The Kildare Gallery is a contemporary Irish art gallery in Kildare Village, run by Ruth Liddle and Ken Folan. It shows garden sculpture, indoor sculpture and painting by Irish artists, and it is opening an expanded space in 2026. When the gallery curated the Bloom Gallery Garden — a flagship feature of Bord Bia Bloom 2026 — our work sat alongside it: the gallery’s website, with a sculpture-list page for the garden, and the tri-fold brochure handed out at the festival. We built the first and designed the second.
The challenge
Bloom 2026 was the 20th edition of Ireland’s largest garden festival, held over the June bank holiday in Phoenix Park, Dublin, and the Bloom Gallery Garden marked the anniversary. The Kildare Gallery curated the garden; Realise Landscape Architects designed it. Inspired by pocket-park design, it wove planting, seating and urban design together with a curated exhibition of twenty sculptures from the gallery, and its walls displayed imagery from past Show Gardens alongside the stories of the designers, judges and teams who shaped Bloom.
Our work sat around the garden rather than in it. A show garden is temporary: when the festival ended, the twenty sculptures would return to the gallery. The brochure and the sculpture-list page were the pieces a visitor could take away — a printed catalogue in the hand, and a page where every piece in the garden could be browsed and enquired about.
What we did
Two deliverables, one route from the garden to the gallery.
- Built the gallery’s website, thekildaregallery.ie
- Added a Bloom 2026 sculpture-list page so festival visitors could browse every piece in the garden and enquire about any of them
- Designed the tri-fold Bloom Gallery Garden brochure handed out at the festival, its cover carrying a watercolour illustration of the garden with the Bord Bia Bloom and 20-years marks
- Laid out the sculpture catalogue inside, listing each piece’s title, artist and price
- Included the garden’s plant list
- Built a sales-enquiries panel into the brochure, with a QR code linking straight through to the gallery
- Set the credits plainly: curated by The Kildare Gallery, designed by Realise Landscape Architects
The result
The two pieces were made to work together. A visitor taken with a sculpture could open the brochure and find its title, artist and price; scan the QR code and reach the gallery; or look the piece up on the sculpture-list page. When Bloom closed, the twenty sculptures returned to Kildare Village.
The garden itself was The Kildare Gallery’s curation and Realise Landscape Architects’ design. Our part was quieter: the printed piece in every visitor’s hand, and the website behind the QR code.