Artist in Residence at Fisherton Primary School in Ayrshire March – June 2012

Fisherton Residency – Weeks 9, 10 & 11, Final Workshops and Preparing for the Exhibition.

During my last weeks at Fisherton Primary School I have been focused on preparations for the exhibition to mark the culmination of the residency. I titled the exhibition Light and Landscape to mirror the photographic and environmental themes behind the work. The exhibition was intended to be a celebration of the work the children produced and ran for one day incorporating a workshop where the children could pass on a skill they had learnt to their parents. However before preparations for the exhibition got fully underway I ran one final workshop.

For the last activity I wanted to do something that would promote individual drawing and creativity beyond the end of the residency. For this I introduced the concept of a sketchbook to each year group and ran bookmaking classes to created individual sketchbooks for each child in the school and nursery. To create the front covers of the books we employed skills that we had learnt previously including making cyanotype sun prints and using oil pastels and watercolours. Allowing the children to begin working in their sketchbooks independently I was really pleased by how much more confident they were, especially with drawing. The sketchbooks were really successful and I hope to get the opportunity to come back and see them filled up!

Moving toward the exhibition all the work was finished and mounted and the large photographic collage of the school was framed so it could be permanently hung in the school. A poster was created and I wrote a statement to accompany the event. The exhibition was held on the 14^th of June in the village hall. As the hall had limited availability I had to put up and take down the exhibition very quickly. Thankfully I had great support from Leona from South Ayrshire Council and some of the parents from the school. The exhibition was a great success with 90% of parents coming along with their children along with the teachers and staff of the school and members of the public. I had some great conversations with the visitors throughout the day and received really positive feedback. The cyanotype workshop I ran was also a great success incorporating a hands-on element to the experience.

I have now finished my time at the school. It has been a great learning experience and I am thankful for the level of freedom I have been afforded to naturally develop my own program of workshops in keeping with my own knowledge and strengths as an artist. There are many things that I have learnt that would perhaps alter my approach to certain aspects if involved in a similar project in the future, however I could not have asked for a better response from the children. It has been an extremely challenging and rewarding experience.



Fisherton Residency – Weeks 7 & 8, Art in the Environment

I am now over half way through my third and final project working with the children and teachers of Fisherton Primary School. I created the Art in the Environment project to encourage making art inspired by and within the environment. I also wanted to introduce environmental art practices within my workshops and familiarize the children with a few influential artists.

To balance the projects already completed I wanted to begin by making something sculptural with the children. My main influence when deciding what form this would take was the wish to create something that engaged with the natural elements. This has been a primary concern in my own work for some time and continues to inform my practice. I decided to create windmills that would respond to the wind and be painted to reflect different aspects of the local environment. This has been perhaps my most successful workshop so far and I could not be happier with the way the children have responded or with the finished results!

I took a series of photographs when exploring the beach at Dunure of: pebbles shells and seaweed, grasses and wildflowers and ripples and waves in the water. These are all close-up images highlighting small, beautiful and often overlooked elements of the environment. I used these to initiate the paintings we created to cover one side of the windmills. Within my own sketchbooks I have always enjoyed using the combination of oil pastels and watercolors, particularly when working outdoors and drawing elements of the landscape, for this reason I was keen to employ this technique with the children.

Firstly we drew from the photographs using oil pastels and then worked on top with watercolor. The children really engaged with the possibilities of this process and created beautifully vibrant and detailed paintings. The next element involved tracing the windmill template onto metallic card. I purposefully used the metallic card for its mirror-like qualities; it reflects elements of the landscape and colors from the painted side of the windmill. Once these two elements (the painted side and the mirrored side) were glued together and cut to form the windmill template they were ready to assemble. I did this using a long glass headed pin, a small bead and a wooden dowel. The windmills worked better than I could have hoped and the children were very excited to take them outside, it was great to have an activity that gives such instant gratification.

The workshop was also very successful in the range of skills it involved, an element of activity planning that I feel I have become more aware of since working with such a broad age range of children.

Week 7 also included my first CPD (Continuing Professional Development) session held to inform and equip the teachers with skills and ideas from my workshops that they can continue to use and develop. The session was very profitable and I enjoyed sharing the activities with the staff. I took suggestions for the next session of ideas and techniques that the staff would like particular help with for running art activities in the future. I am now in the process of preparing some hands on activities to do together at the next session.

As my time at the school moves on I am thinking and preparing more for our final exhibition of work and how best to approach this. I am keen to run a workshop during the day of the exhibition to further involve the local community with the project at the school.

Fisherton Residency – Weeks 4 & 5, Using Photography to Create Images

Weeks four and five of my time at Fisherton Primary School have passed quickly with the continuation of my program of activities and my second project: Using Photography to Create Images. This project concentrates on two aspects of the possible uses for photography in art. Firstly the process of taking photographs and using them to create a collaged image and secondly the use of photography as a starting point for a drawing.

The inspiration for these projects came predominately from my own artwork and experiences. My current art practice grew out of a love for the environment, which first drew me to working outdoors. At the beginning of my time at Art College I spent a lot of time drawing and painting in the landscape and it was this experience of creating art inspired by and within the environment that has informed all my subsequent work.

The first element of the project was to take images to make up a panoramic landscape collage. I took multiple photographs of the school within the landscape and used these as a starting point for the collage project. Each year group was then allocated an aspect of this view to photograph from sky and grass to the view of Arran and the local buildings. This involved teaching the groups how to use the simple digital cameras and taking them outside to explore and take photos of there allocated element of the environment. The children really engaged with this activity and approached looking at the landscape more inquisitively when given the task of capturing it though a lens. As well as introducing concepts involved in photography this was also an exercise introducing composition, which informed the drawing exercises that make up the second half of this project.

These photos are now developed and the task of compiling them into a cohesive collaged image can begin. One of the most important elements of this project is that the whole school is involved in creating one piece of work.

I was also keen to develop the children’s drawing skills focusing on observational drawing. I took a number of landscape photographs on my different research trips around the local area and used these to inspire large landscape line drawings. The Primary’s five, six and seven classes were each given a 2 meter long piece of paper, we then used a grid system to concentrate the drawing activity on the composition and shapes in each square to begin to build up the image. So here again the groups of children are working together to create one piece of art.

With the younger age groups I ran a couple of different activities again focusing on developing drawing skills and engaging with often overlooked elements of the environment. The Primary one and two classes drew local landscapes from my collected photographs, while the Primary threes and fours drew details in the landscape not immediately recognisable. Again I focused on encouraging environmental exploration and working confidently both individually and in groups.

I have now reached the mid point of my residency and I am looking forwards to what the next half will involve as we work towards an exhibition and possible additional events engaging the local community.



Fisherton Residency – Week 3, Origins of Photography

I am now half way through my first full week at Fisherton Primary school, and mid way through my first project, which is an introduction to a couple of processes that pre date photography.

I am focusing on two activities this week, with the younger ages groups I’m running Cyanotype workshops using sunlight to expose found objects from the environment onto photographic paper. And with the older groups I’ve been making Camera Obscura’s and using them to initiate a drawing exercise.

Both of these activities are drawn from experiences and interests I picked up while at Art College in Dundee. One of the aspects I enjoyed most during my course was the interaction with my contemporaries and the conversations that arouse around all the diverse art practices people were developing. I girl in my year spent a lot of time researching and producing cyanotypes, so even though I had not explored this medium myself I felt well acquainted with it.

For the school workshop I have collected an array of different seaweeds, pebbles, shells, glass, small pieces of wood and other debris found on or around the beach. These objects will be placed onto the photo-sensitive paper and left in direct sunlight to expose for approximately 15minutes, then to finish the exposure the print is washed until the water runs clear. I am going to run my first cyanotype workshop tomorrow morning and am excited to see how the children respond to this simple photographic process. I also intend to give some background information about the origins of the process to the older groups.

The English scientist and photographer Sir John Hershal first discovered the cyanotype in 1842 but it was the work of Anna Atkins, credited as the first female photographer that gave this process its photographic function. Atkins was a botanist and collector of seaweed, ferns and other plant life, which she documented in a series of limited edition cyanotype books, composed of the silhouettes of her specimens.

The second activity is a direct progression from my own art practice. During my final year at Art College my work focused on creating objects that provoke a heightened sensory interaction with the natural elements. I created works that engaged with the rain and wind and two that were designed to interact with sunlight. One of these was an Origami Camera Obscura designed to be a pocket artwork used to encourage exploration and viewing the environment in an alternate way – everything viewed through a camera obscura is projected both upside down and back to front.

I have already held two of my three camera obscura workshops with the pupils and they have largely been very successful. I started with an introduction to the history of the camera obscura and it’s function to artists before the invention of the camera, I then explained briefly the function of the lens and the correlation to how lenses work in cameras and the human eye. Finally I showed the group the work of one of my favorite artists Chris Drury, who creates camera obscura rooms or Cloud Chambers which have a lens and sometimes a mirror in the roof of a small windowless shelter made of stone, banked earth or wood which projects the outside environment onto the floor or walls of the inside space. The Cloud Chambers are situated in different locations and so project a variety of views of sky, trees, mountains and water.

Following this introduction we made our own small cardboard camera obscura’s using a small plastic lens and a piece of tracing paper to act as a viewing screen. Once the group had competed their Camera Obscura’s we took them outside to practice focusing the image by adjusting the distance between lens and screen and finding a location that gave us the best quality projection. Once we found this location I asked the group to draw what they saw on the projection screen, an exercise that demands that they observe exactly what they are looking at and not what they assume to be there. This produced some great results, which I look forward to exhibiting at the end of the residency.

Exploring Fisherton and Dunure – First encounter 28^th of March

I walk down from the school beside fields fringed with yellow lichen covered rocks and past a line of sprawling seafront bungalows. At the end of the row I dip under a canopy of leaves and branches, bright dappled sunlight on the road. The chorus of birdsong grows louder, on the left a break in the trees reveals stacks of fishing boxes, lobster cages and old buoys. Around the bend I emerge at the harbour, I walk along the edge of the wall towards the eaten away and smoothly pitted stone of the harbour tower. From here I climb off the wall and continue across sharp edged rocks tinged with green. As I climb over some taller rocks and into the bay I notice the many coloured and very smooth stones lying just beneath the water, scattered across a large slab. I progress slowly across the beach, eyes scanning across its width: smooth oblong stones, seaweed and fragments of shells. In the shallows many sharp stones rise out of the water, clustered in groups, one seagull sits on the largest yellow-capped one. There is a gentle breeze.

I walk along a half submerged rusted pipe to a small waterfall coming down onto the beach, surrounded by green luscious grasses on one side and dry gorse on the other. I climb up some muddy steps hollowed from the grassy slop towards a protruding stone Dovecot, rounded sides pierced by rough slate-like stones. I continue through deep tufts of grass to a vantage point between castle ruin and the beach bellow. Towards the bay alternate crescents of rough and smooth water sweep in from the sea. The only noise is of lapping water and birds. A seagull sweeps down from behind me, a small plane passes above leaving a streak of white in the sky. The sky diffuses from deep blue above my head to almost white at the smudged horizon.