Trading Places/CR.E.A.T.E. Programme

The Residencies

Periodic updates from the journals of the artists involved in this project. Back to residencies

St Colman's PS, Lawrencetown, Co Down; Angela Ginn

Hands

Written by artist Angela on 23 April 2004

We are finishing up this week in St. Colman,s with great excitement about our Open Day. p4& P5 used their photoshop images to make t-shirts & will be wearing them today for our visitors to see. The hall is full of our artwork & P5 & P6 have created a wallhanging of their hands using the digital camera, T-shirt paper & embroidery, which is the photo shown. It has been a fantastic term with lots of great art work made & lots of learning for us all.

At the computers

Written by artist Angela on 26 March 2004

This is a photo of Caolon & Conor working on their artwork have used it to great effect.

Keeping the tradition alive!

Written by artist Angela on 19 March 2004

Over the last couple of weeks here in St. Colman’s, P5 & P6 have been continuing with their love of sewing from our first term. Everyone is getting very good at threading their needles which is the hard bit before we are able to get down to any work. Most of the class had never ever sewed before but now we are all able to ,with some surprisingly talented embroiderers emerging who hadn’t realised they would be so good at it.
We have been experimenting with projecting our lace drawings onto different sorts of linen (i.e transparent, layered, dark, light, small & large) & then sewing into them with coloured embroidery threads - the results are very beautiful as I think our picture shows.

Photoshop

Written by artist Angela on 18 March 2004

This week we worked on our collages and retranslated them into different patterns, shapes and colours in ‘Photoshop’.We were all learning together -teachers, classroom assistant, artist and pupils,discovering new tools ,with very exciting results. To finish we printed our reworked pieces onto t-shirt paper, printed them out and then ironed them onto linen.
All the pupils in classes P4, P5 and P6 now know how to use photoshop and they now all have it installed on their classroom computers so they will be able to experiment with it on their own class free time - which is brilliant !

Sewing collage

Written by artist Angela on 5 March 2004

Getting back to normal in school after training , midterm break etc..
We are using collage to experiment with our scanning and projecting and sewing and we hope to manipulate some of these in photoshop and print them out on fabric.

Mapping linen tour

Written by artist Angela on 27 February 2004

We have had a bit of a slow start this term. we had an outing on our second week to visit Mrs. Mc Greevy’s family’s skutching mill which was very interesting. we did a lot of sketching in our new sketch pads & on leaving Eugene played his fiddle for us which was lovely.
I was off training in Sligo with Orla for a couple of days which was most informative and useful & it was nice to hang out in the Kids Own office for a couple of days & experience the centre of operations.
Only getting settled down again to some work & our web photo is of our painting from the ‘Ulster Linen Tour’ we went on in January.
Today just getting our heads around the technology again & we are experimenting with collage from our previous drawings.

Sewing to finish

Written by artist Angela on 28 November 2003

Yesterday in school we explored sewing & weaving. P4 & P5 were very good & quick at their weaving as they had practised before & I could hardly keep up to them.

P5 & P6 decided to piece their individual ‘hand ‘artwork together by sewing and were very keen. About half the class had never ever sewn before but by the end everyone had got the hang of it and seemed to enjoy the exercise a lot, it was hard to get them to stop sewing & go for break! We are hanging some of our work from the last 8 weeks around the school for our open day today.

Everyone found the back of our sewing particularly interesting & we would like to explore this further next term.

This week

Written by artist Angela on 25 November 2003

In P4 & P5 we have been developing our doilies & using Vine’s lace drawing exercise to make stencils & new group pieces which are now hanging to great effect in our assembly hall , creating lots of discussion about our project.

In P5 & P6 we were still working with our fantastic drawings from Fergusons, scanning , projecting, cutting & also now painting with fabric paint onto them. We also did some work on the theme of hands , based on a piece of my own work entitled ‘Laundry Lane’.
Each child did their own version of this piece but in reverse, i.e : they cut out their hands from the fabric & then projected their detailed lace drawings onto these & then painted them, making a wonderful & extremely varied series of individual pieces. We intend sewing & embroidering into these next week before our open day.

Dyeing had proved a very popular activity with the P4 & P5 class & we decided to do some more but this time we also filmed the process and then we hung them out again on our line to dry.While our dye was fixing the class did some drawings of their favourite activity to date on project. We are all looking forward to having our families in to find out more about the residency & to view our work to date.

Excellent Drawings

Written by artist Angela on 7 November 2003

These images are some of the excellent drawings made by the pupils from our visit last week to Fergusons Weavers, the only company in Europe still weaving linen!

This week in St. Colman’s in P4 & P5 we are still exploring shapes & patterns by making doilies, transfering them by felt tip onto a big page to make a group , colouring our shapes in, connecting them all up & finally cutting into & out of them!
In P5 & P6 we are working from our excellent drawings from Fergusons ,projecting these on our fabric & still working into them. I am very impressed by teachers and pupils enthuasiasm ,support & openess to all activities introduced & the artwork being produced is fantastic.

We cut into our linen

Written by artist Angela on 23 October 2003

This week at at St Colman’s we had a very interesting trip to Ferguson’s mill, Banbridge. We saw how a contemporary linen mill operates and we saw and were able to touch and experience weaving machinery, and all the noises and smells of the mill. We really enjoyed ourselves and brought lots of k
linen samples back to school. We then did some excellent drawings and paintings from our imaginations and from our digital photos on site.

Mill projections

Written by artist Angela on 17 October 2003

Thisweek at St.Colman’s we have been scanning our mill drawings onto acetates and then projecting them onto our dyed linen, drawing our enlarged version and cutting out any interesting shapes we find in our drawings - with great results!

We dye our linen

Written by artist Angela on 10 October 2003

Yesterday we dyed our linen which was all very exciting. We then hung our linen in the wind to dry which was very beautiful and colourful. We also looked at the Trading Places site and I then showed the children my own artwork and we talked about artists.

Cathal draws our flax.

Written by artist Angela on 3 October 2003