Artists
Meet the amazing Helium Arts’ artists bringing joy and creativity to children living with illness and disability across Ireland.
Hospital and Community Team
Chelsea Canavan is Helium’s Children’s Creative Health Programme artist in Limerick. Chelsea is a visual artist interested in understanding narratives and shared experiences. Exploring ever changing places and spaces and its effects on individuals and community identity. She often collaborates with other artists, communities and groups on issue-based themes that are affecting them. The outcomes are participation based and influenced directly from those she works with. They manifest as multi-media works, participatory events, workshops, dialogues and collaborative performances in the context of society, education and cultural heritage. Following graduation from Oakland University in Michigan, USA with a BA in Fine Art in 2009, Chelsea moved to Korea to work as an artist in schools. Currently Chelsea is completing a Masters in Social Practice in the Creative Environment in LSAD. To date, her work with community groups and collaborative projects has been supported by the Arts Council of Limerick, Creative Ireland, and Creative Europe through numerous awards and travel bursaries. She is a member of the Visual Artists Ireland.
Ashleigh Ellis is a multi-disciplinary artist who loves material and process-led art, making art in/with nature and drawing as meditation. She is passionate about sharing this experience with others. She graduated from the Crawford College of Art and Design in 2011, and completed a MEd with the Open University in 2017 in which she undertook research about young artists identity and self-esteem. She has ten years of experience teaching the arts in different alternative settings and was a residential Art Teacher in the U.K. for four years in an international school where she developed inquiry-based, multidisciplinary curriculum, taught Human Ecology, and was a Curriculum Coordinator. She is also very talented on the harp!
Yvonne Cullivan is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Galway. She uses a wide range of creative processes in her work, including drawing, photography, video, sound, mapping and words. Yvonne has made artworks in the form of public sculpture, photographic exhibitions, video installations, sound-scapes, books, apps, outdoor displays and public interventions. She often works with communities of people and in particular places of interest, involving individuals of all ages and expertise in her creative process toward new artworks. She likes to include all kinds of knowledge in her process and draws on history, culture, landscape, storytelling, and community to inspire and inform her artworks. She has collaborated with designers, poets, directors, performance artists, musicians, and many many children and young people in her career so far. Yvonne teaches on the First Year programme at the National College of Art and Design and also works as a Creative Associate with The Arts Council of Ireland promoting creativity in schools. At the core of everything that Yvonne does, is the belief in the power of the arts as a form of expression and communication and as a transformative tool that everyone should have access to and enjoy.