National Sculpture Factory

Our final Heritage Day tour starts at 3, you've still got time to visit

Heritage Week Cork Heritage Open Day

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Cork Heritage Open Day
Saturday 15th August
12 noon - 4:00pm

Heritage Day is a wonderful celebration of Cork’s built heritage. In its 21st year, Cork Heritage Open Day provides the exciting opportunity to meet some artists and see where they work within this unique artists’ work place.

National Sculpture Factory was set up 37 years ago and is a thriving artists’ resource for many creative projects. An important facility locally, nationally and internationally, NSF is a strategically funded resource for artists, with the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork City Council as primary funders.
NSF building, which used to house the trams of Cork City, is a beautiful red brick heritage building which enables large scale sculpture to be fabricated – what the citizen sees in the public realm of scale and ambition can be made in NSF under the high roof of the former tram warehouse. The legacy of Cork’s built heritage continues to be enjoyed and critical for creating Cork’s cultural heritage.

NSF are delighted to invite you to visit NSF facilities and artists to see how the art works you know come into being and learn more about the creative process directly from the source. Join us between 12pm to 4pm to meet the artists, discover where they work and find out more about their practice – find out what goes on in the large red brick warehouse on Albert Road.

Guided Tours will take place every hour starting at 12pm through 3pm (last tour 3pm). No booking necessary. For Health & Safety reasons, under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Heritage Week Cork Heritage Open Day

Cork Heritage Open Day
Saturday 15th August

Tom dePaor designed and built the mezzanine extension in the National Sculpture Factory in
1999/2000; now an award-winning structure in the history of Cork architecture.
The mezz was thoughtfully designed to provide a necessary clean space for meetings, research, kitchen spaceand a technical office, leading to the familiar leaded steel clad inhabitable beam we can see suspended above the Factory floor today. Simplicity of form and process transforms this ‘craft’ like, utilitarian platform into a sculptural tour-de-force, which does not compromise the flexibility of the floor beneath or the walls above.

NSF are delighted to invite you to visit NSF facilities and artists to see how the art works you know come into being and learn more about the creative process directly from the source. Join us between 12pm to 4pm to meet the artists, discover where they work and find out more about their practice – find out what goes on in the large red brick warehouse on Albert Road.

Guided Tours will take place every hour starting at 12pm through 3pm (last tour 3pm). No booking necessary. For Health & Safety reasons, under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Cork Heritage Open Day Heritage Week

Today we're taking a look inside the Power House, operated by Cork Electric Lighting and Tramway Company long before the formation of NSF.
The building itself was nearly destroyed in November 1922 - ten armed Anti-Treaty IRA Volunteers broke into the Power House, and after locking the staff in a small room they set about destroying the generators with sledgehammers. The sudden darkness was so extensive across the city that priests suspended hearing confession in certain churches. Once the National Army troops arrived at the power plant, they freed the engineer and other staff who quickly got to work to fix the generators. Had the damaged machinery been allowed to run for any time afterwards, an explosion would have taken place, bringing the centre building to ruins.

Many thanks to our past board member Cllr. Kieran McCarthy & Technical Manager Rónán Ó’Caoimh for the research behind these words. Photos from The Street Railway Review (1899)

Cork Heritage Open Day Heritage Week

Did you know the NSF building was known as The Power House, supplying electricity to the the Cork tramway depot next door from 1898 to 1931?

Cork Heritage Open Day
Saturday 15th August
NSF are delighted to invite you to visit NSF facilities and artists to see how the art works you know come into being and learn more about the creative process directly from the source. Join us between 12pm to 4pm to meet the artists, discover where they work and find out more about their practice – find out what goes on in the large red brick warehouse on Albert Road.

Guided Tours will take place every hour starting at 12pm through 3pm (last tour 3pm). No booking necessary. For Health & Safety reasons, under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Cork Heritage Open Day Heritage Week

In its first collaboration for an International Curator in Residence NSF and The Guesthouse are delighted to welcome Tsering with the traditional new arrivals Guesthouse TJunction event!
11am - 1:30pm, Thursday 6th August at The Guesthouse, Shandon, all welcome.

Cork Heritage Open Day
Saturday 15th August | 12 noon - 4:00pm

Heritage Day is a wonderful celebration of Cork’s built heritage. In its 21st year, Cork Heritage Open Day provides the exciting opportunity to meet some artists and see where they work within this unique artists’ work place.

National Sculpture Factory was set up 37 years ago and is a thriving artists’ resource for many creative projects. An important facility locally, nationally and internationally, NSF is a strategically funded resource for artists, with the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork City Council as primary funders.
NSF building, which used to house the trams of Cork City, is a beautiful red brick heritage building which enables large scale sculpture to be fabricated – what the citizen sees in the public realm of scale and ambition can be made in NSF under the high roof of the former tram warehouse. The legacy of Cork’s built heritage continues to be enjoyed and critical for creating Cork’s cultural heritage.

NSF are delighted to invite you to visit NSF facilities and artists to see how the art works you know come into being and learn more about the creative process directly from the source. Join us between 12pm to 4pm to meet the artists, discover where they work and find out more about their practice – find out what goes on in the large red brick warehouse on Albert Road.

Guided Tours will take place every hour starting at 12pm through 3pm (last tour 3pm). No booking necessary. For Health & Safety reasons, under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Stage 1 submission deadline tomorrow, Wednesday 5 August 2026, 12 noon.
All correspondence to be sent to [email protected]

Percent for Art commission opportunity, call for expressions of interest; Harcourt Terrace Educate Together NS, Dublin
The budget for this commission is €52,000

Read the full guidelines and application process on our website - nationalsculpturefactory.com/programme/htetns/

Presentation Harcourt Terrace Educate Together National School operates under the patronage of Educate Together where teaching and learning takes place in a relaxed, engaged and holistic learning environment for all children, where they can be themselves, have fun and enjoy learning.
At the heart of the Educate Together ethos is that the children learn in a way that is best for each individual child. Each child is guaranteed a warm and caring learning environment and an excellent standard of teaching. The vibrant school community is a dynamic melting pot of cultures all learning under one roof, currently with approximately 300 students and positioned to grow.

Proposals should focus on the following elements or themes: diversity, ecology and outside in, learning and nature within the context of the adjacent canal, the surrounding city and urban environment, reflecting the National School age group and wide mix of ethnicities.

This is a two-stage open commission and will be managed by the National Sculpture Factory, Cork. To register your interest in the project you are required to email [email protected]

Fiona Kelly joined the NSF earlier this year to build components for her PhD by practice titled Fallowness the Importance of Being Still in an Age of Urgency. Utilizing the woodwork and ceramic area Fiona has worked with a compendium of made and found things; collected, collated, cast, forged, foraged, fired, to populate her reimagined scaffold. A holding space, a non-hierarchical structure to hold materials for observation.

The final installation will utilise a variety of materials and processes - a handmade dowelled poplar wooden modular structure, screenprint on recycled wall paper liner, fired porcelain slip casts embedded with waste, foraged foam, cast concrete from repurposed waste, crushed windscreen glass, found glassware & sea worn bricks.