friday 2nd January
8.30am – Meet, Gates of Highlanes Gallery, Bus to Newgrange (wrap up!)
9:00am – Arrive at Newgrange Monument for special tour with Dr Clare Tuffy & Emeritus Professor of Archaeology and former Head of School at the UCD School of Archaeology, Dublin – Muiris O Suilléabháin.
10:30am – Return to Highlanes Gallery with refreshments – warm up with tea, coffee and sweet and savoury baked delights in the gallery.
11:00am-1pm – Artist, Annette Smyth discusses her painting practice and her role as a lecturer in Ballyfermot College of Further Education, Dublin.
1:00pm – This final discussion (with a sandwich (supplied) )session involves a short presentation about Highlanes Gallery’s programme ahead, as the gallery mark’s its second decade. What’s in it for you? What more can we do for you? What are your ambitions professionally/personally with art, culture, the gallery, and indeed other galleies. The event will close with an opportunity to share ideas and ambitions, short and longterm.
The morning session is charged at €30, with bus, materials and morning refreshments included.
You will be issued with a CPD Cert after the session has ended.
Please email aruane@highlanes.ie on booking with any dietary requirements you may have.
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Annette Smyth – ABOUT MY PRACTICE
Through painting and drawing I want to question what reality is, what are we looking at? Where does one reality start and another begin in an image.
With shifting layers, I place the viewer in between moments. In space or time.
Colour creates remembered new realities. Memory is individual and collective. How I remember an event or era is different to how someone else will remember it.
Colour, reality, history, nostalgia, culture, landscape, forgiveness, dreams and absurdity.
Yesterday was something and tomorrow will be something else.
As an artist I obsess over detail and this brings my work into the abstract. This is in part due to the use of layered acrylic paint.
I believe we are all works in progress in a complex system that, itself, is a work in progress; transient, obscure and unknowable.
This is where the beauty lies.
