Portal Documentation Award Update
Arts in Education Portal
The Portal team has had an exciting few months on the road visiting the recipients of the 2024 Portal Documentation Awards. It has been such a pleasure to meet and collaborate with the artists, teachers and students of Marino College and St Vincent’s GNS in Dublin and Streetwise, Co. Clare in documenting their projects.
‘Marino 100: Back to the Future’ Creative Cluster
In May we visited two Dublin based schools, Marino College Second Level and St. Vincent’s Girls NS which along with St. Kevin’s Boys NS and St. Joseph’s Boys NS have been collaborating as part of a Creative Cluster Project ‘Marino 100: Back to the Future‘ a festival highlighting 100 years since construction started on the Marino housing development – known as the Garden City. This is the third year of the student led festival which was conceived through the Creative Schools programme in 2021 and has evolved into an inclusive collaboration involving the 4 schools, Marino Residents Association, local artists and community groups to celebrate unity and diversity in their inner-city neighbourhood. The festival which took place on Friday 19th May included a packed programme of music, dance, a food fair and as the centre-piece, a parade.
The Portal team dropped in on the students and staff of Marino College on our first visit where they were crafting large papier-mâché floats working closely with lead artist Heather Gray. Also that day, 1st Year students and members of the local community participated in a joint pottery workshop with artist Stephan Doody and we listened in on another group of students on guitar and drums as they prepared to perform as part of the festival with musician Peter O’Toole.
Painting a giant ladybird – ‘Marino 100: Back to the Future’, Creative Clusters project, St. Vincent’s Girls National School, Dublin
On our second visit, we returned once again to Marino College. On this occasion we got to see students working with artist Sinéad Lynch to make Slavic inspired felt flower crowns which would be donned during the parade. We then made the short trip to St. Vincent’s NS where 1st Year students from Marino College joined 5th Class pupils in putting the final touches to super-sized arthropod floats and immersed themselves in mask-making activities.
‘Let’s Get Real’
In May also, we made two visits to Ennis, Co. Clare where we met five learners on the Streetwise programme together with their tutor Ruth O’Keeffe and support worker Patricia Dooley working in partnership with artist Ana Colomer. The Streetwise programme supports young adults with intellectual disabilities & autism to achieve their goals through training & education. Through the Local Creative Youth Partnership initiative the learners were being guided by Ana to develop and produce their own advocacy multimedia film entitled ‘Let’s Get Real’. Working through animation the focus of the project is to share their ideas of home life, work life, relationships, health, and education and explore how laws and society is changing to make these human rights more possible.
Editing green screen footage – Lets Get Real, LCYP project, Streetwise, Brothers of Charity, Ennis, Co. Clare
When we arrived for our first visit of two visits in mid-May, we entered into a welcoming and fun-filled environment with creativity at the centre. A session packed with activities awaited us from storyboarding, prop creation, stop-motion animation, green screen filming and editing. The collaborative nature of the project was evident throughout, the Streetwise animators, moved seamlessly through different processes, working at their own pace, shifting between different production roles supporting each other to draw out their own personal stories.
On our second visit, we joined the animators as they switched focus to the music and sound design for their film. For this element of the project the group were able to make use of the nearby Music Generation recording studio for a collaborative session with musician educator Oisín Ó Cualáin. This was the third session the group were undertaking with Oisín to develop the film’s soundtrack. The preliminary sessions were conversation and ideas based, providing a space for the learners to become accustomed to the new environment of the recording studio and to build a relationship with Oisin. There was great excitement though in embarking on the musical process and they set about creating and recording sound designs and creating musical loops to add another dimension to their visual vignettes.
Over the coming months the Portal team will be working on editing the documentation footage captured during the project visits. We look forward to sharing the Documentation video’s for both project’s in the Autumn. Stay tuned!