Projects
Glimmers
Because small sensory moments shape how we move through the world. Because noticing them - and sharing them - helps others do the same. Because creative attention is a form of connection.
Glimmers is a creative exploration of positive sensory experience, developed for Hapus Wales.
Through public participation, and conversations with artists and creative practitioners working across multiple forms, the project celebrates the everyday sensory experiences that bring moments of pleasure, connection and regulation, and explores how creative practice can help us to lean into our personal sources of glimmers - and make maybe even make more of them.
The project activates research insights through a creative, participatory and co-production model, which led to the production of a short film, and a downloadable zine.
Watch the film and read the zine at:
Commissioned by
Hapus
Year
2025 - 2026
MAPPER: Navigating Digital Life
Making space for young people to find their own path through the twists and turns of digital life.
MAPPER: Navigating Digital Life is a research-informed teaching resource designed to help secondary students explore their relationship with technology, and it’s impact on their wellbeing.
Rather than telling young people what a healthy relationship with technology should look like, the programme creates and hold space for them to explore their own experiences, notice what supports or gets in the way of their wellbeing, and develop strategies that make sense for them.
Designed with neuro-inclusion in mind, the eight session programme translates research insights into creative, discussion based and practical activities that foreground individual experience and meaning making.
It offers schools a different approach to promoting digital wellbeing: less about prescribing the right answers, and more about giving young people the tools to understand themselves, the practical frameworks to help decide where making changes matter most, and empowerment to take intentional action.
Project Partners
UCD Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry & Cycle Against Suicide
Year
2026
Divergent Steps
An action research project about finding sustainable ways to reduce barriers and make ambitious work.
Divergent Steps was a period of research and development exploring what it means to build a creative practice and career around a neurodivergent brain — rather than expecting that brain to fit within a pre-defined box.
Supported by an Arts Council Wales Creative Steps Award, the project created space for Neuropirates founder, Clare Fitzsimons, to develop a company roadmap, build a digital presence, and explore inclusive co-production models which celebrate neurodivergent creativity.
The process paired time for reflective thinking and planning with conversations with other practitioners and mentoring from an expert panel.
The learning from the project is embedded in what Neuropirates is and the direction it continues to grow - a snapshot of that learning can also be accessed here:
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Supported by
Arts Council Wales
Year
2026
The art of Trying
What does trying feel like when you have ADHD? And how could that be represented creatively?
The Art of Trying is a research project led by Neuropirates founder, Clare Fitzsimons, exploring how people with ADHD experience, understand and make sense of effort.
Research around ADHD and effort has often focused on observable behaviour — whether someone starts, persists, or completes a task. This project turns the lens towards the experience behind the behaviour: what does effort feel like? What makes something feel possible, difficult, or exhausting? And how does intersectional identity influence the experience of what it feels like to try?
The research will explore the subjective experience of effort with participants with ADHD through a creative enquiry approach combining multi-modal diaries, conversational interviews and collaborative creative practice - finding different ways to capture, explore and communicate what effort feels like from the inside.
Ultimately, it aims to contribute to richer ways of understanding ADHD in research, clinical practice, and everyday life.
The Art of Trying forms Clare’s doctoral research at University College Dublin and is supported by Research Ireland.
Supported by
Research Ireland
Year
2026 - 2030
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