The children at Scoil Cholmcille Clouna worked with printmaker Tessa Badenhorst and Lisa O’Connor in a series of printmaking workshops that explored the different uses for print as an event for Cruinniú na nÓg.
School Principal Éadaoin Ryan outlined how the day went.
“First, the children were given an introduction to the world of printmaking and were given an overview of the traditions, mediums and processes involved. We invited local historian and storyteller Tom Barry to the school to share stories of local folklore and faery stories from the Clouna area. The children worked on some sketches based on the stories and created illustrations for their favourite story using mono printing. They later added depth by printing a silhouette of the main character on top. Afterwards, the children retold the stories, and they were collated into a book along with the children’s prints as the illustrations.
The younger pupils were tasked to create a landscape with their journey to school or of the place where they lived. Afterwards, they designed and printed a habitat or a home of an animal of choice and overlayed a cardboard print of their animal in the foreground. They used some stamping and other techniques to build their habitats. The results were really effective.”
>Next the older children learned about repeat patterns in Japanese Art. They also learned about relief printing when you carve into a printing block which is then inked and pressed onto paper to make a print. They created their own blocks and repeat printed them in different formations. Next they printed repeat patterns in groups using each other’s blocks to extend the patterns.
For the final part of the project, we invited Phoebe Larkin from the Burren National Park to the school to teach us about different habitats and our local native wildlife such as hares, hedgehogs, stoats, pine martens, toads, shrews and squirrels. Phoebe then introduced the children to “The Hare’s Corner’; an old farming term for a section of land or field that was ‘left to nature’ and good for wildlife. Each class was allocated a different ‘layer’ of the hare’s corner to focus on,” Ms Ryan added
“The junior and senior infants worked on the bottom layer and they focused on the soil/shrubs/grasses and the insects and bugs that live there. 1st to 3rd class focused on the grass layer and concentrated on the animals that hide in the grass layers. 4th to 6th class looked at the canopy of the trees and focused more on the predator animals or those that live in the trees. All children completed a number of observational drawing activities before learning about lino cutting and creating a hexagonal tile to be printed as a collaborative print at our big print event.
Finally, we held a Big Print Event for our Ink Print Repeat project and invited the local community to the school to celebrate print with us. We invited printmaker and lecturer Des Mc Mahon from the Limerick School of Art and Design to open our Big Print Event with an artist presentation and demonstration. We held 6 different mini print workshops for the children before the primary event to print our large-scale collaborative print with a steamroller in our playground.
Huge thanks to Cruinniú na nÓg Clare and Clare County Library for funding the project,” Éadaoin Ryan concluded.