Sightings: Residencies: Documenting Change in Belleek

Documenting Change

Artists and a youth group draw, collage and scan images of spring emerging.

Community: Belleek, County Fermanagh
Participants: Brollagh Youth Club
Artists: Natalie Delimata, Helen O'Connell
Conducted from March to May 2003

The first residency of Sightings in Belleek, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, took place while winter was giving way to spring. The artists took this opportunity to Document Change with their participants. Each week, they observed flowers and plants grow, wither or bloom. Each week, they expanded on their drawing skills starting from pencil and moving into mixed media and collage.

During the workshops, scanners were used to capture drawings in stages before they were destroyed in the next step of creation. As layers of drawing, paint or collage were added, they scanned the pictures, and started on the next stage of the drawing and growth of a plant. The participants uploaded these images into an online Artists' Journal; and wrote about their work. The artists shared their own journals and revealed their ideas-development process. In the case of the online journals they were also able to view the work of others and comment on it. (fig 1) They saw the power of publishing on the internet. Within minutes of exclaiming "How did you get that up there?" they were uploading their own images online. We used these 'stages' as parts of an animation, which was done for each participant. The journals can be viewed at: http://kidsown.ie/showcase/Belleek

Finally, an exhibition at Belleek Pottery gave the children a chance to see their work hanging in a professional context. Coverage in a local paper promoted their work as well.

The artists brought these transformation sequences together and animated them. We turned this into a screensaver which is available for download. http://kidsown.ie/downloads/belleek/