School Residencies
I have taken part in various residencies with primary schools -under the ‘Artist in Schools Scheme’, ‘TAP’ (Teacher-Artist Partnership) and ‘BLAST’ (Bringing Live Arts to Students and Teachers) programmes. With all school residencies, the class teacher and artist work closely together at every stage from planning, running and evaluating the projects.
Visual storytelling has been the focus of my projects with primary school children. Some groups wrote their own stories and created illustrated books and objects to accompany them (dioramas and story quilts).
School Project 1: an ‘Artist in Schools Scheme’ run by Roscommon County Council and Roscommon Arts Office. 10 x 1.5-hour sessions with 10–13-year-olds
The class created their own picture books with embossed covers. They worked on storyboards, leading up to the creation of their picture books, to get a flavour of how a writer/illustrator/editor might work. They also illustrated scenes from their stories by using Indian Ink, making 3D dioramas and painting story quilts. At the end of the project, the class displayed their work in the hall and read their picture books to younger pupils.
School Project 2: an ‘Artist in Schools’ scheme run by Roscommon County Council and Roscommon Arts Office. I spent 5 weeks with 7–11-year-olds and another 5 weeks with 12–13-year-old pupils.
Because my time was divided between 2 separate groups- I didn’t explore such a range of media, as with the first school, but worked on similar projects gauged at two different age groups. This school had pupils from 7 different countries, so English was not everybody’s first language. The countries represented had wonderful wildlife, so we based our inspiration around that. The pupils loved talking about the animals and insects from these places-many of which were quite dangerous. We even had a ‘scary table’ for people who wanted to draw things like the purple tarantula or horned viper! Pupils created delicate coloured pencil studies, brightly coloured pastel drawings {inspired by Mexican Amate Bark Art} and painted textile story quilts.
School Project 3: BLAST (Bringing Live Arts to Students and Teachers) project in County Longford- run through the National Arts in Education Programme (National AIE) and organised by Carrick Education Centre. 7x 2-hour sessions with 6th class.
This group really delved deep into the theme of visual storytelling. We began by creating miniature books (in the form of zines) which the children illustrated. Inspired by historical examples of miniature books housed in miniature libraries, the class came up with their own design for a papier-mâché miniature library-which was created over the course of the residency. Pupils made 3D characters and dioramas to go with their stories. They also made embossed illustrations and finally created beautiful, marbled patterns for the covers and endpapers of their books. The miniature library was a lovely keepsake for the classroom and houses the miniature books made during the BLAST project.
To celebrate, the completion of the project, we had a party on World Book Day when the class read their stories and presented the artwork to the rest of the school. They also premiered a short film that they made themselves about the project!
School Project 4: ‘TAP’ (Teacher-Artist Partnership) project in County Roscommon, run through the National Arts in Education Programme (National AIE) and organised by Carrick-on-Shannon Education Centre. 7 x 2- hour sessions with 6th class.
This was another highly enjoyable project, where I worked with 30 girls who all wrote and illustrated their own miniature books. To accompany their stories, they also made 3D dioramas (depicting their favourite scene) and painted story quilts. Their books had embossed gold foil artwork on the covers.
The group displayed the pieces made during the TAP residency, in the school hall, and invited pupils from all other classes to come and hear their stories.
