Symbolic Spaces
Symbolic Spaces is a visual arts project that has engaged pupils across East Ayrshire Council in the exploring and making of contemporary visual arts. It was a creative collaboration between contemporary artists, pupils, staff and local authority departments.
In one of the participating schools, Drongan Primary, pupils worked with artist Cath Keay to create sculptural installations and digital photography responding to the heritage and unique language of their local environments.
Cath describes the work in the Symbolic Spaces project and also explains a bit about her own artistic process.
'At Drongan Primary School I was struck by the children’s use of brilliant Scottish words - I’m from Dundee, and I had thought that a lot of these words were only used there.
After studying how this vocabulary is used in great Scottish literature such as the Beano and the Dandy, we wrote a list of words that describe feelings.
 
We each made our chosen emotion in plasticine, then cast it into a type of plastic so it could be worn like a halo for the photographs.
Then all we had to do was act out the word to look like characters in a Scottish comic.
 |
 |
In Lainshaw Primary School in Stewarton we investigated what sculpture is.
We then drew up a list of things that exist, but don’t have a fixed shape or a 3D form; things like air, taste, explosions and sound. These things are therefore not made very often as clay sculptures - but we did it. Everyone thought of a different subject, either a shape which changes or an element, and made it in clay as a relief plaque.
It was then cast into a rubber mold, and made into either plaster or a type of plastic called Jesmonite.
They are just ideas made solid. |
All the pupils in both schools also made a ceramic pigeon each which
contributed to one large flock of almost 100 birds. With the help of Brian
Green, the council's Media Officer, Miss Cook's class made a stop frame
animation of the flock in the playground at Drongan Primary School.
I try to encourage natural forces to collaborate in the construction of my
sculpture. The outcome, although directed by me, is not a foregone
conclusion.
My recent work focuses on connections between human society and that of
social animals, in particular the social structure of beehives; I am
particularly interested in crowd and swarm behaviour. I make architectural
models of buildings from foundation wax; these are put into functioning
hives where the bees build onto them.
In November I will take up the Norma Lipman scholarship to study for a PhD
at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where I will research work about
growth and form using clay and casting techniques.'
| To see the pupils' artwork and for more information, visit the Symbolic Spaces website! | |