Week 2 saw us delving into the theme for this phase of work: “dwell”. I chose the word “dwell” because it relates to a lot of subjects that the children will be working on over the next few months. The word also relates to my ACES work. Through funding last year from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, I was able to look at the work I have been doing in Donaghey to date and identify areas that I wanted to develop for future phases. I also completed a body of work entitled “No place like home” relating to my family and places where they lived over generations. I hope that I will be able to introduce some of the work from “No place like home” to the children as part of this phase with the school.
It was important that the children found their own way into the subject matter so this week was about discovering how they related to their home landscape. We started by revisiting the big group drawings they had made of their local area. The children wanted to add colour to the work -we discussed various options and they decided to add washes of paint, starting with roads and fields as these were the dominant areas within their drawings. We started thinking about the colour within the landscape and they went outside and photographed grass and tarmac to help them with mixing their background colours. I used colour sampling in Photoshop to pick out some options from their instant photos. They needed to mix enough colour to fill a large area -this took some thinking as they weren’t used to mixing paint on a larger scale.
After break some parents joined the session. The children talked them through the whiteboard controls and explained the way the sessions worked.
The children and parents shared stories about the area -where grandparents and great grandparents lived, placenames, where particular incidents happened. The children recorded some of these stories in their journals. This has given us lots of material for future work. It was great to meet some of the parents and see them become so involved in the work. All very promising.