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Creagh Primary School- Ballinasloe - Per Cent for Art

Created 2010-09-29 by Ceara Conway

Location: Sub-urban - Co. Galway

Duration: 2010-09-29 to 2010-09-30

Project Outline

After meeting with the staff at Creagh Primary and getting a sense of the essence of the school ( extremely creative) colourful and full of children from all over the world, the school at first suggested that they might like a sculpture that

incorporated the old gate and an old stone from the original school. I drafted a design for a sculpture which was passed by the board buti wasn`t happy with it.

It didn`t feel like it was in any way related to the children and i requested that we review the work but this time with the consultation of the children in the school.

I asked if the children could bring in objects from their avrious countries and decided that the core part of the work would be to cast these objects in resin in

spheres) The schools motto is 5 continents one peope, this gave us our answer for the amount of spheres to use.The downfall and learning curve for me in this project was costing, and finding out that to cast the spheres was going to be very very expensive. I learnt more in this project then any other about how to negociate fees and material costs then any other project.

It was painful at times !! to realise that the final idea had to be changed again and again because the cost for the casting went up.

Do I think that the work has failed due to this factor? No, .. I think that it is what it is, the spheres look amazing and i realise now that we would have needed at least another 10,000 to have created anotehr sculptural feature in which to place them. The children wanted them to rotate, which they will.

Finding an engineer who understood what I wanted and who could give me a costing up front and fairly quickly was really hard.

This sculpture came about with much consultation on the part of myself, the children and the staff and others who were invited to comment.