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Portumna Castle - Cross border contact trip. | Across the border bridging the gap Tipperary
2008-11-05
Portumna Castle - Cross border contact trip.
During the conversations between Triona Ryan ( Galway artist ) and myself we thought it would be interesting to bring the two school groups together. This we would hope should happen several times through out the project.
Triona then found out about an invitation to explore the castle and grounds at Portumna, which included a mystery tour searching for clues. She also found out that we could use the main space in the castle for an artistic activity... There were also links to both our projects in that there were family portraits on exhibit and also key maps of the landscape.
Both the teachers of our schools agreed to organize a bus to bring us to this central meeting point. So the event was scheduled for Thursday 23rd of October at 10 am.
Triona and myself spent some time on the phone chatting about the activity we would organize. Triona came up with some very sculptural ideas.. tying pieces of string between trees in the grounds and then tying parcel labels on to them with cut out paper drawings in response to the day/ place. I liked the approach she was suggesting. We also planned to show the groups power point presenations of what each schools project was looking like so far.
The day went off with out a hitch and was great fun ( Even in the pouring rain ) Bringing the two groups together added a major element of inspiration.. the only down side being that the museums activity involved competition, which meant that a strong element of competition was introduced between the schools. We want to nip in the bud as soon as we can, if we can. One point that we decided on was to eliminate words from the postcard project and keep it to drawings only - this should help with the ` Rathcabbin is the best` type text that was coming through!
The large group activity worked out brilliantly - I lead some warm up activities and then they all got down to the process of drawing with scissors.. castles, houses, people.. no pencils, just paper and cutting.
We then got groups of two holding up the string lines so that all the children could attach their paper pieces on parcel labels. The photographs will illustrate this better probably but it looked really good when they were all attached and floating.
During the shared power point presentations I was very impressed and inspired by the work Triona was doing with her group, it looked so creative and full, this also inspired my group greatly. When we returned to the class for the final afternoon session they worked away like mad on their big family tree and journal drawings. ( Four large collage/ drawing pieces that they are making on Fabriano with mixed media ). So there is a fine line I suppose between competition and inspiration in this case. They also got back online and worked away on the online journal ( unfortunately one girl wiped the whole lot off by mistake , but I will type a copy in myself soon).
Tom Kennedy Seemed to enjoy the day too and was very helpful, there was lots of historical information involved in the trip so i think as well as the artistic interest the link the history of Portumna was a rich vein.
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