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Sound Drawings , St Edwards, Week 1 | Lines Crossing, (phase two)
2009-04-21

Sound Drawings , St Edwards, Week 1

Description

Cathal completed his eight week block with 5th class at st Edwards N.S before Christmas. His part of this residency culminated in a sound installation work sited at the school based on google maps of old rail networks no longer in use. Before starting my part of the project at the school I met the class in February at the Dock Arts Centre. The students received a tour of the exhibition `Eight` and I introduced myself and my work, ( as one of the eight) at the gallery. At the gallery we discussed how I had used `sounds` as the inspiration for the canvas`s on show, and how we will use the `sounds` they had produced with Cathal as the inspiration for their own visual explorations with charcoal and paint.

Week one at St Edwards

Workshop one
We began this workshop with a class discussion about the exhibition at the Dock. The students talked about what they remembered from the exhibition and what they had liked. I then used the interactive white board to display images of paintings by Kandinsky. We talked about how his work was concerned with expressing feelings, emotions and ideas. We looked at the geometric lines and shapes he used and the students picked out the shapes they could see in the paintings and we sketched them out on the board. They were great at naming all the shapes, as they had recently looked at shapes in a geometry class, and introduced me to some I was unaware of. We also talked a little about some of Kandinsky`s theories behind his use of straight, angular and curved lines, horizontal and vertical lines.

Before getting stuck in to the work I handed out paper and charcoal and demonstrated a variety of marks from slow gentle marks to fast strong marks , thick marks, thin marks etc and encouraged the class to go to town experimenting with the material to get an idea of it`s potential as a drawing material.

I then played very short excerpts from a playlist of a variety of music I had compiled on an i pod. Each sample was only a few seconds long so that it would be heard as isolated sound rather than music. For each of the three samples the children listened twice, then after the third hearing I asked them to describe what they had heard, ( if they could pick out instruments, if there was more than one type of sound, if the sound was high or low, loud or soft etc) , after the fourth hearing I asked them to describe how it made them feel or what they imagined when listening then finally, after the next hearing they let loose with the charcoal. They produced three drawings on large sheets of square paper, each drawing inspired by a different sound sample. I left the sketches of the different kind of lines and shapes we had seen in Kandinsky`s work on the board as potential vocabulary, but encouraged the children to work how ever they wanted, and stressed that there was no right or wrong and that all the work would be very different.