John Waid is a maker, inventor, photographer, collector, talker and a nuisance. 

Waid was a lecturer at NCAD Dublin for 30 years, in Core Studies, where he taught all disciplines. Waid initiated, created the structure, and wrote most of the creative tasks for NCAD’s folio entry submission brief that ran for 9 years and achieved an international award for educational innovation.  Waid continues to develop educational projects, and has been invited as a visiting lecturer to several colleges. He delivers creative workshops orientated around a variety of topics. Humour, eclectic curiosity, and the absurd are central to my practice, along with a refusal to be categorised. 

Waid also makes physical work, mostly of a 3D nature. He is a serial inventor of mostly useless items and generator of projects under the collective name: Dubious Proposals Of An Easily Deniable Nature. One of these was shown at EVA in 2016 when he attempted to change the time zone in Ireland. 

He has twice been invited as a finalist on the BBC’s Genius programme, and over a ten year period published fifteen hundred mostly humourous original ideas on the Halfbakery website using a moniker to preserve my anonymity. This is on-going work. He is also listed as a “mischief maker” on a variety of projects for Red&Grey creatives in Dublin. Several items on which Waid has collaborated have won Irish and European awards. 

He is currently a studio artist with the Flax Studios Belfast.

www.flaxartstudios.org/flax-art-artists/john-waid
Instagram: @waidjohn