I worked as an Assistant Artist with Kate Murphy at St. Teresa’s NS in Ballyellis, Gorey on the Living Arts Project 2020-2021. This project is a joint endeavour between Wexford County council and Wexford Arts Centre.
The aim of The Living Arts Project is to introduce primary school students to contemporary art and provide them with an appreciation and understanding of this genre. We completed an 8 week residency at the school, working with 3rd and 6th class to explore drawing and create contemporary art pieces. At the end of the residency, the students’ work was displayed in an online exhibition, along with the other schools who took part in the project.
With 3rd class, we decided to focus on the world around us and we used shadow as our drawing medium. Cardboard cut-outs of their favourite elements of our world came together towards a series of Shadowland installations... The Land, the Oceans and Space. The pieces themselves were coloured with various media.. oil pastel, charcoal, marker, collage... and coloured sellophane brought colour to our giant, billowing shadow projections.
6th class are an active group, and through a brain-storming session, we discovered that combining movement, games or sports with our drawing experiments could inspire our creativity. We took huge paper outside and the children went BIG with their marks, using large actions such as running and jumping with large tools such as mops and balls of straw to experiment with various media, such as charcoal, paint, crayon and chalk. Through this play, we arrived at a set of large and small scale, individual and collaborative abstract pieces which explore mark-making, colour and composition.
You can view the online exhibition in full here:
