Blog 2 – Students and Staff of Marino College, Dublin 3

The following blog posts have been written by the Students and Staff of Marino College, Dublin 3. They will share the story of Marino College’s ‘Creative Minds Festival of Art and Culture’. Find out all about their journey from initial ideas to realising their dream of arranging an Arts and Culture Festival for the community, by the community.

Marino College is a small City of Dublin ETB school. They are plurilingual (37 languages!), non-denominational and DEIS. The schools catchment area is a vibrant and rapidly evolving multicultural part of Dublin North East Inner City.

Under the leadership of Irish teacher Joan Lyne (now also a Teacher Creative Associate with the Arts Council), in 2022 Marino College became a Creative School.

In 2023 Marino College, together with various local schools and organisations joined a Creative Clusters scheme. The project is one of the recipients of the 2024 Arts in Education Portal Documentation Award read the announcement here.

This second instalment is written by Megi, Ayanna and Izabela, 2nd year students at Marino College.

We started planning for the 2024 festival and parade as soon as we came back to school in September. The festival theme was Marino 100: Back to the Future, celebrating the history of the area and because of this we started off researching the history of the residential estate beside the school with our student Creative Council and members of staff like Ms Lyne, our librarian Robin, Ms. Connor and Ms. French. We’re really lucky to have an artist-in-residence, Heather Gray, who’s a creative associate with the Arts Council and guides us in the making and doing of all the things we do. We wanted to represent the history of Marino in our parade. We decided to showcase the following key events in Marino’s history and to represent them through fun props for the Parade.

1. THE MARINO/FAIRVIEW FLOOD:
In the mid-1950s there was a massive flood in Marino, and back then people still kept farm animals in their gardens. This one local had pigs in his back garden, and we found an amazing photo of him rescuing his pigs in a currach. Inspired by this image, we decided to make a pig in a boat. We chose the name “Princess Bacon” for the pig (PB for short). We also made a huge wooden wave to represent the flood waters. PB now lives in the school library with a giant toy spider that look like Charlotte’s Web.

2. THE ESCAPE OF THE LIONESS:
It wasn’t just students from Marino College making props for the parade as we’re in a Creative Cluster with some other school in the area, so the lads in Joey’s up the road made a big lion prop too. This was to celebrate a lion tamer who lived in Marino and kept lions in his back garden (seriously!) One day his lioness escaped and she ran around the Fairview/Marino area causing panic! She managed to make her way into Joey’s secondary school! So the students there made a big lion prop commemorating this.

3. SHEEP FARMING AND SPINNING WHEELS:
Before Marino was developed as a housing estate, the area was all farmland, and lots of sheep were grazed here. The wool from the sheep then would have been sorted, cleaned, spun and dyed in the Liberties area of Dublin and the local people would have worn locally made clothes made from locally sourced materials. We made a giant spinning wheel to show this part of our area’s history. We also had a workshop and learned how to spin wool ourselves with spindles.

Marino College students design and make a spinning wheel for their festival parade.

These are just a few of the events from our area’s history we chose to showcase in the parade.

A group of us from the school Art Club and student Creative Council went to two local primary schools and helped the little kids make costumes to go along with these props. In one school we made pigs’ ears and snouts that the kids wore to dress up as little piglets to go along with Princess Bacon, and in the other school we made little lamb costumes with them so they could go alongside the spinning wheel.

A primary school student wearing a lamb costume and a cutting from The Irish Times showing a photograph of students from St. Vincent de Paul Infant School in Marino wearing pig costumes.

We wanted to make sure that different cultures and traditions were represented in the Parade, as our area and school are really multi-cultural now, so we had a huge dancing dragon that Art club originally made for our school lunar new year celebrations.

We also looked to the future too, imagining what life might be like in Marino in 2124. In planning the making of our props, we drew up a timeline of everything we wanted to include and drew a paper lineup of the order of the parade and how it was going to go. We made the props together in Art Club in the library after school on Wednesdays and in workshops with visiting artists during the school day sometimes too. Our old woodwork teacher Mr. Doody was brilliant for coming up with ways of us carrying and displaying our props once we finished them. It was really good fun but we learned a lot too, applying stuff we learned in maths, history, geography and library class to how to make the props.

Marino College students prepare props for their festival parade

It was great to be able to partner up with other schools too to help with the making of the props, and students from lots of other schools came to the parade to take part or just watched alongside the local residents. We invited everyone back to the school for a festival of cultures, art exhibition and a barbeque as well as lots of other cultural foods, some made by parents. The local Youth Club, Swan, lent us their barbeque and it was great to be able to show off stuff from all the lots of different cultures in our school and community. It was good that students and staff worked together on making and planning too. We all sat down together and planned and made everything together and we were really proud of the final results. Staff made sure our voices were heard and let us take the lead as much as possible, guiding us through the process. We made so many props, but we also made friends, new connections and more of a sense of community too.

By Megi, Ayanna and Izabela, 2nd year students, Marino College, Dublin 3